Lizzie Post — Cannabis's Emily Post

Last verified: April 2026

Who She Is

Lizzie Post is the great-great-granddaughter of Emily Post, the early-20th-century arbiter whose 1922 book Etiquette became the defining American manners manual and spawned a family institute that has advised on social behavior for more than a century. Lizzie now serves as co-president of the Emily Post Institute alongside her cousin Daniel Post Senning, co-hosts the Institute's podcast, and has co-authored or authored multiple entries in the Post family's rolling update of Etiquette.

She is also an open, named cannabis consumer. That combination — Post descendant, Institute executive, and out-loud stoner — is why her 2019 book Higher Etiquette: A Guide to the World of Cannabis, from Dispensaries to Dinner Parties (Penguin Random House, Ten Speed Press imprint) landed with the weight it did. It was not a novelty project. It was the Post Institute formally recognizing cannabis as a social domain deserving the same treatment as wedding receptions, dinner parties, and thank-you notes.

Key Contributions

Higher Etiquette (2019, Penguin Random House / Ten Speed Press). The definitive contemporary guide to cannabis manners. Covers dispensary visits, smoking circles, edibles hosting, dinner-party pairings, terminology, and the social etiquette of both veteran and first-time use.
The three-principle framework. Post codified three inherited Emily Post principles — consideration, respect, and honesty — as the organizing structure for cannabis etiquette. See our dedicated page on how the framework applies.
higheretiquette.com. The book's companion website, which extends the material with blog posts, FAQs, and ongoing guidance.
Media and interview work. Post has spoken about cannabis etiquette on NPR, in The New York Times, in Rolling Stone, and across the cannabis trade press, helping normalize the idea that there are rules here and they matter.

Signature Moments

Two Post quotes have become cornerstones of modern cannabis etiquette writing — and appear verbatim across this site because they are hard to improve on.

On the legitimacy of cannabis culture:

"Cannabis culture is baked in etiquette, has been for a long time, and goes far beyond puff-puff-pass."

On the shift in the stoner stereotype:

"The stoner image of a teenager or surfer or someone who says 'bro' is still there, but it's not the only one. I mean, you've got people like me. Emily Post isn't your natural stoner image, but it's becoming that."

Her position on offering cannabis to guests is likewise near-canonical. When someone declines, she writes — and has repeated in interviews — to offer once, believe them, and don't push. Our first-time guests page draws on that guidance directly.

Where Higher Etiquette fits in the Post library

The Emily Post Institute has been revising its flagship title every few years since 1922. Higher Etiquette is its first full-length treatment of cannabis specifically — but the underlying logic is identical to every other Post book: observe the situation, consider other people, act with respect and honesty. Post was explicit that she did not invent new rules; she translated existing Post principles into a new social context.

Legacy and Current Status

Post remains co-president of the Emily Post Institute and continues to speak and write on etiquette, including cannabis etiquette. Higher Etiquette is still in print and widely cited — including, transparently, on nearly every page of this site. The higheretiquette.com companion site is still live and maintained.

Her larger cultural contribution is harder to measure but is the reason she earns the opening profile in this section: before Post, cannabis etiquette writing was scattered across stoner magazines, forums, and oral tradition. After Post, there is a named author, a major publisher, a recognizable framework, and a Post-family endorsement of the idea that cannabis consumers deserve the same quality of social guidance as anyone else. The rest of us are, more or less, writing footnotes.

How to read her if you do only one thing

Read the section of Higher Etiquette on hosting first-time guests, then the section on dinner-party dosing. Those two chapters contain the single highest concentration of directly usable advice in the book and will change how you plan any cannabis-involved social event.

For the principles Post codified, see our three-principles overview. For her approach to hosting, see our hosting section. For her work on the returning and new older adult consumer demographic, see the older-adults guide.