RAW Baller Organic Hemp Papers, Gary Payton Edition

Who Gary Payton is, and how he ended up on a rolling paper

Gary Payton is a basketball player. Not a strain, not a flavour and not a marketing invention: a Hall of Fame point guard who spent most of his career with the Seattle SuperSonics, was nicknamed The Glove for his defensive work, and is one of the more recognisable names of the 1990s NBA.

The route from there to a rolling paper is indirect and worth following, because it explains the name on the pack.

A cannabis variety was subsequently named after him, associated with the Cookies house in San Francisco, and that variety became well known in its own right. So for a large part of the audience buying papers, Gary Payton is a plant first and an athlete second, which is an odd inversion for a man with a twenty-year professional career behind him.

RAW then collaborated with the man himself for this range. Athlete to variety to paper, and back to the athlete. The GP logo on the pack is his personal mark rather than anything botanical.

It is a genuinely unusual route for a product name to take. Elsewhere on our shelves a name is a fruit, a place or a joke about a plant falling over. This one is a person who became a plant and then came back.

The range is called Baller, and our own listing does not say so

A small piece of housekeeping that spares you a fruitless search.

RAW's name for this line is Baller Organic Hemp Papers, with Gary Payton as the edition. Three separate sellers title it that way. Our distributor calls it the Gary Payton Edition and drops Baller altogether, which is how our listing is worded too.

That matters if you are looking for it elsewhere or trying to work out whether two listings are the same product. Search for RAW Baller and you will find it immediately. Search the way this page is titled and the results are patchier.

The basketball theme runs through the design rather than just the name. The pack is black, red, yellow and orange with a textured basketball graphic, oversized RAW branding across it, and Payton's GP logo. It is loud in a way RAW's standard packs deliberately are not.

The count nobody publishes, and what king size slim actually means

Our distributor lists this pack without a leaf count, which is unusual given it publishes one for most of the RAW range. We had to record it as unpublished on our RAW x Lyrical page. Here is the answer.

Thirty-two leaves to a booklet. That is what sellers who do state it publish, and it is what RAW uses across its king size slim papers generally, which we set out on our Connoisseur listing using RAW's own figures.

On size: king size slim is 110mm long. One seller describes the height as similar to a 1¼ paper, which is a genuinely useful way to picture it and matches the 44mm we published for RAW's king size slim on the Connoisseur page. So the mental model is a 1¼ paper's height stretched to king size length. That is exactly what slim means and it is why slim uses less paper than a king size wide for the same length of roll.

The trade box holds fifty booklets. Our RAW x Lyrical listing does the arithmetic on what fifty booklets of thirty-two comes to, and there is no sense repeating it here.

The paper is the same paper

This is the part most listings for special editions quietly skip, so we will do the opposite and lead with it.

RAW Organic Hemp king size slim, thirty-two leaves, 110mm long, unbleached. That specification describes this pack. It also describes the standard RAW Organic Hemp king size slim booklet, and it describes the paper inside the RAW Connoisseur wallet we stock.

There is no indication anywhere, from RAW or from any seller, that the Baller edition uses a different sheet. It is the same paper with different graphics on the outside of the pack.

That is not a criticism. Special editions are how RAW keeps a twenty-year-old product interesting, the artwork on this one is genuinely good, and plenty of people buy papers partly for the pack. But if you are choosing between three RAW Organic Hemp options and expecting the edition to roll differently, it will not.

What does differ between the three is what comes with them. This is papers alone. The Connoisseur adds matched tips in a card wallet. The Lyrical Lemonade collaboration is a different size entirely and is flavoured.

What is in it, and what is not

Unbleached organic hemp paper. No cannabinoid of any kind, no CBD, no tobacco and no nicotine. Nothing in the UK rules covering CBD products has any application to a rolling paper, and what you put inside one is a separate matter entirely.

Because it is unbleached, expect a translucent brown sheet whose exact tone varies between batches. Our Connoisseur listing explains why that happens and why it is not a fault.

One practical note on special editions generally. They are made in runs. If the artwork is the reason you want this rather than the paper, that is a reason not to assume it will still be listed in a year.

Everything on this site is 18+ only.

Who should buy a different pack

Anyone who wants tips included. This is papers on their own, and the Connoisseur pack is the one that solves that in the same paper and the same size.

Anyone who does not care about the pack. The plain RAW Organic Hemp king size slim booklet is the same sheet without the basketball graphics, and nobody will know either way once you have taken a paper out.

Anyone who rolls wide. King size slim is the height of a 1¼ paper at king size length, and if wide is your habit this will feel short vertically.

Anyone who wants the thinnest paper RAW makes. That is the Organic Hemp Black, not this.

And anyone hoping the Gary Payton name signals something about what goes inside. It does not. It is a collaboration with a basketball player, and the paper is a paper.