From college forward, Rob reevokes the familiar themes of aural and visual enhancement and leads us into a desert journey, where we share with friends moments of connectedness with the wild places, recognizing then the necessity for harmony with our fragile environment.

Dear Mom and Dad,

The publication of a number of articles I’ve written recently regarding the medical marijuana movement and other cannabis issues will cause you to wonder if I smoke pot, a drug that you and millions of other Americans consider harmful, destructive, and addictive. These myths about marijuana are founded on the uninformed, prejudiced opinions of the controlling forces of the status quo and do not reflect at all my own positive experiences with pot.

I know this may upset or shock you both, but I have been smoking pot recreationally for over three years. In this letter, I intend to explain my reasons for using marijuana in order to dispel various myths about the drug and help you place this natural pharmacological wonder into proper perspective.

I first became curious to try pot during those bodacious days known as college. In my reading during my junior year, I came across a number of fictional and technical accounts of marijuana which indicated that pot was quite innocuous compared to hard drugs and alcohol; personal accounts from pot-smoking friends and acquaintances confirmed the idea that pot, though powerful, has little deleterious effect and actually can help enhance the balance of mind, body, and spirit.

A few days after expressing a desire to try pot, a friend invited me to his apartment in the city to smoke with him and a couple of friends. Four of us gathered, playing a dice game which entitled each player to one bong hit (a drag from a water pipe) for every 100 points scored. Graced with beginner’s luck, I won the game by being the first player to score 1,000 points. I was also fortunate in that I got high that night, as many reefer virgins report not getting high the first time they smoke.

An amazing understanding came to me while walking home. As I strolled along the tree-lined sidewalk carrying on a conversation with a friend, I felt an awkward stiffness in my stride, realizing with each step a timid rigidity. I have since altered my manner of walking to a confident, open gait of long strides and silent footsteps. Getting high that night allowed me to comprehend and appreciate a better way of communicating with my physical self, foreshadowing future discoveries of more enriching approaches to life, the next of which occurred weeks later in my apartment. My roommates at the time didn’t get high, so after they went to bed I would smoke outside on my fire escape, then retire to the living room to listen to music, mostly the rock’n’roll of your generation -pleasurable to listen to while high and purported to be partially inspired by the artists’ marijuana use. For as Woody Allen remarked in Annie Hall, “marijuana is the illusion that makes a white woman more like Billie Holiday.”

One night I lay in the dark listening to the Beatles’ “Abbey Road”. While I was familiar with the album from listening to your vinyl copy as a teenager and my own CD, I had never before experienced its depth of sound and richness of rhythm. Smoking pot increases my aural awareness, helping me to find rhythmic order in complex musical forms and ambient sounds whereas my otherwise tone- deaf ears would hear only the music’s silhouette, devoid of its melody. Pot eases the psychic trauma of never becoming a musical performer by helping me to relate to the music as a careful listener.

Pot’s enhancement of my rhythmic awareness also extends to poetry. After I write a poem I revise it numerous times, then follow the example of comedian George Carlin by reading the poem again after getting high to “punch it up”, carefully perusing the words to ensure that each syllable is consistent with the poem’s intended meaning and construction.

Although I often smoke alone when pursuing introspective brainstorming or when revising prose and poetry, I enjoy smoking the most when in the company of good friends. The social aspects of pot smoking often enhance the drug’s personal effects in a culture of sharing.

One night toward the end of my undergraduate days, I went to a bar alone and bumped into a couple of guys I met through an ex-girlfriend. Though we didn’t know each other all that well, they invited me to come to an after-hours party at a restaurant to celebrate the birthday of a girl they knew who worked there. I went, imbibed in a few local microbrews, and had a good time. Afterward, the party moved to someone’s house where two joints were passed around. After a long night of beers and bars, it was relaxing and comforting to be part of a circle of guys and girls sitting on the floor toking a joint and passing it along. I recognized a feeling of peace emanating from our circle that night, a pleasant harmony which has been repeated when smoking with other friends. An instance of this sort occurred during the time I lived at the Grand Canyon. Because marijuana is outlawed by our current system, moving to a place where you don’t know anyone presents challenges to scoring weed. Once when two friends and I secured a reliable connection, we each purchased one ounce – a fairly sizable amount. We three smokers, each with plastic baggy full of pot in hand, smiled goofily at each other until we simultaneously decided it was time to sample the goods. Each of us was more than happy to donate some of his fresh green tea to roll a joint for everyone, exemplifying that hallowed stereotype of indigenous peoples passing peace pipes in a spirit of good will.

Besides the community of kind brothers and sisters I encountered in Arizona’s high desert, I also discovered its dramatic natural landscape. The raw beauty of that rugged terrain is something Teddy Roosevelt believed every American should see. I not only lived in this inspiring place, I also explored its depths through countless hours of hiking. I would often smoke pot during breaks on the trail to increase my awareness of the surrounding environment, attempting to reestablish the connection humans once held with nature before we forgot how to live in ecological harmony.

More than once, a marijuana-fueled midnight stroll with a friend mutated into a marathon walk along the canyon’s edge until dawn. The darkness of the void, enhanced by night’s serenity and the effects of the drug, emphasized for me the inexplicable and humbling power of nature’s cycle, allowing me to fathom how unnoticed minuscule erosion over a period of millennia can cut such a monstrous gorge in ancient rock.

Days before I left the Grand Canyon for further exploration of the American West, I set out on a three-day hiking excursion that would lead from the canyon’s rim, across its desert trails, down to the mighty river below, and back up to the rim. On the first night of the trip, I set up camp in a sandy, rocky flat surrounded by exotic desert flora. After pitching my tent, eating dinner and washing up. I prepared for the lonesome starlit night by packing my pipe. To light it, I used matches I’d borrowed earlier that day from two college students hiking out on the same trail.

The matchbook looked familiar. It bore the insignia of my favorite smoke shop in Flagstaff, making me notice the beauty of coincidence and the generosity of my fellow hiker-smoker compadres, for even in this perilous desert I was connected to the cannabis community I’ve joined. Pondering the charity of my borrowed matches, I sparked my pipe, inhaled, then filled my tent with sweet smoke. I watched insects outside through the screen window in my tent, appreciating the delicate balance of desert life, fortunate to experience its continued survival.

Months later, high atop Mt. Meldron in Yellowstone National Park at an elevation of 10,000 feet above sea level, I shared a joint with two fellow hikers, gazing down at a pristine alpine lake surrounded by millions of acres of undeveloped wilderness. It was an awe-inspiring moment of tranquility, a moment in which I understood the utter necessity of protecting wild places and an example of pot helping me to climb new heights to see the big picture of environmental conservation and the absolute need for all the earth’s inhabitants to reestablish a harmonious relationship with the land.

I carried this ecological commitment with me when I moved back to the city; I was happy to find this attitude shared by our cousin who returned from school down south. When he and I hang out, we usually hit a bar or sit around and smoke pot, but this isn’t the sort of abusive partying one might expect.

When Cousin and I smoke together, we exchange ideas in a productive and honest way. It’s been during our smoke sessions that we’ve drawn up plans for country houses in the mountains, counseled each other’s romantic quandaries, and talked frankly and positively about the family’s idiosyncratic functionality and unabashed comedy.

As you can see, pot has played a positive role in my life and has been an avenue to uncovering my intellectual capacity, my artistic imagination, my self-image, and my relationships with people and the world around me. I wish this testimony to serve as an invitation to critically examine marijuana, its documented benefits, and its apocryphal mythology. An open mind, I’ve learned, is one’s most valuable organ and the most reliable defense against the evils of ignorance.

Peace and love,

Rob

The following letter was written to Lester Grinspoon by Richard Pisano…

Dear Dr. Grinspoon,

It has been said of Rousseau that he was an “interesting madman.” Whether he acquired the cachet by dint of hard work or divine favor is a question I leave for scholars. Yet–I believe that the history of ideas is nothing more, and nothing less, than the history of interesting madmen.

“God is dead,” said Nieztsche: and fear froze the hearts of men, for they could no longer find any meaning in life. Like thunder–the silence of a godless universe drove them mad. The wind of nihilism swept away their minds, for they had nothing to hold onto.

Who can read the Gospels and say why a man called Jesus was killed, or how a religion arose from a murder? Who can say how a man can die–and be reborn a god? Yet who can deny the power–of ideas?

What is psychology?

Jung concluded psychology was “little more than a chaos of arbitrary opinions.” At best, it was “the testimony of a few individuals here and there regarding what they have found within themselves.” Candidly, he admitted: “We are still far from having anything like a thorough knowledge of the human psyche, that most challenging field of scientific enquiry.”

Jung was troubled, however, by the fact that modern psychologies were “psychologies without the psyche.” Webster’s dictionary defines “psyche” as: the soul or spirit. Yet the concept of the psyche as “the soul or spirit” was absent from the modern, scientific vocabulary. What was necessary, Jung believed–was to restore the concept of the psyche as “the soul or spirit” to psychology.

Jung arrived at this belief when he discovered that many of the people he treated were “suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives.” This he considered the “general neurosis of our time.” Jung believed this neurosis had its roots in modern man’s loss of faith in traditional religion and the consequential loss of belief in the reality of God and the soul. This loss, Jung believed, had caused “an almost fatal shock” to modern man. Thus, in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, he wrote: “We moderns are faced with the necessity of rediscovering the life of the spirit; we must experience it anew for ourselves.” The question now for Jung was: What is a spiritual experience? and How do we have them?

Jung found it amusing that modem psychologies were premised on the belief that consciousness was an “epiphenomenon of chemical processes in the brain,” a sort of “secretion of the glands.” For Jung, the notion that consciousness was a product of matter was no less fantastic than the notion that consciousness could create matter. Thus in Psychology and Religion, he wrote: “We thus come to those ultimate questions: Where does consciousness come from? What is the psyche? At this point all science ends.”

The question has become for post-modern man: Is a universe without God really more believable than a universe with God? That consciousness–because it cannot be weighed or measured– could be anterior to matter is almost too much for the scientist of today to conceive. The notion of the soul has become unthinkable. To speak of it is to render oneself risible. Yet I believe Jung was right: It is time to restore the soul to psychology. It is necessary now to make a quantum leap in understanding–to recover a lost gnosis.

What then is a “spiritual experience?”

In Psychology and Religion, Jung characterized the spiritual experience as an encounter with what Rudolf Otto termed the numinous, that is, “a dynamic agency or effect not caused by an arbitrary act of will.” Or as Jung puts it more succinctly: “It seizes and controls the human subject, who is always rather its victim than its creator. The numinous–whatever its cause may be–is an experience of the subject independent of his will.

I will not enlarge upon Jung’s definition, except to say I believe that one of the attributes of the spiritual experience is its sense of high strangeness, and this quality is what stamps it as extraordinary. In Varieties of Religious Experience, William James compiled a comprehensive catalogue of a variety of such experiences. He was also intrigued by his own experiences of the numinous occasioned by his experiments with nitrous oxide.

The notion that drugs can produce “spiritual experiences” is apt to raise eyebrows in some quarters, but I would like to expand upon the notion by sharing with you the impact cannabis has had on my spiritual life.

I preface what is to follow in these pages with these remarks as a sort of prolegomenon because I wish to share with you something that to Western science will seem too fantastic to believe–for it has been shrouded in mystery for thousands of years. That this experience was drug-induced–and entirely subjective–does not preclude its reality. What I want to speak of is–kundalini.

What is kundalini?

According to the teachings of Yoga, there exists a latent spiritual force in the body said to reside at the base of the spine coiled like a serpent three and a half times. The goal of Yoga is to awaken this sleeping serpent and make it rise up the spine to a center in the head. When awakened, it is said to produce genius, psychic powers, spiritual enlightenment , and even Cosmic consciousness. This dormant energy has been known to yogis in India for some five thousand years.

Knowledge of kundalini remained virtually outside the purview of Western science until Gopi Krishna, an ordinary Indian householder, published the story of his own kundalini awakening in his autobiography, Kundalini, the Evolutionary Energy in Man. Despite this book and several others written by Gopi Krishna on the subject of yoga and kundalini, the phenomenon has received little attention from Western scientists. I believe this is a great mistake. To ameliorate this ignorance, therefore, I would like to share with you my own experience of the spontaneous awakening of kundalini.

At the age of twenty-six, I took up yoga. I did not take it up for a spiritual practice because, at the time, I was unaware that it was a spiritual practice. I took it up because I had a kink in my back. I saw yoga as simply a system of stretching exercises that might help me get rid of it. It worked, and I was freed of the kink–but I found the exercises gave me such a feeling of well-being and relaxation that I continued doing them for their own sake.

At this time, after practicing yoga for about six months, I happened upon some excellent cannabis. It was my habit then to smoke a little cannabis and then to write poetry. The effect of cannabis was not to produce revelry in me but a reverie in which the doors of the imagination were opened and inspiration flowed freely.

One day, as I sat to write poetry after smoking this excellent cannabis, my attention was forcibly drawn to an exquisite sensation at the base of my spine. As my attention fixed upon it, it grew stronger yet, and my mind was drawn to it–irresistibly–like iron to a magnet. So intensely pleasurable did the sensation become that, involuntarily, it brought my sex organ to a powerful erection. The sensation grew yet more blissful to the point that I felt I would faint or proceed to have a spontaneous ejaculation. Just when I thought I had reached the point of imminent ejaculation, however, I felt as if a thin thread snapped at the base of my spine from where the sensation originated. Instead of having what I felt would be an inevitable orgasm–suddenly, with the snapping of the “thread” an energy erupted from the base of my spine and began racing around inside my body seemingly on some path already known to it.

Its immediate effect was to paralyze me. Unable to move, or even speak, I watched now in amazement as a luminous ball of light moved rapidly within me racing like a serpent from organ to organ. Adding to my amazement and consternation was the realization that my breathing had stopped, and I seemed to be in a state of suspended animation. All the while there was no diminution of the bliss I experienced, for instead of being localized at the base of my spine, it now suffused my whole body. While held captive now to the energy in a catatonic state from which my will was powerless to release me, I could now see extending out from my head several feet a halo of light similar to the aureoles shown in paintings of saints and religious figures. I say I saw it, but not with my physical eyes, for I could not move my head. I saw it with a faculty that was beyond my ordinary senses, and made self-evident by the luminous energy now circulating within me.

How long I was in this state I do not know. Perhaps it was a minute or two, perhaps longer, for I was too engrossed in the experience to take note. Simultaneous with the foregoing events, I had a vision. From whence it came I do not know, but I now saw as with a third eye a figure before me whom I knew without knowing was the Ancient of Days. As real to my inner eye as the furniture in my room, I now beheld the figure of a long-haired bearded old man dressed much like a biblical patriarch from whom great power seemed to emanate. The figure appeared to be moving excitedly as if doing some kind of ecstatic dance while simultaneously communicating to me in a kind of hand-language. What was communicated to me in this fashion I cannot say.

The vision then vanished from my inner eye, and I felt a diminution of the luminous energy within me as it once again descended to its place of origin. Slowly, I began to recover the use of my limbs which had become cold and stiff. I was utterly exhausted and too weak to stand. I felt as if all my strength had been sucked out of me by some scorching heat. I crawled on my hands and knees to the bathroom and pulled myself up to the sink to cool myself with water. I succeeded then to reach my bed upon which I lay like a dead man wondering how I would ever be able to go to work that night. I considered the possibility that I might have damaged myself in some unknown way. I was completely ignorant of kundalini.

As if by some divinely planned synchronicity, close upon the heels of my experience I discovered Gopi Krishna’s book,

Kundalini, the Evolutionary Energy in Man. There to my astonishment I read an exact account of the very experience that had just befallen me. I now realized that I had unwittingly prepared myself by practicing yoga for the awakening of kundalini. Somehow the cannabis I had smoked had served as a catalyst for the experience. Only much later did I learn that yogis traditionally smoked cannabis as an aid to meditation and the practice of their asanas. I was relieved now to be able to put my experience into a new context.

I have shared my experience of the awakening of kundalini with you in the hope that it will add something to a field of knowledge in which there is still little known.

I do not wish to suggest from the foregoing that the smoking of cannabis will induce by itself a kundalini experience in anyone that smokes it–only that, in my case, it did. Nevertheless, we may ask: Why have yogis in India used it for thousands of years as an adjunct to their science–if it did not play some role? Moreover, it should be self-evident from the yogis’ spiritual use of cannabis that it is not a drug that promotes violence since it would be antithetical to the goal of yoga, which cannot be attained except through discipline and self-control. It is a great tragedy that the hubris of Western science does not allow it to appreciate the wisdom of other and older cultures.

In light of the role cannabis played in my experience, I consider it my great benefactor. It saddens me greatly that so benign a plant as cannabis, provided by the Creator for the benefit of man, has been so badly maligned in this age of the kali yuga blinded by ignorance, and that our society at its uppermost level still has not had the maturity to recognize its beneficence.

I wish to emphasize that enlightenment is not something that can be attained through an intellectual exercise. One cannot “think” one’s way to enlightenment, neither can it be gained by a fiat of will. I wish to stress that enlightenment is a physiological process in the very same sense that having an orgasm or having a baby is–and that it consists in being literally illuminated from within by a vital luminous energy.

Although the entheogens discovered in the course of the “psychoactive revolution” have gained us access to the realm of Jung’s “collective unconscious,” my experience of the awakening of kundalini has revealed to me that Nature herself has provided a hidden gateway to it within the body itself.

This, I believe, is a profound discovery that holds great promise if we are to answer what Jung called “the problem of the psyche.” I believe the discovery of kundalini may reasonably lead us to discover the origin of the belief in the soul and our notion of God–or, at the very least, show us that the parameters of human consciousness are far wider than we could ever have imagined. We may also find that there is a real role for certain drugs in the spiritual quest that can facilitate access to the terra incognita of the “collective unconscious.” That this juxtaposition of drugs and spirituality may appear incompatible in the minds of some at this time, I consider but an arbitrary opinion. My opinion is that human beings have an innate drive to expand their consciousness and will do so by whatever means they can. For what is evolution–if not the evolution of consciousness? In fact, I believe the goal of evolution is to eventually bring all mankind to a state of god-consciousness.

I do not mean to suggest in anything I have related that I imagine myself to be an enlightened person. In the field of psychology, I am only another worker in the vine-yard. My awakening was only a transitory initiation, not full-fledged like Gopi Krishna’s. I teach no doctrine or dogma. I present only the facts as I experienced them, and from these a theory can be made. From my perspective, however, the very fact that kundalini exists fairly shouts out that man is not an accidental creation of blind evolution, but a product of intelligent design.

In Man and his Symbols, Jung wrote: “It is a common illusion to believe that what we know today is all we ever can know. Nothing is more vulnerable than scientific theory, which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts and not an everlasting truth in itself.”

I believe we are on the threshold of what Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm-shift. Just how the soul interfaces with the body awaits further research, but I believe with research in this direction the psychology of the future will rest upon the foundation of kundalini, and it will bring an end to what Jung called “the confusion of concepts.”

Sincerely,

Richard Pisano

A cross-cultural discovery of a medicinal cure that also opened the Peace Corps volunteer to its spiritual-based usage. With a charming account of an ancient herbal remedy, we share a very human moment with holy men and elders in the remote villages of the Himalayas.

It was the winter of 1968. I had freshly graduated from college at the University of North Carolina to become a volunteer with the Peace Corps, doing agriculture work in Nepal. Peace Corps Nepal had received a scare when over-zealous visiting US congressmen had tried to have several of the new volunteers drafted to fight in Vietnam rather than serve as volunteers in our 2 year PCV jobs Their rationale was that Nepal was just a haven for dope smoking draft dodgers and they were going to yank us out and make an example of us, despite the thousands of dollars they had spent training us and getting us over there. A countrywide Peace Corps protest stopped them, but all of the volunteers were made to feel paranoid about any consumption of marijuana, no matter how remote the setting.

I was stationed in my small agricultural community at the foothills of the Himalayas in the Terai, where the village landlord had given me lodging in his Pukkha cement front room. Since I was a cow eater from the West and impure by Brahmin standards, I was not permitted to go into the innards of the house nor eat with them. In every other way I was the village novelty, was on permanent exhibition, and was enjoying my post despite the strangeness. I had prided myself on my iron stomach, eating what villagers ate, the dhal bhat tarkari (sometimes called paste and pepper or rice and lentils depending on your preferences) twice a day and lots of tea, and became increasingly bold in my cavalier attitude about local water. The negative forces soon had their field day when I got bacillary and amoebic dysentery, Giardia, malaria, and whatever else was the common experience of Peace Corps workers. We were famous for sending our shit in the mail to have it diagnosed by Peace Corps doctors but we had a quart of anti-diarrhea medicine in our first aid kit, and a supposed wonder drug called Lomotil to take as we awaited their findings. For a very long four days, I was pissing, puking and shitting substances from every orifice and was so weak I couldn’t make it to the fields. Kathmandu Peace Corps headquarters had sent me an anti-Giardia medicine and were contemplating helicoptering me to the hospital if I didn’t improve. Giardia, the roommate disorder, as we laughingly called it, made one fart for minutes at a time and some of the constantly gazing, sometimes empathetic villagers found my trumpeting still very amusing.

The spirited Brahmin priest landlord who, much to his credit, was getting me a dispensation in the caste bound village (he had worked it out that American cows weren’t their cows and therefore I wasn’t as heathen as the outcasts and Muslims who took of the burger), came to me in my misery, leading a Hindu holy man, a Saddhu, with him. He was a mendicant I had not seen before. I would have remembered him, with his dreadlocks, ash-covered face, Shiva trident on his forehead and loincloth; begging bowl and walking stick his only accoutrements. He came and squatted down in front of me and stared, something I had gotten used to as the odd Sahib in this remote area. He soon started touching my belly, felt my pulse and looked at me with his ebony-pooled, mystical eyes. With a great deal of embarrassment, I released one of my 30 second farts, accompanied by village-kid laughter. The solemn Saddhu, with his eyes piercing through me, gave me the most empathetic smile, and reached for his begging bowl and pulled some ganja buds from it. The Brahmin who had been keeping a running monologue about me, was silent and responding to a nod from the Saddhu, went to the landlord’s kitchen and came back with cloves, powdered ginger and other spices and a pulverizing rock. The Saddhu spread the herbs out in front of him, proceeded to pound them together and without any ceremony, wrapped them in a betel leaf and gave it to me, motioning me to eat it like the common, bazaar-bought concoction that everybody chewed called Pan.

The Brahmin silently said for me to eat it (the universal cupped hand to the mouth sign), and made motions about my disorders and used his big, dark, hands to push them off into the horizon. Believe me I was at the end of my rope and a bit fearful that I had contracted something potentially fatal. Enough so that the landlord, seeing my condition and worried, too, for my health, had alerted the Gurka military camp on the Indian border that I would need a flight out to Kathmandu. To my amazement, the concoction was very tasty and on my empty stomach it was quickly absorbed. I had made several protests in different villages about smoking ganja in their chillums with the wise men and saddhus so that my Peace Corps image would not be tarnished, but in this case I made no acknowledgment of the ganja.

That was until my piercing headache just vanished like a cloud and I became very light-headed, something the Brahmin saw; he made motions to the effect that I must be feeling it, to the villagers’ amusement. To my amazement, after a week of western medicines, cure-alls, etc. I was feeling the immediate medicinal effect of marijuana and almost as a giant send-off to my malady, the final fart lasting a good minute blasted out of me. I suddenly felt healthy and happy to be alive. I sat on the landlord’s porch, while half the village scrutinized the Saddhu’s handiwork, and actually clapped at my relieving blast. I couldn’t believe how good I felt, physically and mentally. I ‘namasted’ the holy man, gallivanted around the village, as they clapped about my relief from a disorder all of them had experienced and all had some degree of fear about.

That night, I wandered the dirt paths in my village and came to the mango grove, next to my fish pond project. Around a rice chaff and cow dung fire the Saddhu and a bunch of old men were passing the chillum and regaling each other about the beauty of Kali, and the power of Shiva, singing and smoking in the mystical light of dusk.

When they all saw me, they motioned for me to come over. They extended the chillum, and motioned for me to partake. I realized that this marvelous substance had literally saved me, and there was no way – even with Peace Corps drug prohibitions being what they were – that I would turn down the gracious offer to join my village wise men in their ritual peace pipe.

The demon drug was certainly not that, and it amuses me and saddens me today to see how we have infected the world with our drug wars’ prohibitions, economies and mentalities. Whenever I think of marijuana I think of the saintly old Saddhu, offering me the lifesaving concoction that all of the western solutions and remedies had failed to equal in its curative wonder.

Self-medication for the treatment of addiction or chronic pain is often reported. In a graphic encounter, Ms. Christian and her husband discover that the suffering from spinal injuries can, in some cases, be ameliorated.

I’m a 57-year-old woman disabled through chronic pain. My husband and I live with identical injuries in our necks and lumbar spines, and as a result, Chronic Pain from Hell.

My husband and I were just discussing marijuana again, a subject near and dear to both of our hearts. Recently we just existed for over a week with NO marijuana. As we use it for Chronic Pain, a week and a half is an eternity to people like us.

We’ve both noticed there’s a pattern for us. We start trying to talk ourselves into the fact that it’s okay to be out of pot, that we’ll be fine. Maybe we’ll even give it up and save money. But it’s all that we use for pain relief. We start sniping a little at each other. In the past, we would substitute alcohol. Alcohol may cut us off from the pain momentarily, but we will be at each other’s throats in a matter of hours, there’s just no question. And that exacerbates stress, and stress begets more pain through clenching of bodies in response to the stress.

I’ve decided that the properties of marijuana have not been touted nearly enough, because how do you put such things into words? I’m a writer, but words to describe the feeling of having marijuana under our roof when we live in so much pain just have not been invented yet. That’s how strongly we feel about it. But let me feebly attempt to try.

Pot is the best muscle relaxer known to man. Everything relaxes. With agony like ours (nerve/spine pain), the perfect antidote for clenching your body clearly is marijuana. I watch my husband’s facial muscles relax. He becomes a completely different person, someone I love to be around. I see him want to stretch his muscles, where prior to smoking marijuana, just ain’t happening. He’s lucky to shuffle across the room to some new position. I see his smile re-appear after long droughts of pot.

He gets involved with people and things he used to care about. He gets creative, I mean REALLY creative. His lyrics could rival Bob Dylan, he’s THAT good. His food could blow Emeril’s away. And his photography…never seen any better. Our minds are expanded to such a degree and that gives us a good day. We constantly smile, though we’re still in the midst of pain. Just to feel human for ANY length of time is a blessing I just can’t quite describe. Sometimes you’ll notice you haven’t had any pain for say, like, an hour. You scream “hallelujah” as if it’s a National holiday. It’s that noticeable.

Time away from our pain killer of choice is cause for much depression, and not because we’re in withdrawal from marijuana’s effects. It’s because we start clenching our bodies again against every wave of pain. Our muscles get frozen in nasty positions. We are again UNABLE TO SLEEP. And IF you are lucky enough to sleep without the aid of pot, the fact that your neck remains in any position for too long means you’re screwed when you do wake up. You know the two worse times of the day are when you wake up and when you go to bed. Both are agony.

So you go into mini-hock because the Feds tell you that what you choose for pain is illegal. Where is the research on that? And you can’t buy that new bed you need desperately for relief, because your pain medicine (marijuana) is so expensive, you have to choose. And maybe IF you had medical insurance besides Medicare you would have to give in to the conventional and harmful medications of choice, narcotics, but in your heart, you know that your particular brain chemistry responds well and BEST to pot. But no one believes your story. You start to envision yourself in a lunasylum. Because you know your pain is so real it’s SURREAL, yet your medication is illegal. But you need your medication, or suicide is sure to follow. (I know the three S’s of Chronic Pain: sleeplessness, sorrow and suffering. I now add suicide, unless an intervention is made.

And you live like second-class citizens because the powers that be don’t bother to get to know herb. Well, I’m here to shout about it.

The truth about marijuana is this: It DOES allow a person who withdraws from life through pain to live a daily existence with some dignity (quality of life, HELL; I’d settle for existence at this point). It allows the person dying from auto-immune disorders and body-decaying cancer to at least enjoy their last days eating the foods they once loved with an appetite produced by you-guessed-it, smoking marijuana.

It brings out long-suppressed creativity. Creativity once stunted maybe by coming from dysfunctional families who expressed NOTHING. Creativity stuffed further down by the shame of coming from these hideous places by picking up any animate object that momentarily changed who you were (but that was at least SOMEthing to feel – anything different from who you truly were). I started to empathize with people who cut themselves to release the emotional pain. And what a relief that could be. Marijuana has served as a sort of truth serum for me. It has allowed me to relax to the point of being me. And not hiding behind masks. And that’s a lot.

All I wish is for someone to hear me, someone who can direct us to pain relief once and for all. Someone who can direct me to the person with the most influence RE: legalizing medical marijuana. I will continue to write my senators and congresswomen.

I pray that 2004 is a year to remember RE: getting something done about this drug UN-war. It frightens me more than I can say. Maybe I can make a difference.

The author of this essay is a seventeen-year-old student and practicing musician from Massachusetts. In his essay, he describes the profound positive impact that marijuana has had on his mental health, musical expression, and social life.

For the majority of my life, I have struggled with depression. I consistently try to determine what is amiss in my life that makes me feel this way, but my inability to blame it on any singular cause can be frustrating. However, I had not actually begun to consider the possibility that I was depressed until a few months ago, when I first tried marijuana.

Despite the fact that I was hardly aware I might be depressed at the time, I believe that it was the way I felt that first drew me to marijuana, rather than any desire to be “cool” or otherwise socially accepted. I was aware that I had been lied to about the dangers of pot while growing up, and my opinionated and passionate personality had led me to develop an acute understanding of the injustices imposed upon recreational marijuana users by our own government and society at large. I only tried marijuana because I knew from my own research that the risks were minimal. Since then, I have been possessed by an unstoppable drive to advocate for a radical change in our country’s policies regarding the use of marijuana. My first hit of weed was the catalyst that led me to adopt a cause I plan to fight tooth-and-nail for now and in the future. Weed gave me a cause to rally behind, a cause to believe in.

It seems that many of my peers are drawn to weed because they like to “get messed up” and party. I, on the other hand, see more merit in the introspective and contemplative thought that comes along with the high, as well as the heightened appreciation of music and aesthetics. Smoking pot socially is always fun, and it’s undeniable that pot brings people together in special ways. The stoner subculture is one of peace, acceptance, tolerance, and understanding. But the intellectual and spiritual aspects of the high are what kept me coming back.

I began smoking pot alone every now and again and using the time to think deeply about what I do and do not know about myself, why I feel the way I do, my personal relationships, and how I can better myself as a human being. I’ve spent time contemplating human nature and why we behave the way we do, which has led me towards an interest in psychology. But most importantly, I came to several conclusions about the nature of my own depression. I realized that I shouldn’t feel the way I do, that my lackluster effort in school was the result of the way I felt every day, and that I needed to take the initiative to bring my depression to an end. Simply remedying it with medication was not enough for me, and I dismissed the possibility of going on antidepressants. Being high was an instant fix for several hours in and of itself, but after some time, everyday sober life had taken on a renewed glamour and sense of excitement as well. I was not cured, but I had taken my first step towards beating my depression. I knew something was wrong, and I was going to make it right.

Social interaction while stoned is a unique experience. I can have a conversation with the same level of depth and clarity as I could while sober, but I pick up on things that normally slip past me; I can psychoanalyze people on a rudimentary level while carrying on with an everyday conversation. I believe that the insights I’ve had thus far about human nature have been spot-on, as my experience with people while stoned has reinforced these very ideas rather conclusively.

Marijuana has enhanced my appreciation of aesthetics, as well. After further experimentation, I began to appreciate aspects of everyday life that I had otherwise ignored or been blind to. Even while sober, the world seemed more beautiful. Not quite as stunning as it was through the looking-glass of a cannabis high, but there was still a renewed sense of beauty and wonder in the outside world, even when I was completely sober. I believe that there is an aspect of existence that we are unable to comprehend with our senses, in the same way that bees are aware of colors we cannot see. And I believe that marijuana (as well as other psychedelics) temporarily expands that margin, allowing us to become privy to sights, sounds, emotions, and ideas that we cannot or would not normally experience. And when these experiences come to an end, we are left with a taste of the things we witnessed, and we can project them back onto our everyday lives to experience common things in a new and more vibrant light.

Music is perhaps the most important aspect of the marijuana experience for me. When I am high, music takes on a transcendent beauty, richness, and complexity that is often too immense in scope to put into words. I am a practicing musician myself, playing guitar, bass guitar, and drums, so I listen to music a bit differently than non-musicians. While I can appreciate a piece of music as a single, cohesive work of art, I also take great pleasure in singling out specific instruments and appreciating the ways in which they contribute to the song as a whole. When stoned, certain instruments that are sometimes difficult to hear in the mix (bass guitar, I’m thinking of you) come to the forefront, and this increased clarity allows me to hear and appreciate bass runs and drum fills that had otherwise slipped right by me while sober. It can be difficult to explain the way music sounds when high to someone who has never experienced it themselves; allow me to remedy this with an admittedly stolen analogy from somewhere on the internet. For me, “the difference between listening to music sober and listening to music high is comparable to the difference between listening to music on a cheap radio and listening to music in a grand concert hall.”

The other side of the musical coin – playing, rather than listening – has been polished by marijuana as well. While I was always confident in my compositions, and I’m very aware that I don’t need marijuana to write interesting music, I feel that my playing takes on a new dimension when I am high. Instead of concerning myself with the intricacies of classical theory and proper technique, I simply play what I feel, and the end product is always satisfactory. When I worry too much about whether what I just wrote or played is classically acceptable, my music takes on a sterile and overly-polished quality. But when I play and write music stoned, more raw emotion and random experimentation seeps into my work, and I believe that is what truly matters. My technical skills are also executed more cleanly when I am high. I have tested myself on complex guitar pieces and such while sober and then while stoned, and I can say without any amount of doubt that my playing is tighter and more refined while I am high. It does not have any negative impact on my coordination whatsoever. All in all, I am more creative, confident, and technically skilled at my instruments when high.

I believe that cannabis has extraordinary potential as a tool for recreation, as a tool for social interaction, as a tool for psychological insight, and as a tool for artistic expression. I have come to life-altering conclusions as a result of my marijuana use, and I feel they have changed my life only for the better. I feel as if victory over depression is just around the bend, and I wouldn’t be remotely as close to that as I am today without having experimented with marijuana. It may not be a cure-all, but neither is Prozac; my goal is not to need either, but to finally develop a philosophy about life that will help me manage my depression. And marijuana has exhibited extraordinary potential in helping me achieve this end.

“David” is a pseudonym. The 40-year-old author is a philosophy professor at a distinguished liberal arts college. His ritualized use involves refection and solitude, note-taking during periods of intensified pleasure in thinking, and the awareness of the interaction between his disciplined “Apollonian” daily work and his liberated “Dionysian” hours. In this reflection on moderate use by a professional, we follow him into the rebirth of wonder.

Reading what others have had to say about cannabis has reassured me that despite the absurd lengths to which our society has gone to tell us otherwise, cannabis can be a positive force in human lives. Yet even well-meaning folks who wouldn’t mind seeing it legalized often view cannabis as a more or less harmless means of inducing temporary silliness and stupidity in its users. Hardly the stuff of sacrament! In what follows I don’t mean to deny (since I myself enjoy) the purely recreational virtues of drugs like cannabis and alcohol. Yet it may be a more useful contribution to the larger conversation about the uses of cannabis if I say something about how cannabis contributes to what I regard as some of my better hours.

I am a forty-year-old man who teaches philosophy at a distinguished liberal arts college on the East coast. Besides being a devoted reader and writer, I am happily married and enjoy the company of a circle of family and friends. An athlete in college, I remain fit, running and practicing yoga regularly.

The first time I got high was in college (after a chemistry final, fittingly enough). I immediately liked it more than alcohol. During college, I smoked cannabis occasionally, sometimes going months without it. It wasn’t until graduate school that getting high grew into a habit or, as I prefer, ritual. I usually get high by myself, except on those occasions when my wife and I smoke a little before bed. Getting high is solitary both from inclination and circumstance. At the present time, there is to my knowledge no one in my immediate circle who uses cannabis. “To my knowledge” being the crucial phrase. For of course I have colleagues and neighbors who use cannabis; but the community in which I live and work is conservative, and the drug of choice is alcohol. I suppose if I were eager to have friends to get high with, I would find them. But as it happens I prefer the solitude and have long associated the ritual of getting high with the sweetest moments of solitary reflection. I find that other people tend to divert my attention from what I most enjoy about cannabis – the enthusiasm of the senses it sparks, and the related intensification of my pleasure in thinking. That said, I have two far-flung friends whose disposition towards the drug is much like mine, and I relish those rare occasions when we get high together.

During the past couple years I find myself using cannabis more regularly than ever before, about two days a week or so. Some weeks not at all, either because we’re traveling or because my work is so pressing that I do not make time for it. Going for weeks without getting high is usually a sign that I am overly busy and stressed.

I called using cannabis a ritual for me. It goes like this. During the academic year, I leave my Wednesday evenings free from all obligations. I work in my study until 4:30 or 5pm. (My work on these afternoons often goes very well, driven perhaps by the pleasure of anticipation and by the knowledge that, unlike many other days, I will not be working late into the evening.) When I’ve finished my work, I prepare some cannabis for my Tulip vaporizer, sit back in my reading chair by the window, and await the reliable lifting of fatigue and the rebirth of wonder.

Dogs are tuned profoundly to ritual (especially rituals that involve their happiness!), and my dog associates the scent of cannabis with long, leisurely walks. He stands, stretches, comes over to me, bright-eyed and wagging his tail. Soon I get up, gather a small notebook and pen that I keep handy by the door, and then we set off outdoors. I won’t say much here about the experience of the outer world when I’m high – plenty has been said by others more poetic than myself. I’ll simply corroborate that I find the objects of my senses more vivid and striking and generally pleasing than when I’m straight. Why? It feels as though my mood has shifted and released the psychic energy necessary to pay proper attention to my surroundings.

Since I spend most of my waking hours engaged in reading, conversation, study, and writing, I have always been grateful for this power of cannabis to bring me back to my senses. Walking outdoors, I feel the day’s accumulated trivia and obsessions begin to disperse, and with them the wearisome self-absorption that in my own case seems an inescapable part of caring for my works (“works” understood in the broadest sense, to include all those matters to which one devotes sustained energy). This turn from interior to exterior is invariably revitalizing. It relieves me from my cares and heightens my enthusiasm for what the senses are revealing, and this in turn lifts my spirits. And for what it’s worth, it is a fact attested by neuroscience (one may always rely on scientists to point out the obvious!) that we think better and more energetically when we feel good.

Aristotle observed that philosophy has its origins in wonder, and the single greatest gift of cannabis is reliable occasions for wondering anew about what is before me: a magnificent tree or the aging clouded eyes of my beloved dog; a book I’m reading or an idea I’m meditating on; a fugue of Bach’s or the melody and rhythm of a song I’m singing; the conversation of my wife as she speaks her mind or the feel of her body as we make love. Being high is not the only time I appreciate such things, but what’s powerful about this drug is that it reliably produces a shift in consciousness that heightens my wonder and enthusiasm. (Inclined as I am to melancholy, I’ve often wondered exactly how this bears on my responsiveness to cannabis. If I took antidepressants, would the shift I describe be so pronounced?)

But while philosophy begins in wonder, it naturally leads to investigation and finally to knowledge of that thing that got us thinking in the first place. For me this means that a thoughtful life requires many sober, disciplined Apollonian hours for every Dionysian hour liberated through cannabis.

Back to the ritual. Since my deepest passion is thinking about and writing philosophy, this naturally tends to be the focus of the time I spend high. By the time I return from our walk I usually have a few pages of scribbled notes – more or less important and incisive ideas, either about what I observed on the walk or about some topic I’m meditating on in my work, reading, or personal life. I make no effort to think about anything in particular while I’m out walking. The pen and paper is merely a net for catching those flighty thoughts, should they occur to me. It matters enormously to the liberating quality of the ritual that I have no agenda and no expectations. In this respect, my mood is receptive rather than active. Usually I return again to my study and use a little more herb. Not too much, though. I distinguish a moderate “high” from being intensely “stoned.” Ordinarily I prefer being high, since I find myself more able to enjoy thinking; but if I have chosen to spend the time being in my body primarily – for example, having sex – being stoned can be wonderful.

Then I usually sit down at my desk to work out at greater length, in writing, the thoughts I had jotted down. (Or, if the day finds me over-tired, I may find myself listening to music and practicing yoga instead; after all, the ritual is not meant to extend my work day but to be a counterpoint to it!) Needless to say, during the enchanting hour or two that pass many more thoughts come rushing in, each called forth by the last. These hours spent reflecting are the best and most satisfying ones I spend high. They never feel like work, though afterwards I feel pleasantly exhausted. For the record, I find that if I use cannabis later in the evening I often feel a little dull in the morning, whereas I recover completely if I leave off by 7pm or so. I am a light sleeper, and since cannabis stimulates my mind, it can interfere with the quality of my sleep. Whence the dullness.

Let me say a bit more about the character of contemplation that being high encourages in my own case. As I said, I do not set agendas for whether, much less what, I’ll contemplate; that is the nature of morning, or Apollonian, work. Instead I give my mind over to free play. Liberated, it makes many associations I am unlikely to have considered. In the morning light, some turn out to be more trivial than they appeared while high, while others turn out to be very suggestive and helpful indeed. My well-trained, sober mind possesses many habits and views that lead it away from apparently implausible paths and connections. While high, those habits of mind and viewpoints are set aside: My grip eased, I find myself entertaining a subject from a fresh perspective, one that often sets it off in bold relief, facilitating comparison with the tissue of thoughts surrounding it. Or I find myself making a connection I hadn’t noticed before. These thoughts seem encouraged in part by what the abbreviation of memory makes possible: a kind of imaginative clearing in which what is familiar becomes fresh and original once more, because it has been temporarily isolated from all the habitual thoughts my memory ordinarily connects to it. That these musings often yield substantial insights is beyond doubt, seconded as they are by that Apollonian self who patiently reviews and edits (and, yes, occasionally winces at the sometimes childish enthusiasms I’ve recorded) the prior evening’s reflections. By the way, subjecting one’s musings to that discriminating morning light does help keep one honest about their actual quality and worth. This is the more important, given how easy it is to imagine when we’re high that the pleasure a thought gives is a measure of its substance!

In general, two points stand out about the effects of cannabis. First, getting high excites my senses and my brain and thereby kindles my pleasure in thinking through whatever comes to mind. Even when I imagine I’m too dull and careworn by the day’s events to entertain a single thought, it usually happens that after I’m high I find myself enchanted and engaged with a swarm of them. This transformation strikes me as little short of miraculous, until I remember that it costs me something, that it cannot be sustained day after day. On those occasions when I use cannabis two or three days in a row, I find it less likely that my mind is concentrated to good effect, both while I’m high and when I’m straight. Being high is still pleasant, but my mind feels a little ragged and diffuse. Discovering this has limited how often I use cannabis.

The second point has to do with cannabis’ effect on my mind’s operations. In brief, ideas tend to have more texture: their differences and hierarchical relations to one another grow clearer to me. I see how completely unprofitable is a line of thought I’ve been pursuing so studiously; or I see that an idea I had thought was peripheral actually belongs closer to the center of my thoughts. So much of thinking well rests on the ability to see which questions are worth asking, and to distinguish essential thoughts from accidental ones, crucial insights from trivial ones. Cannabis can be enormously helpful in these efforts. In my own experience, the very sophistications of Apollonian thinking – achieved through the desire for great learning and perfect lucidity and ruthless self-criticism – can make it harder to see these matters clearly. Professorial souls may have a hard time making the simplest observations clear and compelling, in part because that sophistication can lead us to qualify an insight to death by belaboring details, exceptions, doubts, and the like. We become obsessed with analysis and detail and forget to look up from time to time and take our bearings from the larger landscape, which is always where significance appears.

One further bit of speculation about how cannabis affects thinking. Synthetic thought – adding things up and seeing things whole – comes easily, but its counterpart, analysis, seems harder to engage. This may be because analysis, as the etymology of the word suggests, involves breaking things down into their parts, and this places a premium on memory. For it requires keeping an extensive body of knowledge actively in view in order to make the right distinctions and keep track of where one is in an analysis, or argument. Thus analysis calls on the very power that cannabis “compromises”, namely memory. On the other hand, this same compromise serves to heighten synthetic powers, insofar as the abbreviation of memory promotes the capacity to make connections we might not consider otherwise. So cannabis can aid insight, which is the quintessential achievement of synthetic thought; but it is less useful when straightforward analysis is wanted. We may have good thoughts about the fundamental theorem of the calculus when high, but we’re less likely to find ourselves digging into intricate proofs concerning it.

How pleasurable and uplifting these hours spent in solitary meditation! They are usually among the best moments of my week. And being a Protestant, I sometimes wonder if that’s not a problem. Wouldn’t it be better if such moments and hours were attained without drugs? In a qualified sense, my own answer to this question is, yes. But one qualification many cannabis users probably agree about is this: the frenetic pace of life and work in our culture argues against the very cast of mind cannabis can help invoke. So, until that day I leave it all behind – my rewarding but demanding work and my crowded schedule filled with the cares I’ve chosen for myself – until I escape to my Walden, I shall in all likelihood continue to enjoy cannabis as a welcome counterpoint to the cares of my workaday world. It may be a shortcut, and my limited experience with spiritual practices such as meditation leaves no doubt there are natural approaches to the same prospect. But for the time being I have made my peace with a busier life, which is to say a more communal and therefore more conventional life. Here cannabis is a sacrament I use periodically to fling off and rise above the world-weariness and tedium native to such a way of life, good as it is in other respects.

I think those who call cannabis harmless do it an injustice: anything that has so much power can be harmful. For myself, I question whether the greatest harm my use of cannabis might do is diminish my power to enjoy the world when I’m straight. Many afternoon walks with my dog feel terrifically dull; the contrast when I’m high is so striking that of course I’m tempted to get high more often. Why not maximize my power of enjoyment? But as I said earlier, I find that getting high too often diminishes the excellence of the high, and this suggests that the pleasure of being high depends in part on the contrast with being straight. After all, if I got high all the time, against what would I measure those heights? So, in answer to my own question, it may be that by getting high regularly I do somewhat diminish my capacity for joy when I’m straight; but in return I enjoy regular and greater high points in my life than I would otherwise.

Besides, there are many things I can only do well when straight: Write essays and lectures, converse with colleagues, friends and students, follow another thinker’s intricate argument, commit new things to memory, go on a long run, to name a few. So I live for both the Apollonian and Dionysian moments, and I try to be vigilant that the desire to be high doesn’t interfere with these other goods in my life. Since I think of cannabis as a powerful sacrament in my life, I work to preserve its place and not profane it by making it too common.

Now it may be that all this talk of “work” merely rationalizes my Protestant worries about being seduced into an idle, muddled life. Yet I can see how the virtues of cannabis I’ve described have a downside if used too often. I might become impatient with the humbler discipline of those less ecstatic morning hours in which I labor towards understanding things. Instead of engaging in that careful discursive work, I occasionally imagine leaping over it and enjoying being in the know all the time. But I like the Apollonian hours so well as not to be tempted to “wake and bake.” The likelier and more insidious prospect is diluting my mornings by indulging too often at other times. I worry when any of my actions (including novel reading and late nights talking with friends) intrude on my ability to engage energetically and lucidly in morning work, whatever that work may be.

After a morning spent writing this, I got high and, while out walking, had the following thoughts: Since I don’t much like moralizing talk from others, why say anything at all about the dangers cannabis might pose? God knows the public square is full of righteous people speaking to that point. Why not just describe my own experience and leave it at that? Of course, I thought, we do need serious reflections from people who actually know something about cannabis, who use it and like it! Then Aristotle came to mind again, in particular his definition of human flourishing as the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. And I saw that it is because I agree so profoundly with his conception of the good human life as an active one that I find myself returning to Apollonian virtues in an essay on Dionysian ones. Ever since we were thrown out of Eden, thinking and acting well have been fragile goods achieved only through serious effort: unlike our metabolism, a good life doesn’t just happen for us. This reminded me of Tarantino’s film “Jackie Brown,” in which Samuel L. Jackson’s character tells his girlfriend that if she doesn’t stop smoking so much pot it will rob her of her ambition. Her reply: Not if my ambition is to get high and watch TV. Admittedly, watching TV is an activity that just happens, but it’s hardly the stuff of our best hours.

For those who have the head for it (and many do not), I think cannabis can contribute to flourishing. But it may also dim our prospects if used in such a way as to make us less capable of thinking and acting well.

“By smoking marijuana that morning, I was given the gift of enhanced appreciation.”

Airie Hicks is a 27-year-old wife and mother of three girls who lives in San Antonio, Texas where she enjoys writing, independent study and spicy Tex-Mex. We walk with her by the sea as she develops a new respect for nature’s majesty, and we find a humble sand dollar containing a precious message.

Every puff of marijuana smoke brings an adventure. Perceptions become heightened, and senses sharpen, becoming acute and aware.

One of my fondest memories of smoking marijuana was in the graceful embrace of the ocean side. I stood on the beach with my mother and my youngest daughter, feeling the deepening warmth of the mid-morning sun on my face, arms and legs.

Although I had smoked pot dozens of times prior to my experience at the beach, it was this particular event that changed my life and made me want to observe my natural physical surroundings high from then on, released from the grip of stifling social reality.

In my usual smoking life, I enjoy marijuana privately in my home, where I like to watch television and movies, listen to music, read, play with my three daughters, flirt with my husband and actively imagine under the influence. I didn’t realize I was missing a whole other world.

Everything was different at the beach that day. Living in Texas has afforded me many opportunities at the coast, but none were as lucid as this one. When my mother and I arrived, we pulled our car to a deserted stretch of sand and shared a joint in the sheltered shade of wind ravaged trees. As I began to relax, the first thing I noticed was the wind. It was like a living, breathing entity, first stroking my hair, then playfully fluttering my shirt, then tickling my toes and beginning again in ceaseless repetition. I could hear the sounds the wind was making, almost as if I could predict which way it would stream next, even before it knew. I felt like I could see the wind as well, not the impact it has on other objects, but a visceral outline of the element itself. That experience was only the beginning.

As we stepped away from the car and toward the skirt of the ocean, nature illuminated herself for me to see, and I was a lone specimen in a vast galaxy. I was completely content.

It was a perfect cloudless day, just miles and miles of blue arching overhead that melted into the miles and miles of blue drifting before us. The sun had not yet reached its pinnacle in the sky, and its heat was not yet so overbearing as to be exhausting. Warm rays soaked my skin as though I’d been kissed by nature’s magic wand. I couldn’t help smiling.

I had taken my shoes off in the car, so I felt every gradient of sand, from the soft fluffy white sand far from the water’s edge, to the seaweed spattered sand nearer to the water, to finally the drenched, compressed, squishy sand beneath the sea. Being high, I was able to fully appreciate the moment, rather than enjoying only the surface of the experience.

The water was still cold; a wintry March had not yet heated the ocean to a comfortable temperature, but it was marvelous nonetheless. The Gulf seemed infinite. Sparkles of sunlight bounced off every molecule, dazzling my eye. I was enraptured, spellbound and free of anxiety or worry. The waves crashing upon themselves made a deafening sound, commanding respect as though the ocean were a General in majesty’s army. To speak at that moment would have been sacrilegious.

After some time, I wandered slowly and deliberately up the shore, pausing on occasion to watch the water. I could hardly take my eyes off of it. The wind remained with me the entire time. As I walked, I looked at the sea shells that had washed up with the seaweed. I was surprised to find that most of the shells were intact and unbroken. On my way back to where my mother stood holding my daughter, I happened to look off to the left of where I was walking. Something grabbed my attention, although from where I stood I couldn’t tell what the object was. I bent to where it was and gasped aloud. There on the stiff sand was a perfectly round, unbroken sand dollar. Growing up near the Gulf, I had always hoped to find an unbroken, flawless sand dollar, but all the ones I had ever seen were crunched or for sale as high-priced novelty items in tourist shops. At last I had found a whole one, unmolested by human hands, sea cruelty or time.

The legend of the sand dollar, in addition to being saturated in Christian lore, tells of five white doves locked inside that, when cracking the surface of the sand dollar directly in the center, are released to fly away and spread peace throughout the world. I picked up the sand dollar as if it were a delicate bomb that could erupt in my hands at any second. I wanted the doves to remain inside, a perpetual reminder of the potential for world peace. It was a wondrous piece of treasure that I had discovered by chance on a blue sky day.

By smoking marijuana that morning, I was given the gift of enhanced appreciation. By observing my surroundings and taking the time to revel outdoors, I had escaped the inner sanctum of my home and wandered into the elusive grace of nature. I can only hope my future adventures with marijuana will be as personally rewarding.

Michael McKenna is a Vietnam veteran who suffers from posttraumatic stress disorder. He reports his descent into a profound addiction to heroin, and his use of cannabis as a singular medicine for becoming human.

My name is Michael McKenna. I’m 46 years old, and I’ve been using marihuana on and off since 1970. I’ve gone without it for long periods, but I use it today and probably will for the rest of my life. I have no choice. I went to Vietnam right after my 18th birthday. When I had been there for two weeks, our company lost the first men that I knew. Back at base camp, I sat in the dark by myself wondering what the hell had happened. I asked myself where these souls went, and was there a heaven for men who died the way they did. As I stared into the darkness I heard a voice behind me say “Man, you shouldn’t be out here by yourself thinking about this shit or you’ll go nuts.” I couldn’t look him in the face and didn’t even look up for fear that he would see the tears in my eyes. He told me I needed to get drunk to forget it and go on, or I would die there. I told him I didn’t drink, and he said he would be right back. When he returned he had a big joint and asked if I had tried pot before. I told him that I had, a couple of times. He said this shit was about 100 times stronger than anything in the States and I should only smoke a little. Then he left.

That night alone in the dark, I smoked the whole thing, and I’ve never regretted it. He had given me my mental survival tool. It did not make me forget, just allowed me to digest the pain and fear peacefully and respectfully with dignity. I’m sure you’ve heard before that over there we had Jesus freaks, straights, potheads, and diesel freaks (drinkers). While the diesel freaks made up the majority, pot smoking became more and more open. The straights became potheads by the drove.

My job over there meant I had to deal not only with our dead but theirs also, along with murders, suicides and heroin overdoses. I did not allow my crew to get high on the job, but when we hit camp we all smoked. There was not one drinker in my crew, because we had to move on a moment’s notice, and you could not trust the drunks to be ready or sometimes even able. The potheads came through like champs, always ready, always able. When I returned home, I was hit by the same crap that most other vets got: unemployable, hate, prejudice, called all of the names I’m sure you’ve heard. All you had was family and close friends, and that didn’t last, because in your head they knew that you were the murdering, rapist scum that they had been reading about and seeing on the news. So I threw away all the people who knew me and loved me and turned to vets and then threw them away too, just as some had thrown me away because they knew the scum that I was. Soon no one I was seeing even knew I had even been in the Army, and I wasn’t talking. My way to cope was heavy drugs and booze.

About this time my father (a combat vet from WWII) told me in a loving way that something was wrong with me, that I wasn’t adjusting. He saw death in my eyes, and knew that I was killing myself. He and my Mom begged me to get help before it was too late, or my rage and anger would kill me or someone else. So with my Dad almost holding my hand, we went to the VA hospital in St. Louis. They told me there that I didn’t really have a nervous problem, and in time I would adjust like everyone else who had served in combat. They gave me Valium and told me to come back in 90 days. When I went back and told them the Valium wasn’t working, they said there was nothing else they could do, and I had to live with it. I began to hit the drugs even harder, running all over the country from my demons. Eventually I got strung out on heroin, a $500 a day habit. When I found myself thinking about robbing places because I could no longer support my habit, I decided to quit so I wouldn’t hurt my family any more. All the people I knew who took methadone in the morning were still doing heroin at night, so I decided to quit cold turkey.

I called my father to come and get me. All I told him was that I need his help. He never asked why, and I never told him until later, but he knew anyway. He put me in a camper on his property not too far from their home, and then the hell began. He watched me from time to time, puking, screaming, not able to sleep or even stay in the trailer. I would build campfires to sleep by, if I slept at all. If the fire went out, he would keep it going when I didn’t even know he was there.

On the third day, while I was rolling on the ground screaming in pain and puke, a yellow convertible pulled in and a barefoot guy with waist-long hair and no shirt got out. He said my father had sent him to help me. Seeing my confusion, he said, “Just call me Dr. Jim, and you’re going to sleep tonight.” He had a bag of pot and a gallon of whiskey. I told him to take his shit and get out. Pot wasn’t going to do shit, and the whiskey would probably kill me. But he said getting drunk would help me sleep, and the pot would make the withdrawal less violent and help with the puking. I stayed drunk and high for a week.

When I finally went to my Dad’s to take a shower, he came over and hugged me, as nasty and disgusting as I was, with tears in his eyes. He told me that I had been through enough, that he would have gone through the withdrawal for me if he could have, but that I still had a long way to go. He said that he was never so proud of me as he was when he realized that I wasn’t going to turn back to heroin instead of continuing the withdrawal. He suggested that I quit the booze, but maybe the pot wasn’t a bad thing. Well, I drifted away from the other drugs, but continued to drink and smoke pot. I was unknowingly starting to refine my own treatment. Pot was no longer just a party high for me but a survival tool. I used it to cope with everyday things that others seemed to do on their own, going out, seeing friends, working.

I was just another bombed-out crazy vet, useless, suicidal, and violent. I’ve had a lot of women in my life who liked me but could not stand the mood swings, the striking out and fighting, and the depression. After a while they all would learn the same thing: that when I had pot, I was nicer and more romantic and didn’t get into fights. So they made sure I had pot even if they had to buy it for me.

I’m in my third marriage, and my wife has mixed feelings about pot because it’s illegal. I’ve bought my first home, and she’s afraid we will lose it if I get busted. So she’s scared, but she sees that pot helps me. Since 1990 I’ve been in therapy for PTSD. I’ve been in the Stress Recovery Unit at Bay Pines VA hospital in Florida four times. My doctors there have tried me on different medications for depression and anxiety such as Valium, Prozac, trazodone, Cetrizine, and Serzone. All of my doctors know I self-medicate with pot, because I never hid this from any of them. Most of them don’t really discuss it with me, but some have, and have even told me that the only problem is that they can’t control the dose. They ask me not to smoke while I’m adjusting to their drugs, but I always go back to the pot because it is what works for me. I still use trazodone to help me get to sleep and short-circuit the nightmares, but pot is my daytime drug. I’ve had a lot of pain in my lower back for many years. During one of my stays at the VA, they told me I had a spondylopathy there that they could not operate on, and that I would probably end up in wheelchair. While pot does not stop the pain, it sure makes it a lot easier to live with at bad moments. My pain pills don’t stop the pain and are addictive.

I think it is important for you to know that I’m not a “Cheech and Chong” type. I’ve been a deputy sheriff as well as a police chief and a private investigator, but the PTSD always made me crash and burn. I’ve lost everything several times, and for the last few years I have been rebuilding again. My doctors have told me to retire and try to maintain as normal a life as possible.

Yes, I’m still in a lot of pain mentally and physically, but I am still alive, and I know that I would not be if it weren’t for the pot and my family. And as I said earlier, without the pot I would not have maintained my family. I’m sorry I’ve been going on longer than I thought I would, but I guess I had to defend my continued use. I hope I can help others who have guilty feelings because the stuff is illegal. We must make choices, and mine is to continue to smoke and tell others about the benefits that I got. Thank you for helping me vent.

Another scientist who has found cannabis useful tells his story. He awakens a special skill that continues after his marijuana epiphany, thus joining the numerous users who report cognitive benefits persisting into the normal state.

I am a forty-year-old geologist who studies the surfaces of planets and moons at a National Aeronautics and Space Administration research center. I began smoking marihuana in high school, partly out of curiosity and partly in response to peer pressure, after observing no ill effects on my friends who used it regularly. Since then I have used it for self-exploration, for religious experiences, and, of course, for pleasure, including enhanced appreciation of sex, music, art, and conversation. But cannabis has done more than that for me; it has actually helped me to acquire a professionally useful skill.

To analyze the underlying structures and history of geological change on a planet or moon, planetary geologists rely on images of landforms and surface markings radioed back from spacecraft. Landforms cannot be understood unless they are perceived in three dimensions by means of stereo images – paired photographs taken from slightly different angles to mimic depth perception.

Most people use mechanical devices – stereo-opticons of one sort or another – to judge depth from stereo photos. The machinery needed to view stereo images of planetary surfaces is particularly awkward and time-consuming to use. A few fortunate people can see three dimensions in stereo photographs without mechanical aids – a skill every planetary geologist would like to have.

When I was an undergraduate, a friend tried for months without success to teach me this skill, and I became convinced that people who said they possessed it were deluding themselves. But one evening we smoked some especially potent marihuana, purely for pleasure. I amused myself by looking at a pair of stereo photographs that had been left in the room. Suddenly the two pictures merged into a single three-dimensional view. It was like a gift from God. Overjoyed, I looked at other stereo pairs and discovered that I could perceive depth in them as well. I spent the rest of the evening gazing at stereo pairs. The next day, when the immediate marihuana effects had passed, I found that I retained the ability. The skill has saved me a great deal of time in consulting and analyzing stereo photos of geological field sites.

I believe my experience illustrates how marihuana can overcome deep conditioning, initiated immediately after birth, which locks us into perceiving reality in very narrow and formulaically defined ways. Marihuana shares with its stronger psychedelic brethren the power to cleanse the doors of perception and make the world seem as new. Its help in catalyzing the acquisition of a skill useful in my work is only one of the many blessings and insights it has provided.

Appreciation of music is frequently cited as a beneficial effect of moderate use. In preparing a PhD theses on cannabis and music, Anonymous offers a detailed view on the influence of its effects on aural perception, evolving from his early encounters with musicians and their improvisations.

In my little hometown there was a tiny old house that always had some jazzy music coming out of it. It sounded as though the musicians were improvising because I didn’t recognize a real song or a chord line. Some jazz does involve a fixed chord line, like a jazz standard or a popular song on which you improvise. But you can improvise on a modal tune without a fixed chord line, just creating a groove or rhythmical sound pattern or short melody and then experiencing what happens when you expand it. That is what they were doing in the house. For both kinds of improvising you need to listen very closely to what the other musicians are playing to fit your ideas into the web of sounds.

One day a musician came out of the house, and I asked him if I could join in for a jam session. The next evening I went there with my guitar. I was 16 and these guys were much older. The owner was an organ player with a weird, unusual technique. He was also a painter, and his psychedelic drawings and light installations created an ambience of fantasy and delight. They offered me some marijuana and I played stoned for the first time in my life. The music seemed more intense, and I discovered that my playing was better when I just closed my eyes and let go. They seemed to like my playing too, and eventually I joined the band. We used to tape our sessions and listened to them afterward. It was strange to listen to a piece of music you improvised the night before. Sometimes you felt as though there was something coming out of the Nordic night. Somehow, to listen to it properly, it had to be louder, and of course you had to be stoned with closed eyes. It was real “stoner’s music.”

As my musical interests developed, I began to use echo chambers, reverb, and modulation effects, trying to create rooms and space in the emerging soundscapes. When I was improvising stoned, I had a better sense of the correlation between the notes. It was as though I was looking into the space between them. I sensed them as a blurred harmonic structure behind the groove of the bass and drums, but I did not feel as though there were “too many notes.” I discovered that the quality of my playing was better when I tried to let myself go, while at the same time getting a sense of upcoming changes in the sounds played by the others. It was especially exciting at moments when we all changed at the same time. Most of the time I looked at my instrument and led my hands according to my musical ideas; sometimes I just closed my eyes and tried to let my hands do the music by themselves. I was even writing and singing spontaneous lyrics that way. I put words and images together without thinking whether they had a coherent sense, and when I read them the next day, most of them did. Some had strong personal meanings that I discovered years later. Cannabis allowed me to trust my fingers and my ears.

When you use cannabis, ideas and changes come out of your hands as if they are waiting to be played. Your fingers are running over the frets, hitting the right notes, and your soul integrates them into a structure. If you are in a certain mood, that mood is expressed just as if it was waiting to be played in that way. I didn’t need to control the music and its harmonic and rhythmic structure. I didn’t need to decide what to play. It was like making a journey with friends. During sequences of intense playing, I would open my eyes and look into the faces of my fellow musicians. Sometimes this gave me a strange feeling of reading their minds and gestures, their joy and excitement.

We had some really good black Nepalese hash that we used to smoke with a little tobacco in a water pipe before jamming. It became a kind of ritual, cleaning up our minds before playing. One day when I had smoked this hash, I closed my eyes and saw Oriental mosaic patterns and figures rushing through my head. When we started jamming, I suddenly felt one of the paintings in the room becoming very vivid and changing in size. The fantasy creature in the picture started talking to me, and it seemed as though the painter understood me and was talking through the music and his pictures. It was like being in telepathic contact. Then I heard a strange voice, and I was surprised to realize that it was my distortion guitar and phaser. It was a powerful psychedelic experience that reminded me of the Doors’ song, “Break on Through to the Other Side” (383 kb mp3 file).

That experience changed my perspective on life and became the basis of a decision to go deeper into the mystery of music. I decided not to be just a musician. I studied psychology, social science, and musicology. I worked in a physiology department and learned how to handle measuring apparatus like the EEG. Today I am in my thirties, working in the music department of a European university to help therapists and clinicians find scientific literature relevant to their problems.

I am also writing a Ph.D. thesis on cannabis and the perception of music, relating my cannabis experiences to scientific experiments on auditory perception and other musical topics. Under the influence of cannabis, time is stretched and so is rhythm, providing more free space within and more room to be filled. It is much easier to catch the basic beat and the pulse, to get into the groove of a phrase or a melody. As any jazz, rock, or folk musician will tell you, cannabis intoxication provides a wonderful basis for musical improvisation by expanding time perception, changing body image, enhancing sensitivity to movement patterns, and evoking auditory and visual cross-modal relationships, heightened association patterns, and vivid imagery. Other features of stoned music are an attraction to higher frequencies and expanded metric units of frequency intensity ranges, as well as enhanced three-dimensional perspectives on the sources of sound. All of this is relevant to the mixing of sound in modern studios. (Cannabis is not used so much for recording complicated musical structures or for performing.) I have found that when we listen to music while stoned, an area in the rear of the brain that processes auditory and visual information becomes especially active, indicating a physically relaxed but aware receptive state. The brain wave patterns also suggest synesthesia-like effects. The activity of the right hemisphere increases, and the experience thus becomes more interesting from an informational point of view. Because of the changes in time perception, more things and events are experienced as being present at the same time. As the space between the normal information processing patterns is opened, you “see” information that is normally censored or “useless.” This may explain why we hear music differently when stoned, and why some stoners make music that creates a rhythmical trance-like soundscape.

This is just a brief insight into the possible dimensions of the subject. I think there is a lot more work to be done, and I hope I will find some funding to go deeper into these questions. Meanwhile, I pursue the adventure of learning more about the mystery of improvised music. I still listen to the tape of the session that was my breakthrough, and I still play improvised music on stage and in the recording studio while working with people who use it to heal.