Is Cannabis a Psychedelic? Of course, but…

In a social situation, when someone passes me a joint, I usually decline. Often, the response is something along the lines of, “Get’s you paranoid?” To which, lying just a little, I usually say, yes.

Having grown up in a culture where cannabis was illegal and villainized to an extraordinary degree, and having diligently tried to hide my use of it from parents, dorm monitors, and, of course, the police, I can say that a certain amount of paranoia was indeed part of my history with it. Usually, though, in social situations I might merely become self-conscious, without any real paranoia — but I figure it all gets bundled together in our less-than-precise stoner vocabulary.

Yet it’s the power of my experience of cannabis that makes me hesitant to use it casually in uncertain situations. While many people seem to be able to use it for a mild sedative and pleasant sensual effect, I have almost always found it to open up multiple dimensions of experience. That is, I am one of the people who experience it as a psychedelic.

I used cannabis for several years before I had the opportunity to try LSD, mushrooms, or mescaline. I did read quite a bit about these substances, and tried to gather as much information as possible. To me, the descriptions sounded an awful lot like what happened when I was high on cannabis. When I tried to describe what I was experiencing, I mostly got quizzical looks. One friend suggested that I had talked myself into a psychedelic trip (not true, but quite interesting as an hypothesis, if you think about it).

A large part of the question of whether cannabis is a psychedelic comes not from the experiences but from the semantic history around these substances. Initially, LSD, and by implication mushrooms and the others, were labelled as psychotomimetics, meaning that they created a state that imitated psychosis. That was a failed hypothesis, although subsequent work on spiritual emergencies suggests that it might not be completely absurd, at least in the case of some apparent psychotic breaks.

At the same time, back in the mid-20th century, the popular imagination associated cannabis with a temporary (but addictive) psychosis, as in the infamous Reefer Madness and High School Confidential movies. Still, there was no real association between cannabis and LSD, as they travelled in very different social milieus, with cannabis moving in bohemian and ethnic circles while LSD and other substances were making the rounds in medical laboratories and academia.

The next label for LSD, mushrooms, and company was hallucinogen, that is, something that generates hallucinations — the perception of something that is not present. “Hallucinogen” remained in use throughout the growing popularity of both cannabis and other psychoactive substances in the 1960s. But because cannabis doesn’t usually cause much in the way of overt hallucinations, it wouldn’t fit neatly into this category.

Mind you, cannabis does often provide rather stunning visual images, but with the eyes closed. Auditory hallucinations might be a little more prominent, although it is probably more a matter of interpretation than perception (you hear some wind outside your window and think it might be voices).

Meanwhile, the label hallucinogen began to fall out of favor because true hallucinations are neither guaranteed nor fundamental to the experience of LSD, mushrooms, and others. Many of the powerful visual effects like geometric patterns that are common with LSD and mushrooms, or snakes and jungle animals seen on ayahuasca, are more visions than hallucinations. Importantly, the term “hallucination” was deeply associated with unfortunate mental states such as psychosis, dementia, and delirium.

Humphrey Osmond’s term psychedelic (“mind manifesting”) began to take over as more relevant to the experience, and finally freed the substances from their association with mental illness. I think that cannabis would have fit neatly into the category of psychedelic, if the demarcation had not already been made when LSD and company were called hallucinogens. In fact, the mind-manifesting effects of cannabis were already well known within creative communities in recent history, and among spiritual communities going back centuries if not millenia.

In Food of the Gods, Terrence McKenna said, “… there is also no doubt that when used occasionally in a context of ritual and culturally reinforced expectation of a transformation of consciousness, cannabis is capable of nearly the full spectrum of psychedelic effects associated with hallucinogens.”

I would argue that while the more positive effects might rely on a ritual context and culturally reinforced expectations, many aspects of the psychedelic experience are going to be present in any case, especially with today’s ultra-powerful weed — thus my passing on the offered joint.

To be fair, though, the power of cannabis is on a different level than the other psychedelics: similarities in kind do not mean equality of effect. Some folks can take a hit of strong weed and just feel relaxed: that doesn’t apply to a hit of DMT. Chemically, too, the pharmacology of cannabis does not fit in with the others, which can be placed into several broad classes.

Even so, the similarities are becoming more apparent with the comparatively recent trend of microdosing (microdosing has been around for a while, but is increasingly popular in a wider range of social circles).

While it may be a challenge to get as powerful an experience on cannabis as on LSD, more and more individuals are seeing that lower doses of LSD and mushrooms open up the same sort of creative channels that have previously been associated with cannabis. Today’s graphic designers and computer geeks are replicating the techniques of jazz musicians and Beat poets, using low doses of LSD and mushrooms in place of cannabis (that’s a gross oversimplification and a bit tongue-in-cheek, so don’t take it too seriously).

I have mixed feelings about the more recent term, entheogens (“manifesting god within”), which sounds to me more like a prayer for a good trip than a universal descriptor for the psychedelic experience. There are some things one encounters on these substances that could be considered godlike in only the broadest sense of the term.

I tend to use cannabis infrequently, at home, and when I have plenty of time and privacy. I treat it in very much the same way I approach any other psychedelic experience — with a combination of reverence and trepidation. The pleasant and profound effects of cannabis are less than they are for the others, and happily (but not casually) so are the unpleasant profound effects.

Lately, though, I’ve been using it a little more frequently, with friends and family. I’m trying to get used to low doses on a regular basis, so that when the joint gets passed to me, I can take a hit.

Cuz, you know, I wanna be one of the cool kids. ;)