“You’re Such A Stoner”
And other casual barriers to conscious thought.
I’m a stoner. I say that with no shame and a certain quiet pride because if the last few years have proven anything, it’s that clarity doesn’t always come in straight lines. Sometimes it loops. Sometimes it spirals. Sometimes, it hits you at 4:22 p.m. while staring at the veins of a leaf and suddenly understanding how empires fall.
History is full of those who saw too much, too soon: the mystics, the heretics, and the scientists who whispered truths too dangerous for their time. Galileo faced the Inquisition, and Emmy Noether developed revolutionary mathematics while barred from academia for being female. When the official story cracks, it’s the dreamers and outliers who feel the quake first.
The Architecture of Control
We’re living in a time of collapse. That’s not hyperbole — it’s observable. Democracies are hollowed out by algorithms, and ecosystems are collapsing like lungs full of smoke. As author Douglas Rushkoff documents in “Survival of the Richest,” billionaires build bunkers while ordinary people drown in debt and heat waves. And still, we cling to old blueprints, as if the system that brought us here is capable of leading us somewhere better.
The modern mind has been systematically trained to privilege certain forms of knowledge while dismissing others. Psychologist Iain McGilchrist, in his landmark work “The Master and His Emissary,” meticulously documents how Western civilization has increasingly favored left-brain dominance — analytical, fragmented, abstracted — while marginalizing right-brain perception that sees patterns, connections, and holistic relationships.
What we’ve created isn’t just a preference for logic but an architecture of control that pathologizes deviation. Our educational systems reward convergent thinking while punishing divergence. Our workplaces monitor productivity in six-minute increments. Our social media feeds are engineered to hijack attention and channel it toward consumption. According to a 2021 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, the average American makes more than 35,000 decisions daily, most under algorithmic influence we barely perceive.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped trusting ourselves. We outsourced instinct to institutions, letting bureaucrats define morality, scientists gatekeep wonder, and corporations monetize every emotion, from grief to joy to curiosity. In the process, we rewired what it means to know something. It was dismissed if it couldn’t be measured, modeled, or monetized. Intuition became superstition. Feeling became failure.
Ancient Plant, Ancient System
What if I told you that inside your body right now exists an entire biological system that modern science didn’t discover until 1992? The endocannabinoid system, identified by Dr. Raphael Mechoulam and colleagues, is one of our most ancient biological networks, evolving over 600 million years ago — predating the nervous system itself.
This system — comprising receptors throughout the brain, organs, connective tissues, and immune cells — regulates everything from sleep to appetite, memory to mood, pain to pleasure. It serves as our body’s primary homeostatic regulator, maintaining balance across systems. It doesn’t just manage individual functions; it coordinates how those functions relate to each other. In essence, it’s a biological system dedicated to connection and integration.
Indigenous cultures understood this synergy long before Western science caught up. Cannabis appears in Chinese pharmacopeias dating back to 2700 BCE, where it was prescribed for rheumatism, malaria, and, oddly enough, “absent-mindedness.” Ancient Hindu texts name it one of the five sacred plants, capable of delivering happiness and liberating anxiety. Scythian shamans threw cannabis seeds onto heated stones, inhaling the vapors to induce trance states for communing with the spirit world.
These weren’t simply recreational practices — they were recognized technologies for altering consciousness with specific intentions. The plant’s use spans continents and millennia precisely because it enhances connection — both within the body’s systems and between the individual and their environment. This isn’t mysticism; it’s biology. The endocannabinoid system’s primary function is integration across boundaries that our rational minds perceive as separate.
The Criminalization of Consciousness
How did a plant used medicinally and spiritually for thousands of years become demonized in the modern era? The answer reveals much about how power operates through the control of perception itself.
When Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, launched his campaign against cannabis in the 1930s, he explicitly linked it to racial minorities and threatening ideas. “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men,” he testified to Congress. “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz, and swing result from marijuana use.”
This wasn’t subtle. It was an explicit admission that certain states of consciousness — especially those that might question racial hierarchies or cultural norms — needed to be criminalized. Later, when the counterculture of the 1960s embraced cannabis as part of its rejection of Vietnam War policies, President Nixon’s administration doubled down.
“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.”
John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic policy chief, later admitted: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.”
This pattern repeats across history: consciousness that challenges authority becomes criminalized — not because it’s harmful, but because it threatens established power. Despite promising research into cannabis for treating conditions from chronic pain to PTSD, it remained classified as a Schedule I drug with “no medical use” for decades. The war on drugs was never just about substances. It was about suppressing the perspectives those substances might enable.
Neural Liberation
What happens neurologically when cannabis compounds interact with our endocannabinoid system? The science reveals something profound about how we perceive reality itself.
The dominant cannabinoid, THC, binds primarily to CB1 receptors concentrated in the brain, while CBD interacts more indirectly, inhibiting the breakdown of our body’s natural endocannabinoids. However, the most fascinating effects occur at the system level. A 2020 study in the journal NeuroImage shows that cannabis temporarily disrupts the brain’s default mode network — the same network affected by meditation and psychedelics.
This network, responsible for our sense of self and narrative thinking, typically maintains rigid boundaries between cognitive systems. When these boundaries soften, previously segregated brain regions begin communicating in novel ways. This isn’t cognitive impairment — it’s cognitive liberation. A 2010 study published in Psychiatry Research found that THC increases blood flow to the frontal lobe and temporal regions associated with creative thinking while enhancing connectivity between brain areas that generally don’t communicate directly.
What’s often dismissed as “stoner thought” is actually the brain forming connections between ideas, memories, and perceptions that logical thinking keeps separate. Consider the phenomenon of “deautomatization” that cannabis often induces — the capacity to experience familiar things as if for the first time. Neurologically, this occurs because the plant temporarily suspends the brain’s patterns of habitual processing. The sunset you’ve seen a thousand times without noticing suddenly becomes breathtaking. The song you’ve heard countless times reveals hidden melodies. This isn’t distortion — it’s the suspension of filters that usually keep us from seeing too much, feeling too deeply, and questioning too thoroughly.
Dr. Carl Hart, neuroscientist, and Columbia University professor challenges the narrative that altered states necessarily mean impaired states. In his research and book “Drug Use for Grown-Ups,” he demonstrates how cannabinoids can enhance certain types of creativity and problem-solving precisely by allowing the brain to escape its usual constraints. What our efficiency-obsessed culture calls “focus” is often just a narrowed field of perception — attention directed so specifically that context disappears.
The philosopher Alan Watts noted that the dominant culture teaches us to experience reality through a “spotlight consciousness” that illuminates narrow areas with intensity while leaving everything else in darkness. Cannabis and other consciousness-altering tools often provide what he called “floodlight consciousness” — illumination that may be less intense but reveals relationships between elements rather than isolating them from their context.
The Wisdom of Uncertainty
The physicist Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle showed us that even in the physical world, precise observation has fundamental limits. The more accurately we measure position, the less we can know about momentum. This isn’t just physics — it’s metaphor. The harder we grasp for certainty, the more reality slips through our fingers.
Indigenous knowledge systems have always understood this balance between precision and context. The Anishinaabe concept of “two-eyed seeing” simultaneously embraces multiple ways of knowing. Traditional ecological knowledge preserved biodiversity for millennia before Western science had names for species. These systems don’t reject empiricism — they situate it within larger frameworks of meaning and relationship.
What we dismissively call “stoner thought” isn’t disorganized. It’s decentralized. It moves in fractals, not formulas. It dares to connect dots without permission. The poet John Keats called this “negative capability” — the capacity to remain in uncertainties and mysteries without irritable reaching after fact and reason. In our metrics-obsessed culture, this capability becomes revolutionary.
Modern neuroscience increasingly supports what contemplative traditions have taught for centuries: insight rarely emerges from linear processing. Researchers at the University of California found that breakthrough problem-solving often occurs when the brain’s default mode network — active during daydreaming and mind-wandering — communicates with task-positive networks typically associated with focused attention. The stereotypical “stoner thought” isn’t cognitive breakdown — it’s boundary dissolution between mental categories we’ve been conditioned to keep separate.
Free Thinking in a Time of Crisis
This matters profoundly in our current moment. The polycrises we face — climate breakdown, democratic erosion, technological dystopia — aren’t simple problems with simple solutions. They’re complex systems challenges that require perceiving connections across domains typically treated as separate: economics from ecology, technology from psychology, and politics from ethics. Our institutional structures deliberately fragment these domains, making holistic understanding nearly impossible within conventional frameworks.
Creative breakthroughs throughout history often come not from gathering more information but from perceiving new connections between existing information. Einstein’s theories emerged not from new data but from thought experiments that reconfigured existing knowledge. The double helix structure of DNA was famously visualized in a dream. The benzene ring’s structure came to chemist August Kekulé in a reverie about a snake eating its own tail.
These weren’t random accidents. They were insights made possible by states of consciousness that transcended linear analysis — states that allowed pattern recognition to operate without the constraints of conventional categories. Cannabis doesn’t guarantee such insights, but it creates conditions where they become more possible by temporarily suspending the cognitive frameworks that keep perception confined to approved channels.
We are over-surveilled, over-medicated, under-touched. Every intuition is second-guessed through a dozen algorithms before we’re allowed to trust it. Every gut feeling is met with a search bar. We’ve created a culture that mocks the mystical, even as it drowns in its own unexamined certainty.
This isn’t about rejecting science or embracing conspiracy. It’s about reclaiming the full spectrum of human perception. Science itself was born from wonder, from the willingness to question established narratives. The scientific method doesn’t work without the imagination to form hypotheses worth testing.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow warned of the “law of the instrument” — when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We’ve built a civilization with miraculous instruments for measuring the material world, but increasingly treat these tools as the only valid means of knowing. The result is a technically advanced society yet spiritually and ecologically impoverished.
The world’s greatest scientific minds understood this balance. Einstein played violin when stuck on physics problems. Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock described developing “a feeling for the organism” that guided her groundbreaking genetics research. Steve Jobs credited his LSD experiences with enhancing his creative vision. They knew that logic alone could not birth breakthroughs.
Reclaiming Perception
And yet — beneath all that noise — something ancient still hums. A knowing that predates language. You can find it in the eyes of someone who’s glimpsed something beyond ordinary perception. In the way children speak to animals. In the dreams we dismiss and the déjà vu we ignore. Intuition is not a glitch. It’s a compass. And many of us have spent our entire lives being told not to follow it.
So when I light up, I’m not checking out — I’m tuning in. To the rhythms we’ve forgotten. To the connections we’ve severed. To the part of me that still remembers how to listen without needing proof. If that makes me a stoner, so be it. In a world suffocating under its own certainties, perhaps the most radical act is to remain open to mystery.
Maybe what we need isn’t more answers, but better questions. Not more data, but more profound wisdom. Not more productivity, but a renewed perspective. The challenges we face — climate collapse, democratic erosion, technological alienation — weren’t created by people who thought too wildly. They were created by those who thought too narrowly, confused profit with progress, and controlled with competence.
As we stand at the crossroads of multiple crises, perhaps we should listen to those who’ve been quietly cultivating alternative ways of seeing all along — the ones who question not just what we know but how we know it. The ones who refuse to accept that economics matters more than ecology, that efficiency matters more than empathy, and that “practical” thinking is somehow more valuable than the reimagining that every transformation requires.
Ultimately, stoner thought isn’t about escaping reality — it’s about encountering it more completely, with all our faculties engaged rather than just the narrow band of perception deemed productive by markets and institutions. It reminds us that before we were consumers, citizens, or workers, we were first and foremost perceivers — beings with the miraculous capacity to witness and wonder.
Wonder isn’t an escape. It’s a return — to the parts of ourselves we’ve been trained to distrust. And if we don’t make that return soon, no amount of certainty will save us.
