On being California sober

One of the problems with the term "California sober" is that it sounds too cutesy to be taken seriously. It conveys notions of a kind of "sobriety-lite". Sobriety, except you're cheating. A flimsy, superficial approach to recovery. Depending on who you ask, "California sober" might describe staying away from hard drugs (sometimes including alcohol) while still using cannabis, and sometimes other psychedelics or anything else a person has decided they can keep in their life without going completely off the rails.

Part of why the phrase resonates is that it names something a lot of people were already doing. Plenty of people who cut out or cut down on their drinking still need to take the edge off from time to time. A few beers and weed all day is standard for several recovering coke addicts I know. Are they sober? Yeah. They're managing their lives and avoiding cocaine and maintaining their employment and their relationships. That's their version of sobriety. Who am I to tell them that isn't good enough?

Establishment expertise

The Cleveland Clinic generally maintains an excellent reputation with mainstream recovery experts, doctors, and professional researchers. They take a pretty dim view of any notion of harm reduction when it comes to sobriety. Generally speaking, sobriety itself is intertwined with puritanical notions of goodness in mainstream recovery circles. It's counterproductive. If you're trying to get people to reduce their harmful substance use and fix their lives, demanding adherence to a single model of abstinence and demonizing psychedelics like cannabis, psilocybin, ayahuasca, and others seems misguided at best and deliberately unhelpful at worst.

Writing about the idea of leaning on cannabis to stay sober, the esteemed Clinic frames it as something not grounded in scientific research; they point out that there is "little evidence that it offers a long-term solution" to substance use problems.¹ That phrase, "long-term," is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

Why put "long-term" in there at all? That's done deliberately, and I'll tell you why. There quite obviously is evidence showing the efficacy of cannabis in reducing short-term alcohol use. The most direct evidence to date, a randomized placebo-controlled trial published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, found that heavy drinkers consumed meaningfully less alcohol in the hours after smoking cannabis.²

Wait. It gets worse.

This isn't some new, cutting-edge area of research. Researchers have long known that those in recovery from hard drugs use cannabis to maintain their sobriety. For example, research on recovery from cocaine dependence long ago established that cannabis was an important tool for former users to maintain their sobriety.³

The issue comes down to whether or not you think sobriety can include substances like cannabis at all. Those with a narrow or fixed idea of recovery tend to be extremely skeptical of any claims that cannabis or other psychedelics are helpful in recovery. These drugs are dismissed out of hand in part because they are drugs. Never mind that traditional approaches to recovery seem to regard coffee and cigarettes as sacrosanct, and binge eating as a perfectly acceptable alternative to booze.

My point isn't to go after the coffee drinkers or the cigarette enjoyers, or the delicious food enthusiasts. My point is that rigid notions of what recovery should look like aren't particularly helpful. The goal is to help others improve their lives by lessening (if not eliminating) the harmful impacts of drugs like alcohol and cocaine. You might not personally approve of cannabis, but people aren't killing themselves and destroying their bodies by smoking weed. I don't care how much they're smoking. Any argument to the contrary just shows a facile understanding of recovery, human beings, and cannabis.

CBD, a specific cannabinoid found in cannabis, has been shown to have a variety of positive effects in the treatment of cocaine addiction.⁴ Psilocybin is less studied, but has also been shown to have positive effects in terms of treatment of cocaine use disorder.⁵ Indeed, there's a breadth of research showing the potential for psilocybin to have benefits for treatments of many different drugs, including opioids and nicotine.⁶ Establishment groups and institutions will be forced to come to terms with this in the coming years and decades. But for now, there's still a great deal of resistance. Heck, there actually is evidence showing the efficacy of cannabis in reducing long-term alcohol use⁷, mainstream institutions are just reluctant to recognize it. That's why we still get these dumb claims that are easy to disprove.

There is no panacea

Cannabis isn't for everyone, and its effects certainly depend on the person. Someone like myself can use cannabis daily to avoid alcohol use and for emotional regulation, while deriving great enjoyment. Someone else might get none of those benefits and hate the feeling of being stoned. In my experience, cannabis is much more hit and miss when it comes to recovery. For some, it's a godsend. For others, it's a tool they try on the way to finding what actually works. But while a mild psychedelic like cannabis isn't for everyone, you shouldn't discount the power of stronger psychedelics, either.

Some of the most profound experiences of my life have been on psilocybin. If you have unresolved, deep-seated issues, psilocybin can bring a reckoning. It can force you to confront what you've been ignoring. If you're not happy with something in your life, psilocybin often forces you to sit in that, demanding you confront the thing that is keeping you stuck. It can be ugly and deeply uncomfortable. But it can also represent a turning point and a catalyst for change. The same is true for drugs like ayahuasca and ibogaine, but these are obviously even more powerful than your average psilocybin experience. I'd add MDMA to the list as well, but this one is a little more controversial—undoubtedly because of its pharmaceutical rather than natural origins. The puritans among us can perhaps make room for these esoteric natural drugs; once you start talking about street pharmaceuticals, however, it's game over.

So here is the unglamorous thing, said as straightforwardly as possible. Cannabis is not a cure for a drinking problem. Ayahuasca, which tends to get discussed in the same hopeful register, isn't either. There is no single substance or ritual that dissolves a substance use issue for everyone who reaches for it. The hunt for that one clean answer makes complete sense, because living inside the problem is exhausting and human beings like simple fixes to complex problems.

What actually helps is obviously more nuanced. Some approaches do have a decent track record across large groups of people. Talk therapy has helped a great many of us. Peer support and mutual-aid communities, the twelve-step world included, have helped keep people sober for decades. Medication has good evidence backing it for certain kinds of dependence, and for some people the thing that finally works is even less complicated: just building a happy and stable life with those you love. But none of this guarantees that one of these or any of these is the answer for you specifically. And none of it means you have failed if the approach that saved your friend does absolutely zilch for you.

This is the part the whole "California sober" debate tends to skip past. The real question was never whether cannabis is good or bad in some abstract sense. The real question is what shifts your relationship with the substances that are actually harming you, in a way you can keep up, on terms you can live with. For one person the answer might be full abstinence from everything. For another it might be cutting alcohol out completely while using cannabis as a relatively benign substitute. For some, it's a steady diet of cannabis and a few beers on the weekend. That's what keeps them off coke. That's what keeps them connected to their families and gainfully employed.

You don't have some moral authority over me or my friends because you're judgmental and have rigid idea structures. Being "California sober," or whatever you want to call it, isn't cheating. It isn't sobriety lite, or sobriety with an asterisk. If you think you're helping anyone by framing others' experiences that way, you're not. If a person has stopped drinking themselves into the hospital and is functioning while staying close to the people they love, that is objectively a good thing.

To be clear, none of this is a pitch for cannabis as a panacea for substance misuse. If anything, it is an argument against any plan sold as universal. A recovery built around one substance, picked because it worked for someone else or because it made a tidy headline, is a road to nowhere. The right approach depends on the person, their experiences, their needs, their preferences, and their goals.

It's easy to look at others and judge them because "that's not the way I did it." Lasting recovery, however, is difficult, and all of us are on our own journey. For me, understanding and empathy keep me focused on helping others achieve recovery, rather than scrutinizing whether their journey to recovery meets with my approval.