The Substance
In the 1600’s, a substance that was plant derived, was rolling through the cities of Europe. It was the beginning of the modern era, where, for the first time in history, novel crops, medicines, and drugs could be pulled from their native soils, tossed into the hull of a ship, and delivered—with good fortune and a few months travel— into the nervous systems of Europeans who lived half a world away. This particular substance’s path of travel flowed from the rainforests of South America to the brains of increasing numbers of Europe’s educated class.
There was opportunity for betterment in the barks, plants, spices and leaves entering Europe by port, but it was accompanied by a problem. Namely: how were these things supposed to be used? What were the benefits of ingesting, imbibing or inhaling them? What were the risks?
The use of this particular South American substance caused hysteria. “If it be taken in large quantity, it affects and disturbs the mind” Francis Bacon wrote of the drug in Sylva Sylvarum. “It is of the same nature with opiates”. Rumours swirled in European cities that overconsumption of it could lead to apoplectic fits, even paralysis.
At the same time, the supposed benefits of using this substance were presented to the public with gusto. It was said that partaking of it could increase one’s vitality, quicken the mind, and give the user a jolt of energy. Apothecaries, physicians and retail shops began marketing the drug as a panacea.
It took the better part of a century, but Europe managed to sift through the competing hopes and fears to come to an agreement over how the substance could be used for benefit. The hysteria subsided, the substance became woven into the culture of the European city, and by the early 1700’s, a citizen could have a mug of the stuff in public without any hint of stigma. The substance, the one filling the mug, the one able to make its way without scandal past the lips and into the brain of the urban Europeans drinking it, was a hot, bitter beverage made from the seed of the cascara cherry: coffee.
The Other Substance
Cannabis’s entry into western culture in the 1900’s mimicked coffee’s trajectory three centuries earlier: Benefits were propounded, fears were voiced, and the culture of the time was experimenting with how this new substance could be properly threaded through society. With cannabis’s criminalization, however, that experimentation abruptly ceased. The threads were dropped.
In place of a society-wide dialogue over the benefits and risks of cannabis, we have instead been stuck for a good half century in Cheech and Chong territory. It seems to have been an unspoken agreement between the counterculture and the wider culture; weed could be allowed to remain in public consciousness, but only as the butt of a joke. Depictions of pot-smokers over the last fifty years, forgetting their keys, raiding the fridge, staying glued to the couch, seemed guaranteed to produce the opinion that, though perhaps not dangerous, cannabis was something to avoid if one was to become a functioning member of society (perhaps after a brief experimentation with it in college).
With legalization, we can finally continue public discussion over how to use cannabis with benefit, to pick the thread up once again. To do that, we need to address the shortcomings of the Cheech and Chong model of cannabis use.
Here’s the thing: the model is not wrong (season 2 of Rick and Morty, some Northern Lights, and a family sized bag of Smartfood make for a pretty fun afternoon) but it is incomplete. It ignores another thread, one that seems to appear whenever cannabis intermingles with a society. It ignores the long and storied history of people using the plant to get sh!^ done.
The wake and bake uses of cannabis, the ways people have used the plant to help them tackle the demands of the day, seem to fall into three main categories: Motivation boosting, flow enabling, idea generating.
Motivation Boosting
Cannabis was shipped alongside coffee into Europe in the 1600’s, and like coffee, impressions were soon formed on the substance’s effects. Robert Hooke, a scientist, architect, and contemporary of Bacon’s, wrote of cannabis’s ability to “ease the sense of hard labours”. This impression still sounds accurate, and it gets at why many people use the plant today.
Certain strains seem to enable a willingness to take on tasks that would otherwise be avoided: doing the dishes, running out for groceries, or finally getting around to organizing the garage. These same strains also seem to help some people (this writer included) avoid the inertia and internal pep-talk normally required to convince themselves to actually start the workout they had planned, and so might be worth including in your pre-workout routine.
What to Look For:
The strains able to kickstart the day for most people seem to be the terpinolene and limonene heavy haze lineages, with Jack Herer, Green Crack and Girl Scout Cookies being a few famous examples of these motivation boosters.
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Flow Enabling
“Whether it is Alexander Dumas’s description of hash’s ability to let one advance “free in mind”, Louis Armstrong’s insistence that his music sessions benefitted from his use of the “gage”, or W.B. Yeats recounted experience of hashish-induced hyper focus in Discoveries, the idea that cannabis is capable of locking you in to sustained, focused attention on a task reoccurs throughout history.
The plant’s ability to enable focus shows clearest how incomplete the Cheech and Chong model of cannabis use is. A few centuries ago, you had authors like Dumas, Balzac, Yeats and Hugo, all regular cannabis users, able to maintain an output of doorstop-sized writings at a steady pace decade after decade. A few decades ago, you had Louis Armstrong, who knocked off close to 300 shows every year, year after year, whose musicianship pushed him past the racial divide and into wider recognition; he was too good, for too long, to ignore. Currently, you have our hometown hero, Seth Rogen, who for over a decade has maintained a rate of making multiple movies per year, most of which he has written, directed, or both, most of which are commercial successes, critically acclaimed, or both. He appears to have taken over Hollywood in the process. These creators explicitly pointed to cannabis as helping them achieve their sustained output. I don’t see how these achievements can be put into the category of typical stoner behaviour with a straight face. Something is missing here.
Though there is experimental evidence suggesting that a state of focused flow is produced by a suite of neurotransmitters which cannabis modulates the production of, it is too early to say we know the precise way in which cannabis creates a state of sustained focus. We are still in the realm of correlation, not causation.
However, just as European culture landed upon some useful rules of thumb for consuming coffee before caffeine’s effect on the brain was known, I think it possible to provide some useful heuristics to consider when using cannabis to help enable a state of focused clarity.
What to Look For:
When suggesting these rules of thumb, it is useful to look back at what exactly Armstrong, Balzac and Hugo were smoking. What they smoked, by all accounts, was much, much weaker. With the THC levels of flower regularly maxing out at less than 10% in the early 20th century, it looks like it was an entirely different experience compared to the average potency of flower on Muse’s shelf. Much of the European romantics favoured hash, so that upped the potency they experienced, but what they experienced also likely included a substantial amount of CBD, as earlier varieties of the cannabis plant seemed to produce both cannabinoids equally. It was only in the latter half of the 20th century that strains began to be supercharged for THC potency and decoupled from CBD production.
Anecdotally, I have found that following these rules of thumb—keeping the THC low, including CBD—has been effective at locking me into a focused state of attention. If the high produced by “motivation boosting” strains resembles a shot of espresso, the high able to produce focused attention should feel more like a mug of green tea; not a jolt, but a steady background hum.
Clear-headed strains like God Bud, Lemon Zkittle, Blue Dream, and Moresby seem to help create this state of focused attention, with Pinene being the dominant terpene to look out for when wanting something focus-friendly. It is also the place where balanced THC:CBD strains like Skunk Haze or Dancehall shine, as they seem to provide you with a reserve of mental energy while leaving your head clear and free to get to work.
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Idea Generating
“Cannabis brings us an awareness” writes an anonymous author in an essay on the substance, “that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds.” The author would go on to describe how, while during a single session of cannabis consumption, he produced the insights behind nearly a dozen essays on topics that he would later present at lectures, commencement addresses, and publish in later books. Those lectures, addresses, and books would not be anonymous like the essay, but would instead bear the real name of the author: Carl Sagan, astrophysicist, Pulitzer Prize Winner and perhaps the most successful communicator of science in the 20th century (next to Mrs. Frizzle).
Sagan’s essay grapples with a controversial thread of cannabis, the thread I feel the most apprehensive acknowledging in public: that its use can cause the user to suddenly be overwhelmed by a flood of ideas.
This thread, however, is also the one which runs the deepest through our use of cannabis as a species. One of the Sanskrit names for cannabis, vakpradatava, means “speech giving” in english, Vedic medicinal texts suggest the use of cannabis flower tops to impel the flow of ideas and words, and African tribes, upon discovering cannabis, recognized and used it as a “plant of insight”. This recognition of cannabis’s ability to generate spontaneous thought is not limited to ancient history. In 1942, America’s Office of Strategic Services established a committee to discover any substances which could be useful as a “truth serum” in espionage missions. Subjects were dosed with many different drugs—alcohol, caffeine, peyote—but cannabis was selected as the best candidate for such a truth serum due to the plant’s ability to induce a flow of speech in the user.
The current knee-jerk cultural response to ideas generated through cannabis seems to be that yes, the drug generates a lot of ideas; terrible ones, ideas that are impractical and will be recognized as such once the thinker sobers up. “I am convinced that this is an error” Sagan writes in response to this perspective, “I am convinced... the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights”. As someone who rose to fame through his ability to generate and recognize insight, Sagan’s perspective is hard to dismiss out of hand.
The cognitive model which best explains cannabis’s ability to generate ideas suggests cannabis doesn’t bestow you with automatic insight; it instead seems to increase the mutation rate of the ideas you come up with. It loosens the boundaries between categories, allowing you to see connections you had not noticed before, to view something familiar from a perspective you had never considered, to discover novel ways to think about yourself or others or the world around you. Like biological mutations, most of these novel perspectives will be ineffectual, or flawed, or of minor value. However, also like biological mutations, the odd idea to emerge from this experimentation can offer enormous value. The kicker is, it is impossible to judge the value of the idea while you are having it; everything feels like an epiphany in the moment.
How to Use Cannabis for Idea Generation
In a word, carefully. The cultures which recognized cannabis’s potential to produce ideas did not use the plant lightly, but were instead extraordinarily thoughtful about how its potential could best be harnessed. In many of these cultures, the suggested practice after being overwhelmed by ideas was to spend time with them, to ruminate over them and see how they could be integrated with the rest of your thinking. This is a good description of how Sagan himself seemed to have used cannabis, where ideas generated while high were then parsed and strengthened afterward while clear-headed. It might be a useful rule of thumb to keep in mind when considering how to fold cannabis into your creative process. If overwhelmed by a rush of ideas, get them down while you are having them, put them aside, and, after a few days of abstention, come back to them with a clear head. If there is an idea which still causes your pulse to quicken, it is a good indication that you may have come up with something worth exploring.
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Strains able to help with idea generation seem to be so specific to the person that it is hard to offer universal suggestions. I have included some options which seem to work for me, but here is an area where it pays to do some experimentation.
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Tantalus Labs Sky Pilot - 3x0.5G
Aurora Sativa Liquid Gels - 10 caps
Over the course of a century, coffee went from being a near illicit substance to a cherished part of European culture; Cannabis seems to be following a similar arc of acceptance. Now, with legalization, we can once again explore in public how it can be beneficially woven into our society. For us to do that properly, I think, it is time to move beyond the Cheech and Chong model to one which takes into account the consistent and vibrant ways different cultures have used the substance. Tracing these threads of similar benefits—idea creation, motivation, deep focus— throughout history and across culture just so happens to lead to a thoroughly modern understanding of how cannabis affects the brain. And while we can’t say precisely how cannabis will be woven into society, how people a century from now will be using it, we at Muse are willing to bet that their use of it will not be relegated to time spent on the couch.