Being High

    "Our normal waking consciousness," wrote William James,

is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness....[8]

While William James was interested in drugs, he was not thinking of marijuana when he wrote these words. Still, his observation sounds familiar to contemporary marijuana users, for whom the drug's effects represent what is commonly referred to as an altered state of consciousness.
    As marijuana smokers are well aware, contemporary Western society operates under a common and convenient myth that holds that there is only one real and operative form of consciousness, variously known as the ego state, rationality, or logic. This, we are told in many ways, is what is known as "reality," while other forms, other states of consciousness, be they dreams, physical sensations, drug-induced states, hypnosis, precognition, or intuition, have been—and for the most part still are—considered to be distortions and aberrations.
    Many marijuana users find it difficult to adhere to these beliefs of what constitutes reality. Indeed, for some, marijuana has served as a teacher whose principal lesson has been that life holds multiple forms of reality. "Marijuana has helped me to see the phenomenal power of plural" is how one man puts it, continuing: "There is more than one way to look at something, and marijuana has made me aware that perception and consciousness can come in more than one kind of package." A computer programmer speaks of "getting into another realm, and, when that isn't possible, at least accepting that there is another realm."
    It is only in recent years that social scientists and others have begun to pay serious attention to altered states of consciousness, which include such diverse phenomena as parapsychological manifestations, meditation, and prayer. Of those who have investigated states of consciousness resulting from marijuana and other drugs, Andrew Weil has made an especially significant contribution. After completing work on the 1968 marijuana study in Boston, Weil went on to write a book about states of consciousness, with and without drugs. The Natural Mind was published in 1972, and it is something of a classic among marijuana users, being a lively and imaginative theoretical treatment of the marijuana experience.[9]
    Weil believes that all people are high all of the time on some level, and that the point of using drugs is not so much getting high as connecting with a high that is already there. And so for most users, Weil writes, smoking marijuana becomes an opportunity, and sometimes an excuse, to experience a mode of consciousness that is actually available to everyone all the time without drugs, even though most people do not know how to get there in other ways. Drugs, Weil insists, do not contain highs; highs are latent in the human nervous system, waiting to be triggered or released by various mechanisms. This is a message that marijuana users hear all the time from opponents of drug use, but coming from Andrew Weil, it carries more credibility and seems far less of a moral prejudice.
    In one way or another, many of the people I interviewed for this book made a similar point: "I don't think marijuana really adds anything that isn't there in the first place," I was told repeatedly. "It just enhances and brings out what's inside of you." Again and again, smokers described variations on this basic theme, not casually but thoughtfully, and often after a decade or more of smoking marijuana. Although these various articulations of the same idea mean that it has become part of the conventional wisdom about marijuana, it is interesting that each person came to this realization individually, and nobody seemed aware that many other marijuana users had come to believe the same thing.