some thoughts on CBD (cannabidiol)

Recently I “quit” smoking tobacco, which for me means I have stopped purchasing packs of cigarettes. Occasionally I bum a smoke or buy a loosie, or I smoke hookah. In the interest of accuracy, we can just say my relationship with tobacco has changed. Anyone who has ever developed the habit knows that the word “quit” is always dubious.

In place of cigarettes I have been using a vaporizer to inhale nicotine. I started with the second lowest available strength (11) and will soon be migrating to the lowest strength (4). Out of curiosity, I recently began adding cannabidiol (CBD) to my vaporizer in conjunction with the tobacco. The results have been interesting.

CBD is an allegedly non-psychoactive cannabinoid found in marijuana and hemp. It is claimed to be responsible for many of the medical benefits associated with medical marijuana. It has very different effects on the body than THC and supposedly counteracts the psychotic effects THC has on the body/mind. Preliminary research has suggested applications for CBD in treating many medical conditions, including epilepsy, anxiety, addiction, gastrointestinal disorders, insomnia, diabetes, depression, neurological and pain disorders.

The litany of claims surrounding CBD made me a little suspect, as they resemble the discourse of the natural supplements industry, which makes a fortune selling overpriced substances with little quality control or sound scientific evidence supporting their efficacy. However, the research being done on CBD appears to be serious and legitimate, it is just in the early stages and much more needs to be done.

The cannabis oil was quite expensive - $25 for 10ml. at a local gas station. I estimate this will last at least 3 weeks when mixed with the nicotine syrup, possibly over a month. I added it to the vaporizer along with the nicotine syrup and noticed effects right away. There is a mild but noticeable warmth in the body reminiscent of smoking hashish, as well as the sense of mental clarity and calm I also remember from when I was a heavy daily hash smoker. When I was smoking hash regularly (at times as frequently as 10 times per day), I noticed the most effective and benign impact on my various symptoms of any other self-medication, and I would probably still smoke hash today if genuine product were available here. It made me feel completely clear and more like myself than anything else, but sadly marijuana produces the opposite effect for me and I rarely touch it for that reason.

Based on my experience thusfar, I find the claim that CBD is non-psychoactive to be questionable, but after further thought I think the term psychoactive itself needs to be called into question, rather than making a claim for the psychoactivity of CBD. The notion of a substance being psychoactive rests of a problematic division of mind and body that I don’t think is supported by our current level of understanding. Most of us by now are willing to support the idea that mind and body are inextricably linked, so how can something be “active” on the “soma” but not on the “psyche”? If a substance changes the way our body operates, there must be some effect on mental operation, although there is most likely a threshold below which this effect is not perceptible to our discursive mind.

Where do we draw the line between psychoactive and nonpsychoactive? Is caffeine psychoactive? Research has indicated that CBD also acts on adenosine and increases alertness, which is the same as caffeine’s mechanism of action. Is aspirin psychoactive? If my headache is relieved, does my mental and emotional state not change? Let’s be honest - even food is psychoactive. The line between mind and body doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Classifying substances using this schema seems arbitrary and simplistic.

I suspect the main reason there are so many claims that CBD is not psychoactive stems from the fact that much of the popularized information on CBD is coming from the industry that profits from it, and which profits from its sustained legality. When something is considered to alter the way the mind works, particularly something associated with marijuana, you start to brush up against the morality police and the wrath of the state. CBD is still a Schedule II substance in Canada, and there remains a lot of poorly-informed resistance against it. And it is true that the effect of CBD is worlds away from THC in terms of producing a “high”, but psychoactivity and recreational effects are not the same thing, despite our tendency to conflate them. I think we need to stop doing this.

Even our concept of “high” is problematic and should be called into question, due to its overlap with legal status and taboo. Personally I tend to think of “legal highs” as ersatz or “less than”, even when they produce equivalent or stronger effects to illegal substances, in spite of my better judgment. I think this is because some of the “high” of using a substance for recreational purposes comes from the thrill of breaking a law or social taboo. This overlaps with the biological effect and the two become indistinguishable, but when that transgressive aspect is absent, there is something hollow about the experience.

Thinking about this has made me question how much of substance use and addiction boils down to social perception and motives rather than biology proper. As this social superstructure of substance use becomes increasingly transparent to me, I’ve found I do not get the same degree of satisfaction from recreational drug use. Many things that used to provide me pleasure now have little to no effect. I’m wondering how much of what I experienced in the past was some kind of socially engineered placebo effect that has become untenable. One time under the influence of LSD, or something sold as LSD, I debated whether the effects of psychedelic drugs were overwhelmingly, if not entirely, placebo in nature. The circumstances of Hoffman’s bicycle trip would seem to refute this, but it’s still an idea I have toyed with for years - that we have been socially molded to interact with various “mind-altering” chemicals in a certain way, driven largely by expectation, and that as that imposed socialization erodes, so do the effects of these chemicals. Ram Dass claimed his guru in India ingested a massive dose of LSD and was totally unaffected by it. It’s interesting, because many of us have thought of drugs as a tool to break down socialization, but we rarely consider that in breaking down socialization we may also be neutralizing the drugs’ effects.

I am trying to gradually reduce my dependence of substances of all kinds, because I can no longer rationally justify this dependence - the placebo effect is becoming too thin. It is becoming naked to me that these behaviors are part of a lingering syndrome caused by entrenched habits that originated as coping mechanisms for emotional issues largely irrelevant to my present life. But there is a lag effect in eliminating them, and it’s more complex than simply eliminating a habit of imbibing something. For example, an entrenched habit of maintaining poor sleep schedule and nutrition fuels substance habits. You can’t really address the latter until the former is addressed, but the substances also negatively affect biological rhythm, so it’s a vicious circle.

I’m exploring CBD as a more benign replacement for nicotine and will try to use it to gradually free myself from nicotine dependence completely. Hopefully I can use it in conjunction with green tea to also ween myself off of caffeine dependence, which is the other lingering menace in my life. I dream of the day when I can wake up and feel grounded in myself without needing to self-medicate. This isn’t to say I would ever abstain from “psychoactive” substances entirely - I have a strong aversion to puritanism of all forms and I think variety is important in life - but substance dependence remains an anchor that is preventing me from moving forward in my development. I hope the experiment will be fruitful.

new phase

I have been abstaining from (personal) social media for a while, which has been very healthy for me. I’m not going to dabble in negativity to expand on my objections to social media, which I have done already at length in the past. I’ve developed a strong aversion to soapboxing and don’t really want to make prescriptive or proscriptive statements anymore. Each of us can determine through our own experience what helps or harms us.

I have composed the occasional stream of tweets analyzing various social phenomena I’ve observed and thought about, but I really do not like that medium anymore. It feels obnoxious to me to blast a barrage of hastily written truncated texts into everyone’s face. It feels like there’s a degree of desperation and attention-seeking inherent, and I don’t want to do it anymore. So I’m going to try using Tumblr again.

I won’t be using Tumblr to repost media or other frivolous things anymore, or to interact with people. I’m not interested in being “social” in a virtual space - I am meeting my needs elsewhere. Again, this isn’t to disparage anyone for using the internet in a different way - it just isn’t for me.

My posts will be journal entries of varying length, offering reflections on my experiences with a variety of topics. They will probably be very sporadic. You are welcome to follow along or not. I can’t shake the feeling that I have become superficially much less “interesting” than I was in the past, when I had a different sort of internet persona. I’m also much less sick.

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The film opens with a news broadcast about a teenager named Jason Jackson (Bobb'e J. Thompson) being shot outside of the Monte Vista High School dance lock-in. Then Jason tells the story from the beginning, in which it starts with him trying to get in the most popular dance clique in school, The Ranger$ (Langston Higgins, Julian Goins, Dashawn Blanks) but they say he has to pass the initiation of getting a pair of panties from one of the Sweet Girls by midnight. Jason is also trying to get his crush, Anastacia (Kristinia DeBarge) to notice him, but all she remembers him is when he peed on her in elementary school.

Meanwhile, Day Day, one of The Ranger$ and Jason’s older cousin owes Anastacia’s eldest brother, Junior, $2,000 by midnight due to Day Day’s father, Darren (Katt Williams) telling Junior that he would pay him after losing in dominoes. Jason gives Anastacia a poem he wrote about her as her homework in which the teacher makes her read it in front of the class. Anastacia then gives Jason her number so they can write a song together sometime.

Another subplot of the film is two police officers, Officer P'eniss and Lagney are chasing down the New Boyz, who are on their way to the lock-in but get caught with weed brownies in which Officer Lagney eats.

At the school dance lock-in, Jason, Anastacia, The Ranger$, and Sweet Girls play “7 Minutes in Heaven” but when it comes to Jason and Anastacia she tells him that she already knew his plan. Then they compete in a talent show to win $2,000 but when it comes to The Ranger$ performance, Jason finally breaks his fear and then raps to help them win the money, but the Sweet Girls win. At midnight, Jason and The Ranger$ meet the Eses in the parking lot and are about to be killed until the wannabe gangsters (Kevin Hart, Lil Duval) start a drive-by shooting and Jason then saves Anastacia but is shot. Jason is sent to the hospital but Anastacia goes with him, becomes Jason’s girlfriend, and gives Flaco the $2,000 prize money so they won’t kill Day Day.

The film ends with Mamma Tawanna (Luenell) coming into the parking lot with a gun, yelling who shot Jason and breaks the fourth wall showing Nick, the producers and the crew then shouting to the audience.

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