Now that pot’s legal, and available just around the corner in forms that make zero sense to me (“Delta-9,” anyone?), it seemed like a good week to read “How Cannabis Affects Our Cognition And Psychology.” That’s the snappy, engaging title of a recent work of neuroscience by four unheralded English scientists: you’ve never heard of them, but like anyone else who uses the word “neuroscience” at least once a week, all of them have cushy research grants. I cordoned off a sterilized, controlled area within my current rental, printed one copy of their article, and read it under tightly monitored laboratory conditions.
We’ll review the fascinating results of that experiment shortly; first, let me ask you a very simple question nobody can answer. What kind of drug is cannabis? Is it a hallucinogen (or a “psychedelic” drug)? Some people experience hallucinations on it, including people at risk for schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders. Most people, however, don’t hallucinate at all. They may experience things more intensely through their senses, or misinterpret events around them, but such things are different in kind from “hallucinations” in the classic sense. While the link with psychotic symptoms is relevant to understanding cannabis, most things on our planet routinely produce hallucinations in somebody. The list’s very long, and chocolate’s on it, along with sleep deprivation, and getting a lot of votes in a primary election.
There are other points of similarity between cannabis and psychedelic drugs, including the subjective phenomenon that lots of people call “going down a rabbit hole.” People on psychedelics constantly project their emotions onto the world around them, tingeing it like an Instagram filter. Once this begins, it snowballs. An initial sense of wonder, or a single pang of anxiety, can build into a drug-induced “spiritual awakening,” wholly positive from the user’s point-of-view, or else drag the hapless user through a “bad trip.” The vast difference between these two trips isn’t baked into the drug; it’s produced by the individual’s own psychology, and her immediate environment, with an internal logic that tends to become increasingly grandiose and biased as time goes on. Cannabis must do something similar. That’s why it has a confusing reputation for making people paranoid, and also relaxing them; for enhancing our senses, and also blunting them; for inspiring profound thoughts, and enabling profound stupidity, often within the same 10-minute span.
Even so, cannabis is still too capricious to count as a true psychedelic. It does things in the brain, like flocking to “cannabinoid receptors,” that regular psychedelic drugs won’t do, since they consider it a crude, oafish way to behave. That makes cannabis sound more like a narcotic: a tranquilizer, for instance, or a stimulant, both of which migrate through our bloodstreams, fording the perilous “blood/brain barrier,” just to find particular receptors on particular neurons where they proceed to roost, imperturbable, like penguins. But obviously cannabis isn’t a stimulant, no matter what sativa salesmen tell you. Nor is it a dependable tranquilizer: ask anyone who’s spent six stoned hours theorizing anxiously about the “burglar noises” their house is making. (Usually, this turns out to be their cat, Bowser, walking around in that little “attic” space on the second floor.) Cannabis shreds attentiveness; it’s not a hypnotic.
Nor does it stop there; heavy users, especially, can suffer from a “lack of motivation,” one of those complex social constructions we don’t understand (in neuroscientific terms) at all.
In short, the drug category that can hold cannabis in its net—for any length of time, or any large user population—hasn’t been invented. The drug remains an open question. We don’t even know why the brain has cannabinoid receptors. From an evolutionary perspective, unless your ancestors all lived in Denver, Colorado, they’re pretty superfluous. Here’s how those British scientists explain them: “Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the main psychoactive compound in cannabis. It acts on the brain’s ‘endocannabinoid system,’ which are receptors which respond to the chemical components of cannabis.” Right! The whole system our brain developed in case somebody decided to light some hemp on fire! “Always be prepared”: that’s the motto of the endocannabinoid system. It was there from the very beginning, lying in wait, inspiring early humanoids to hunt fewer woolly mammoths (relatively speaking) than they originally planned, and leading to some extremely sloppy, proto-Cubist cave paintings.
Let’s pause here, and look closer at the obscure issue of “motivation,” including the war cannabis supposedly wages against it. The usual explanation for motivation, in neuroscience, is that it’s a conditioned behavior; we’re motivated do things because we’re seeking a neurological “reward.” This reward might be dopamine, or…well, that’s it, basically. It’s faddish to complain about the “information economy,” or the “attention economy,” or to worry about “mimetic desire” and “aspirational purchasing.” But none of these categories are encompassing enough; none of them use all the latest neuroscience. Here you go: we live in the age of the dopamine economy. Why do I use social media? Dopamine. Why do I eat “family size” meals by myself? Dopamine. What do I get for being the first person on my block to have a PlayStation 5? Why do I buy the watches I saw in some Bond movie? It never varies. It’s infallible. That’s why it’s so incredibly frustrating that cannabis doesn’t do anything, at all, to raise (or lower) the dopamine circulating in our brains.
That’s not just a guess, incidentally. This exact issue gets studied over, and over, and over. In the world of neuroscience, where it’s not uncommon to rent a yacht just to give your first TED talk, expected answers about drugs are main stage material. But nobody ever finds what they’re looking for. Here’s how charmingly brazen top-shelf neuroscience types get when summarizing their pointless research in the mega-journal Nature:
Chronic use of drugs may alter the brain’s reward system, though the extant literature concerning long-term cannabis use and neural correlates of reward processing has shown mixed results. Adolescents may be more vulnerable to the adverse effects of cannabis than adults; however, this has not been investigated for reward processing… Results showed no User-Group or User-Group × Age- Group effects during reward anticipation or feedback… These null findings were supported by [data analyses suggesting] cannabis users and controls had similar neural responses during reward anticipation.
When such researchers do find something cannabis-related going on, such as “tentative evidence of greater fronto-parietal activity in cannabis users,” they make a note of it, then ignore it like it’s a former friend in their supermarket aisle. These authors spend more time raising the specter of adolescent “drug sensitivity,” including admitting it isn’t real, then they do trying to make sense of the actual brain activity on those otherwise inconclusive scans. The problem with modern neuroscience is very basic, and plainly visible in studies like this one: we can’t translate detectable “brain activity” into a transcript of a subject’s thoughts. So we just don’t know what it feels like to undergo “greater fronto-parietal activity,” or how that electrical uptick might alter your perceptions.
The problem with most studies of cannabis, and most studies of drugs in general, is a confusion between cause and effect. It’s true, for instance, that people who use cannabis are generally less happy than people who avoid it. But we’ve no idea how cannabis might produce (or, at least, compound) unhappiness and anhedonia. It could be that using cannabis holds a particular appeal for unhappy people; we already know such people are more likely to use nicotine, and alcohol, and to consume both in large quantities. Similarly, the claim that the chemical effects of cannabis are “related to higher anhedonia… in adolescents” only pretends to separate cause and effect. You would need a study of people with no previous exposure to cannabis, who then began using it and tracked the emotional consequences, to prove anything like that. Even then, one would have to somehow correct for the inherently alienating experience of taking strange drugs at the behest of a neuroscientist: depressing, sterile conditions, especially for someone taking a paradoxical drug they’ve never tried.
There’s no doubt in my mind that whatever cannabis does accomplish in the brain derails all kinds of normal associative processes. I’m not just basing this on anecdotes; a tiny sprinkling of useful data has emerged from those stalled-out labs searching for the El Dorado of increased dopamine. We know that people who use cannabis start thinking more hurriedly, and more broadly, than they otherwise would. That shows up as increased activity in the frontal lobes, as well as the hippocampus (where our memories are stored, and “re-played” afterwards), and even in the brain’s olfactory centers, which likewise replete with memories. All this activity doesn’t make a stoned person “think” any faster, or any better. From an observer’s standpoint, they seem increasingly debilitated. I’d propose that cannabinoids suspend the normal rules that allow us to focus by inhibiting awareness. Suddenly, the jail doors open. Tangents, “lateral thinking,” neglected memories: all that comes trickling into consciousness. Then the trickle builds to a flood.
In fairness to the article I cited at the beginning, cannabis absolutely disrupts all kinds of normal mental activity, perhaps all in this same way. It’s a cacophony: a messy, sometimes generative tide. Cannabis makes people paranoid because one’s perceptions hum with newly vital connotations and associated memories; everything seems to be interconnected, and related directly to oneself, even when it’s not. As the veils separating past, present, and future begin to shear away, the subjective experience of time begins to stretch like taffy; memories pour in like importunate ghosts. That’s why our responses slow down, and our surroundings come unstuck. Our attention lags; beyond a certain point of intoxication, you might say it disintegrates completely. The problem each of us has to solve, on our own, is how much of this antic parade we are willing to endure—if you’re up for it at all, I mean. Sometimes a good idea will flourish, but only in forgiving soil, and permissive climes… nowhere else. How much white noise can you stand while you wait to be inspired?
Furthermore, these are all just short-term effects. Over the long-term, we’re back to the terrifying problem of “motivation.” Apparently it can just evaporate. Maybe so, but if a person on cannabis does stop caring, and neglects their responsibilities, how can we be sure the drug is to blame? We love making drugs into scapegoats. What if drug use is just the visible part of apathy, anhedonia, and suffering? What motivates a certain person, in the first place, to want “success,” and to work for it—and how much do they like being driven thus along the track? If we can’t answer those questions, we can’t measure cannabinoid-related apathy either. Cannabis is so mercurial, so hard to predict, that we can’t begin to assess it without embarking on a philosophical inquiry. Turning on and dropping out is bothersome to others: it’s pissed people off since Bartleby stopped working as a scrivener. Cannabis abuse is an act of quiet secession that raises problems of universal concern.
In Minima Moralia, a heap of discontented fragments, Theodor Adorno writes that our society’s “admonitions to be happy… have about them the fury of the father berating his children for not rushing joyously downstairs when he comes home irritable from his office.” One could say the same thing about these cannabis researchers looking with such compassion into drugs that disrupt us. Studying the means, in this case, can become a clever way of ignoring the ends. We ought to study people who desperately want to drive a blade into the belly of what’s “normal.” Currently, we know a lot about their hobbies: they love drugs, risks, denial, and the past. But we don’t know why they hate this world. We’re afraid to ask.