Cannabis has a long history of use in spiritual contexts (Fuller 2000). Archaeological evidence points to ritual cannabis use in China 2500 years ago (Jiang et al. 2006; Ren et al. 2019) and in Judahite worship in Israel dating back to the eighth century BCE (Arie et al. 2020). In India, spiritual cannabis use probably goes back to prehistoric times and has been associated with the worship of Śiva (Shiva) (Rätsch 2005; Russo 2005, 2007). One of Śiva’s epithets is ‘Lord of Bhang’, which refers to an edible preparation of cannabis, although devotees today more commonly smoke their ‘ganja’ (cannabis) in a ‘chillum’ (clay pipe) (Godlaski 2012). This tradition spread perhaps most notably to Jamaica, where Rastafarians smoke ganja – sometimes in a chillum, but more often as a ‘spliff’ (joint) – and may consider the act a sacrament (Chevannes 1994). During the 1960s, furthermore, cannabis use spread among Western countercultural movements, and often had spiritual overtones. According to Fuller (2000), the act of smoking cannabis during these years “was something like a rite of initiation into the religious underground,” whereby one joined “a community that valued nonconformity, peacefulness, and quiet introspection” (p. 145). One notable spokesperson for the age – the philosopher Alan Watts (1968) – endorsed cannabis as the ‘psychedelic’ that in his experience was best suited for moving into a state of ‘cosmic consciousness’, although he found that once the gate was opened, he was gradually able to move into this state without using drugs.

As cannabis use became normalized in Western societies during the 1970s and 1980s, however, it seems to have lost much of its spiritual connotations and became, in Fuller’s words, “just one more intoxicant alongside others” (Fuller 2000, p. 145). That normalization and de-spiritualization walked hand in hand here should probably not surprise us, at least if we follow Taves (2009) in identifying specialness as the central basis on which people deem certain things as belonging to the domain of religion or spirituality. If spirituality is about ‘things set apart’ and marked as special because of their anomalous nature, anything that is normalized can only have a tenuous connection to the spiritual.

The normalization of cannabis use is reflected in surveys of usage patterns. According to the 2019 World Drug Report (UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime) 2019), the proportion of daily or near-daily cannabis users in the United States doubled during the years 2002–2017, while lifetime prevalence rates during the same period saw only a modest increase. The World Drug Report did not offer any estimates for cannabis usage patterns in other parts of the world; in Colorado, however, the report estimated that 27% of adult (age 21+) cannabis users had daily or near-daily use, while the median usage pattern remained more moderate at five use occasions per month. By contrast, Kumar et al. (2019) found a median use frequency of 250 days last year in a sample of 8345 US-resident respondents (median age = 23). In Europe, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction estimated that while 27.4% of all adults in the European Union have tried cannabis during their lives, about 1% are current daily or near-daily users (EMCDDA (European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction) 2019).

Writers who emphasize the spiritual potential of cannabis often warn against overuse. “With this plant you can free yourself and you can go into other realms of reality, transcendental realms of reality,” the Brazilian ayahuasquero Mariano da Silva (2017), p. 166 promised, but in order to obtain such ‘special effects’ you must have the discipline not to overindulge. For with overuse, it “starts to be common, almost normal. It loses quality” (p. 164). Gray (2017) similarly found that “engaging with the herb less frequently can make a big difference to the depth of a particular encounter” (p. 107). For these writers overuse implies trivialization, which must be avoided for the cannabis use to maintain its spiritual value. Gray also advised that the combination of cannabis use with some form of meditation practice tends to intensify its effects: “When you’re active and the thinking brain is engaged while under the influence, you may find the effects much milder than if you can sit still, avoid head traffic, and breathe into the space that cannabis opens up” (p. 74). While many users today seem to regard cannabis as a mild drug, there is no reason to assume that this applies to all. To take one notable example, Shulgin and Shulgin (1991, 1997), who invented and self-experimented with a great number of psychedelic tryptamines and phenethylamines, reported that cannabis was too intense for them (1997, pp. 48–63).

Previous research has identified five primary motivations for cannabis use: coping, enhancement, social, conformity, and expansion (Bresin and Mekawi 2019; Simons et al. 1998). In this model, coping refers to a wish to escape from problems, enhancement to a wish for pleasant feelings and excitement, the social motive is about increasing sociability, and conformity refers to a wish to use cannabis in order to fit in with the social group. Simons et al. (1998) added the expansion motive to account for desires to know oneself better, be creative and original, expand one’s awareness, and understand things differently. While none of these five motivations links directly to spirituality, both enhancement and expansion relate to factors that have previously been identified as important aspects of entheogenic spirituality (Johnstad 2018). Bresin and Mekawi (2019) performed a meta-analysis of the relations between cannabis use motives and outcomes, and found that coping motives predicted both a higher cannabis use frequency and more problematic use, while expansion and enhancement motives were associated with a higher frequency of use, but not with problematic use.

In this article, the term ‘psychedelics’ means the group of drugs named after the Greek words ψυχή (psyche), meaning soul or mind, and δηλείν (delein), to reveal or manifest. The classical psychedelics include mescaline (the active constituent of the cactus peyote), psilocybin (the active constituent of ‘magic mushrooms’), lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Especially when used in spiritual contexts, psychedelics are also sometimes referred to as ‘entheogens’, which is derived from ἔνθεος (entheos), meaning inspired or filled with God, and γενέσθαι (genesthai), which means to come into being.

The article is based on an explorative mixed methods study involving both a quantitative survey and qualitative interviews. The study aimed to explore the characteristics of spiritual cannabis use as compared to both psychedelics use and what may be called recreational or non-spiritual cannabis use. As many cannabis users have both medical and recreational motivations for use, the study did not differentiate between medical and other forms of use; one item in the motivations battery of the survey allowed participants to indicate that they used cannabis for medical conditions. The basic hypothesis of the study was that most respondents would differentiate clearly between entheogens such as the classical psychedelics and recreational drugs such as cannabis and alcohol, but that a minority would regard cannabis as an entheogen. I expected to find significant differences between spiritual and recreational cannabis users in how they approached the drug in terms of motivation and usage pattern.