Ceremonial cannabis use is on the rise. So is a stranger phenomenon: cannabis getting demonized by other plant medicine practitioners.
“You’re giving your life force to weed,” plant medicine facilitator Iván Chocron says on a 2025 episode of the Integrating Consciousness podcast. “And weed is giving you something so that you feel that giving your life force away is worth it, but that’s why it’s called weed. A weed in the plant world, any weed, what it does is it’s a plant that sucks up all the resources that are around it. The plant around it starts dying. And that is the spirit that people are inviting in without knowing at all what kind of contract they are signing.”
That’s one side of a fight playing out quietly across the plant medicine world right now. On the other side is a growing number of people turning to cannabis as a holy sacrament, using it with spiritual intention in ceremonial settings to reach higher states of consciousness. Cannabis only numbs pain, Chocron argues, while he advocates for Ayahuasca, which he says “takes you to the root cause so that you can address it and never experience the pain of that again.”
Not everyone in the community sees it that way.
A quiet resurgence
“I think there’s a growing resurgence,” says Maestro Hamilton Souther, who has been a pioneer in the global plant medicine movement for the last two decades, working with a variety of psychedelics after apprenticing with two master Amazonian shamans specializing in Ayahuasca, a psychoactive brew of plants containing DMT.
“I think it’s still early,” he continues while speaking to High Times, “because there’s still the effect of decades of propaganda against the plant as having real merit and purpose for personal growth and development. But there is a growing number of people interested in using it as part of meditation, yoga, and shamanic or spiritual ceremony.”
As American propaganda fades and cannabis continues to gain industrial momentum, now legalized in 24 states, two territories and the District of Columbia, that demonization of Ms. Mary Jane from within the plant medicine community itself has become its own curious counter-current.
Souther, who is considered a master shaman, doesn’t share the take that Chocron and others echo and debate on plant medicine forums around the web.
“I have heard that perspective, and I don’t share it. The plants all have an aspect that is medicinal in nature or ceremonial in nature, and then they all have an aspect of them that, if misused or habitually used, create potential personal difficulty. And so it’s very important to understand that in the ceremonial use of cannabis, in the ways that we found it to be most effective, that it was not used as a form of dissociation or numbing to daily life, but rather an acute spiritual intervention separated by time for integration that produce the best results.”
Maestro Hamilton Souther
Holes in your aura
Marc Erickson, creator of the We Are the Medicine community in Los Angeles and a psychedelics advocate who regularly sits in Ayahuasca ceremonies, tells High Times he frequently encounters a prejudice against cannabis within the Southern California plant medicine scene.
“I’ve always heard about cannabis, ‘Don’t do it because it clouds your perception and puts holes in your aura,’” says Erickson, who has also studied with shamans in Central and South America. “But I think cannabis is not being used to its fullest potential, and people [within the Ayahuasca community] have been very anti-cannabis.”
He recalls attending an Ayahuasca church in L.A. whose leader frowned upon cannabis use, especially in the ceremony itself, declaring to the congregation, “This is a single sacrament ceremony!” Still, Erickson has seen people puffing on joints in ceremony on the down low, something some believe is dangerous, disrespectful to Mother Aya (sometimes reported to be a jealous plant spirit), or at least dulling enough to the senses to block the visionary splendor she provides.
“I do know for a fact there are people that really believe that,” he says. “I personally never have.”
Erickson has also sat in Ayahuasca ceremonies in Brazil, where smoking cannabis may be encouraged and baked into the ritual in some sects. People report even more powerful and profound journeys by mixing the Amazonian tea with the herb, while others will warn against it and strictly forbid the practice in their circles.
What McKenna found in the Amazon
The late, great psychedelic pioneer Terence McKenna reported marvelous visual hallucinogenic effects after smoking cannabis during one of his initial Ayahuasca journeys, guided by a Peruvian shaman deep in the Amazon in 1976. In a reflective diary entry called “Among Ayahuasqueros,” featured in his compilation book The Archaic Revival, McKenna recounted being questioned about his drug use by the shaman, Don Fidel, who suggested that perhaps marijuana would help them concentrate on the Ayahuasca, just as tobacco helped the shamans do the same.
McKenna described lighting up and feeling his mind, relaxed by the familiar taste of cannabis, flow out into a hallucination-filled space.
“The synergistic effect of smoking cannabis is apparently necessary for deep rushes of visionary images on lower doses of ayahuasca, as it is with other hallucinogens. The singing showed the way through the billowing hypnagogia. I roved and scanned like a swimming fish caught in a spiral dance in a sea of tryptamine images, the mundane and the unimaginable crowding for my attention.”
Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival
Fifty years have passed since that night McKenna spent orienting himself under the influence of the legendary Amazonian brew, with the help of his good friend marijuana. So why are people still so split on this?
A relatively new game
Erickson points toward the simple fact that plant medicine, though ancient in origin and practice, is very new to modern Western civilization, which only began to explore the topic publicly and scientifically in the second half of the 20th century.
“The whole thing is a relatively new game,” he tells High Times. “If they join an L.A. tribe or a tribe in South America, they’re going to preach whatever is preached to them. There’s a lot of neuroplasticity happening.”
Souther, meanwhile, only works with one plant at a time in the ceremonies he facilitates, with the medicine offering dictated by the law of the land where the event is taking place.
“There are many people in the plant medicine community that are rigid against many of the different plant medicines, including cannabis. You’ll find strong identification in the plant medicine community for individuals who bond greatly with one kind of plant. And they’ll make statements like, ‘That is my medicine.’ ‘Boga is my medicine,’ or ‘Ayahuasca is my medicine,’ or psilocybin, and they’re not interested in exploring the other plant medicines.”
Maestro Hamilton Souther
He looks at them the way he’d look through the lens of Western medicine, where each plant medicine is really effective at certain things and maybe not as effective at others. Ayahuasca, Souther says, “is incredible for different kinds of mood disorders, including anxiety, depression, PTSD; it’s also very potent for treating addiction.” He’s seen a high success rate of people using it to transcend dependence of all kinds, from chemical to behavioral.
Cannabis, he says, has its own profile. He’s seen it effectively treat PTSD and depression, and adds, “It’s powerful at unlocking or freeing imagination and creativity when people have been spiritually stifled; it’s great at reinvigorating the nervous system and stimulating somebody breaking free from what often people express as sort of a weight that’s on them from life itself.”
From indulgence to intention
Souther has heard of ceremonial cannabis circles popping up just about everywhere. “I hear of practitioners starting to embrace it in every place that it’s legal. And now that represents a vast part of the United States, and because of the nature of propaganda and stigma, those circles are very quiet about what they’re doing.”
Darrien Divine, however, is not shy about her mission. She’s the founder of Marijuana Meditations in Los Angeles, which is, of course, among the nation’s most 420-friendly cities, and regularly offers group ceremonies to the public, in addition to one-on-one guidance while building an online community.
“Cannabis, to me, feels more like a mentor, whereas Ayahuasca feels like an elder. I think that any plant medicine is basically bringing up a memory, a trauma, or a trigger to the surface for you to have the opportunity to recognize. And I feel like cannabis gives you that choice to say you can either recognize this right now or maybe we can put it to the side for later. Whereas with Ayahuasca, I don’t think it gives you that choice.”
Darrien Divine, founder of Marijuana Meditations
Divine communed with the vine of the soul for five days at a retreat in Costa Rica while she was still in the early stages of building her conscious cannabis consumption business. She describes that week of ceremonies as “the most intense, beautiful, but scary experience I’ve ever had.”
“I remember asking my medicine, like, ‘Should I continue working on Marijuana Meditations?’ And it was a very clear, ‘Yes, this is something you should be doing, but this is also not the focus right now. So, go within, uncover some other layers,’” she recalls. “I don’t think it necessarily shifted the direction of my relationship to how I consume cannabis, but I feel like it did inspire me as far as how to hold space for a plant medicine ceremony.”
Divine is among a new wave of pioneers working to shift the perception of cannabis from indulgence to intention after noticing a gap in the industry.
“I felt like a lot of the media around cannabis was encouraging people to over consume and kind of floating like, what’s the highest THC? How big of a blunt can you smoke? What’s the biggest dab you can take? Rather than, how can you really use your high to reach your highest self?”
Darrien Divine
“Since I’ve been on this journey,” she continues, “I have come across other people that do similar things, not necessarily specifically marijuana meditations. I see a lot more of like smoke and stretch, or cannabis yoga, high vibe yoga kind of thing. So, I think it is emerging as far as people starting to incorporate it into the wellness sphere and starting to look at it as more of a medicine rather than a recreational drug.”
Souther believes the missing link between cannabis and the modern world is “an understanding of the great historical importance that cannabis has played in the context of spirituality and ceremony across the history of humanity.”
“There’s a lot more going on than just going to a dispensary and buying cannabis and smoking it,” he continues. “This is a plant that has been consumed by humans for thousands and thousands, maybe even more than 10,000 years, and has been affecting the nature of us, individually and collectively.”
“I support it as an advocate,” he tells High Times. “But you know, always emphasizing safety, integrity, responsibility and ethical use. And as that continues to grow and flourish, I think the positive elements of it will become more known.”
