When I moved to Spain in 2002, I didn’t come for the easy attitude to cannabis, but it quickly became a reason to stay. I remember Friday afternoon in the port of Marbella, summer sunshine, rows of pristine white yachts rocking on the calm water under a blue sky, spacious bar terraces full of potted plants and wicker furniture with canvas canopies for shade, party people in shorts and flip-flops, tables full of drinks, and the sea breeze heavy with the scent of hash.
Shame & The Secret Handshake
This was where I first encountered the Spanish style of rolling in cupped hands, mixing the loose tobacco and hash in one concave palm, covering it with a skin, and pouring the mix into the other palm to roll it up. It was like a secret handshake out in the open.
There was nothing open about cannabis back in my native Ireland, where the most distinctive feature of the culture was stigma. Any connection to any drug labeled the user an addict and outlaw. We found dealers in dark corners and kept our use behind locked doors.
We were misfits, good at hiding, we had to be—this double life was all we knew. I worked “normal” jobs, in marketing, and lived for evenings and weekends when I could spark up. And wore my outsider status as a badge of honour to bury my shame, the kind that comes with anything you’re forced to hide.
It was from this place of judgment that I embraced the liberation I found in Spain. I thought I’d escape prejudice. I was wrong.
Moroccan Pollen & California Sober
Later, I decamped further down the Spanish coast to a port town, a misfit haven with counterculture vibes and close ties to Morocco. During these years, I had a dealer who delivered to my door, and I visited Morocco often, smoking the best of local pollen in Chefchaouen riads and Tangiers cafés.
The first big shift in my attitude to cannabis came in 2014 when I quit alcohol. This was before ‘California Sober,’ and the fact that I still smoked was a literal cloud over my head. “Yeah, but you have hash,” one ex-drinking buddy said, suggesting I was forever one puff away from falling off the wagon. The message was clear: I was an addict.
But I’d used cannabis to shoehorn my way into sobriety, swapped going out for working out and become a gym fiend, going up to six times a week. I was healthier than ever. Yet, a niggling voice at the back of my mind questioned my progress. Fact was, I still saw cannabis as a drug and my use as an addiction, a flaw, something to hide.
No Marijuana For Sale
The next big change came in 2017 when I started writing for the industry, going to Barcelona, meeting fellow stoners, activists, growers and club owners, doing interviews, writing articles, attending events, dare I say, finding my tribe. I was also learning about the health benefits of cannabis and in 2018, started making homemade canna-cookies. I used them to mitigate the worst of my irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) symptoms, and never felt better.
I read up on the plant’s unjust history, would regale anyone willing to listen with the many benefits of cannabis, encouraged family members to try CBD, and laughed off their snide comments. I changed my social media handles to reflect my work and smoke of choice: hash. And I posted links to articles with tags like #wholeflower and #homegrow.
Cannabis was my identity and I wore it with pride. I’d stopped hiding and was giddy on the high of being seen. However, also in 2018, I started to notice some cracks.
I visited Toronto that summer, three months before legalization, and instead of celebration, I found doom and gloom. The scene was stagnant, a little hostile even. I passed one cannabis store, a clinic giving advice on medical marijuana with a high-tech camera on the door, and a sign in the window in bold letters: No Marijuana For Sale. The next clinic was empty inside, bar a lone desk and some files on the floor. I visited a few dispensaries where the weed was overpriced and staff despondent.
2019 was a wake-up call.
Medical V. Recreational
Canada’s legalization didn’t open things up the way I’d imagined, work-wise. Instead, I could no longer find a home for the educational and cultural content I’d been writing. The sanitization of cannabis was in full swing, with lots of new studies emerging in medical journals and documentaries about Parkinson’s patients on YouTube.
In the media, you were either a recreational or medical user, either a member of the black hoodie crew or a cancer patient. There was no space for anything in between. But I was in between. In truth, I didn’t fit in with the people I’d been meeting at Barcelona clubs and events. They had different backgrounds and values. Bar cannabis, we had nothing in common.
I watched the direction the industry was taking, watched its counterculture cred go commercial with a rush of new high THC strains and ‘elevated’ brands chasing the canna-curious, and noticed no one was talking to me. New questions formed in my mind. How could I reconcile my use with a narrative that didn’t reflect me? And who was I to tell anyone how to use cannabis?
For a brief moment, I had the support of a seedling community. And with time, I realized I’d conflated that support with the new industry, thinking its very existence would be a campaign against the shame of hiding that had shaped my life. Naïve. Rather than accepted, I felt exposed.
The comedown was crushing. The fight went out of me. I had no idea who I was. Because I’d worn my outsider badge as a status symbol, the betrayal was personal. I’d betrayed myself. In 2020, I went back underground. Then emerged with a different attitude.
The Best Stoner I Can Be
I was still looking for a way to fit in.
I shifted gears and decided if I was going to be public about my use, I’d portray the best of being a cannabis user, work harder, show up more, and balance my use with diet and working out. Basically, be the best stoner I could be… the point being I was still terrified of being judged.
Inspired by the way cannabis had helped with my IBS symptoms, in 2021, I qualified as a sports nutritionist. I launched a beta business with the goal of providing cannabis-based products to women with IBS, but based in Spain, an illegal market, it will be years before I can offer what’s needed.
By 2022, I’d embraced the term ‘medical user’ but it was an awkward fit. I connected with users in the States, and discovered many who used it for medical reasons, anxiety, insomnia, migraine, fibromyalgia and coeliac disease. I heard stories far worse than mine.
I heard their anger, discussed our shared sense of betrayal, and yet, I lived in a different region, used cannabis in a different way, and couldn’t wholly relate to their experiences.
And I spoke with many industry people who talked the talk but when push came to shove, didn’t have the resources, interest or wherewithal to focus on anything but their bottom line. Which was fine, but listening to the lies was draining. I stopped taking calls. And in 2023, after yet another cannabis client suddenly shut up shop, leaving fellow writers unpaid, I stopped working for the industry.
It was around then I let go. And realized the prejudice I was holding onto lived inside me. That was the thing I had to let go of.
OG Culture & The Lie of Legalization
These days, I’ve come full circle and returned to my original stance on cannabis: call it what you want, but it’s mind-altering and that makes it a drug. My relationship with it is still complicated, probably always will be, but I see the struggle as a gift, a teacher. If I’m a misfit, good.
I’ve stopped seeing the emerging industry as a cabal out to destroy cannabis but rather a product of the way business is done today. I know our plant has been hijacked by corporations who are just doing what corporations do, and recognize it takes time for an industry to evolve, what matters is it’s evolving, who knows what it will look like in the future.
For now, the OG culture of my youth has been reduced to a Reddit thread mocking the ‘weirdoes’ who used to puff behind the bike shed at school. But old school stoner culture wasn’t just about dropouts and Pineapple Express. It was much more. It was people with radical ideas about societal structures unafraid to fly in the face of fabricated rules. It was about disrupting complacency.
So, the thing that frustrates me these days is the notion that questions around cannabis use will be solved by legalization when I see so many users, like me, have never felt more unseen. While a post on Facebook the other day declared: “I love how we as a society have decided Snoop can spark up wherever he wants,” we only call ourselves “stoners” in private. The old stigma is gone but in its place is something more insidious.
The secret handshakes have been replaced by warehouse weed, social media memes and gas station gummies. Much like the plant, stoner culture has lost its diversity, its vitality. In many ways, it feels more underground than ever. The legalization movement gives the impression that cannabis is acceptable (in some places) and it’s easy to be public about use. The truth is we’re not there yet. If legalization doesn’t mean acceptance, then what did we truly win?
This article is from an external, unpaid contributor. It does not represent High Times’ reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.
