The Healing Gift of Cannabis

The Healing Gift of Cannabis

by Daniel McQueen, author of Psychedelic Cannabis

I know it sounds impossible, but what if I were to tell you that there is a medicine—readily available and one that can be grown all around you—that can heal your trauma and wake you up to your true potential? What if I were to say that you didn’t have to suffer as much anymore?

I believe it is a real tragedy that our children, through no fault of their own, are growing up in a world that, if left unaided, is going to be far worse in the future than it is today. The warning signs are all around us, and we’re running out of time to change things for the better. I sincerely hope our goal is set a little higher than mere survival, but I’m not that confident. According to many reports on the climate crisis, we have about a decade to implement drastic change to advert global disaster.

But it’s not just climate change we need to tackle. We need accessible and effective healing practices now, on the largest scale possible, so we can successfully respond to the daily struggles of a world in constant and ever-accelerating global paradigm shifts. In an age where collective trauma is rampant (and seems to only be getting worse), we need to reevaluate and assess all of the options available to us. Cannabis sativa, although previously overlooked, might be one of our best tools to implement psychedelic therapy on a large scale.

I used to think the large-scale version of this would be to train a corps of healers to go out and start facilitating groups with the medicine. And that is what we’re doing. But what if we don’t have time for even that? What if we need to take our healing into our own hands now? Not just for us now but to make it through the wild times ahead. This is the purpose of my book, Psychedelic Cannabis.

In addition to the need for healing because of all these crazy happenings, we also need accessible psychedelic tools to support the development of increased resilience for the activists, veterans, first responders, mental health specialists, and other professionals on the front lines of our unhealthy collective choices. We need accessible psychedelic tools for the innovators and visionaries who help move our society toward greater health and vibrancy and away from unhealthy, unsustainable, and dangerous paths like militarism, nationalism, and the tragic destruction of our environment.

While the recognized psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD clearly possess this potential, our desperate societal needs are proving difficult for the psychedelic community to meet on the scale required, not only due to the trauma caused by fifty years of significant and continued prohibition (not to mention the slow and tedious process of legalization through clinical research and medical application) but also our collective ignorance of one of the most important tools that has been growing right in front of us. Most psychedelic medicines aren’t yet legal. Cannabis is legal in a lot of places right now.

Yes, contrary to popular belief, Cannabis sativa is a classic psychedelic, and it can be used just as other psychedelics can be used. I know this because I facilitate psychedelic cannabis sessions all the time with people, and I have experienced the results firsthand.

The collective psychedelic community has minimized this sacred plant and relegated it to a position as either solely recreational or used as an adjunct to other medicines. Cannabis isn’t considered a “real” psychedelic, and some in our medicine communities shame others for using it. Most of our eyes are fixated on the shinier, sexier psychedelics as the “right” ones to use, and somehow cannabis is the “wrong” one.

Many of us have a complex history with the medicine, as well—getting caught smoking pot or being shamed for our curiosity about it is often one of the first traumatic psychedelic experiences many of us have as teens and younger adults. While our first experiences using cannabis are often the most magical, they’re disregarded as dangerous and delusional, and the magic is shut down by others who don’t understand. It’s no wonder we have such a complex relationship with this plant medicine.

I’ve smoked cannabis for a long time, but my first real memory of recognizing the true psychedelic potential was about ten years ago in graduate school. I was attending Naropa University to receive my master’s degree in transpersonal counseling psychology. I had every intention of becoming what’s called an underground therapist, someone who used psychedelic medicines for therapeutic healing purposes. I had talked my program into letting me complete a body-centered mindfulness practice to fulfill a course requirement. As part of the practice, I was stretching in the spare bedroom of my apartment we used as a meditation studio. I’d smoked a copious amount of some really wonderful flower and was in a very deep, meditative state. I was gently stretching my neck when something released with a pop. I had my eyes closed, and I didn’t just feel, but saw a yellow bolt of lightning quickly shoot up my spine to the top of my head. I thought, “Hmm . . . That was really interesting,” and didn’t think much of it after that. But looking back, I think that was the moment I first noticed the psychedelic potential of this medicine.

My buddy Jon knew of my interest in psychedelic therapy, as I’d sat in sacred spaces with him a number of times. I was trying to figure out how to make a living doing something I cared about deeply but was illegal to do, and by that, I mean being a healer and guide who uses psychedelics, without actually breaking the law. (I was married to my wife, Alison, by then, and we were thinking of having our first child.)

He said, “Hey, Daniel, have you ever considered using pot as a psychedelic? Like using it with the other practices you do?”

And I thought for a second and said, “No, I actually haven’t.”

And he replied, “You do know cannabis is a psychedelic, right?”

I said I did, but I had never really considered it.

Why was that? Something about not recognizing cannabis for what it was piqued my curiosity.

Jon said, “Hey, I want to help you try it out. Let’s do it. I’ll pay for the space, and let’s see what happens.”

I said okay, and that was the genesis of our Conscious Cannabis Circles.

The power of the medicine quickly became apparent to everyone who participated in the practice. I was quite skeptical about it, and if I’m being honest with myself, I still am sometimes. After more than seven years, though, I have yet to find the limits of the potential of this sacred plant.

It is really hard to describe what was happening to me through that time. I was being introduced to the psychedelic potential of a medicine completely overlooked by society and the psychedelic community. When Jon and I started this work, cannabis had been so degraded by the War on Drugs, and prohibition, and fear, and shame, and prisons, and its association with addictive drugs and the gateways to them that we just couldn’t see it for what it was anymore. It was becoming more and more obvious that we had been lied to not only about how bad it was but also about how amazing this plant really could be as a tool for psychedelic therapy.

We had been taught to believe from an early age that pot is bad. People who use pot are unhealthy. Drug users. Immoral. So we lived in this numb life, with numbed pains, and the antidote to this pain was literally growing out of the earth all around us. We were so blind; we couldn’t see the obvious. We even demeaned it. We called it a weed. I used it, even with respect, but I still didn’t really see it.

But there was something about the process of exploring cannabis intentionally that continually inspired me to go deeper into the exploration of it. It felt like an invitation into a mystery and a puzzle to be solved and shared. So, I got to work experimenting with the potential of the medicine. I was intuitively drawn to blend strains and over a series of trials and errors and beginner’s luck maybe—and could I have even been guided?—I found that I could mimic other psychedelic experiences with just plain ol’ pot. And I don’t mean sort of mimic. I mean truly mimic the potency and transformational power of other psychedelic medicines.

I was confused. Everything I knew about this plant was wrong. All the things I had minimized were its greatest gifts. How in the world was this happening? In the beginning, I was too inspired to really care about the how. I just wanted to see how far we could take it.

So we did. I experimented and experimented and experimented. I worked with my friends and anyone else who would let me, and something very special and very promising started to happen. Again and again, it happened. People around me started to heal deep trauma and wake up. I started to heal, too. I started to wake up.

Imagine a space of pure self-acceptance and full, deep awareness where you can see through your life, all the way back, at the things that happened, and realize that yes, they happened, but the meaning of them had changed into empowerment and understanding. A common experience after someone has healed deeply held trauma is for them to recognize and say: “I had to go through that struggle. I understand that now. I see the gifts that it gave me and I accept who I am because of it.”

What does it really look like to help each other heal? And how might cannabis play an integral role in that healing process? My book sets out to explore the answers to those questions.

The purpose of the book is pretty simple. I would like to teach you exactly how to turn cannabis into a real psychedelic medicine and how to safely and effectively use it for healing and transformation. Within that simple intention are some major implications. In a very real sense, this is my attempt to help break through the barriers to using psychedelic medicines not only for healing but for all the other reasons we use psychedelics: to help solve problems and explore possibilities.

Part 1 of the book provides an overview of our current state of affairs with cannabis, its legality, and its characteristics as a psychedelic medicine. I discuss the Medicinal Mindfulness orientation and how we use cannabis as a tool for psychedelic therapy. As a transpersonal psychedelic therapist, I also speak to its nature as a plant ally because I think this nomenclature and identity captures the mystery of psychedelic cannabis experiences, one far deeper than statistics and solely scientific discussions can probe.

In part 2, I share exactly how to make a psychedelic cannabis blend. I’ve discovered a few secrets, and I’m not keeping these secrets to myself. I’m finding that it is hard to be a part of a professional field no one else works in, and I’m starting to get lonely out here on the psychedelic cannabis frontier.

Part 3 provides the meditative tools and knowledge to prepare for the psychedelic cannabis experience. Cannabis is the safest psychedelic but using it doesn’t come without risks. While I do recommend working with a therapist or a guide, for the vast majority of us, this just isn’t possible. It’s time to take the responsibility for healing into our own hands, not to wait for other psychedelic medicines and MDMA to become legal. Yes, these will definitely be beyond useful when they enter the mainstream, but we don’t have a moment to lose.

In part 4, I speak about Cannabis-Assisted Psychedelic Therapy, methods for engaging the use of psychedelic cannabis for healing and creative problem-solving, as well as psychedelic exploration. These practices were developed over the past five years to amplify the psychedelic nature of cannabis. We begin from the perspective of the new user, then move into safely working with cannabis for the very first time, and finally discuss advanced journeywork practices for trauma resolution and advanced psychedelic journeywork techniques. These practices will help anyone translate greater skill and agency from psychedelic cannabis experiences to any psychedelic medicine experience.

Lastly, in part 5, I discuss the greater societal-level implications of these practices, how to implement these experiences into a safe, ongoing protocol for lasting change, and what tools you need to keep the process going in solo practices as well as in community groups.

Healing can happen now. We don’t have to wait. We just have to look outside the box of what we were told is possible. The good news is you don’t have to take my word for it. All of the practices discussed in Psychedelic Cannabis can be tested and verified through personal experience.