Graham Hancock Quits Marijuana (from Joe Rogan Experience #360)

You've kicked the green bitch. Yes, yes. After a 24-year intense relationship with the green goddess or the green bitch, depending on what mood she's in, I had to stop. And I've come in for some criticism for this. And I feel it's important to say that I hugely value and love cannabis. I think it's a wonderful herbal ally. And I don't think that I would ever have written my books of historical mystery if I had not encountered cannabis. Rather late in life, I did not smoke any dope until I was 37 years old and I'm now 62. And roughly around about the age of 38, that's when I started getting into historical mysteries. Before that it was all... Of course, it's total stoner stuff. Absolutely. Before that it was all curd affairs, you know. But suddenly something opened up for me and I'm very grateful to the herb for that. And initially, again, I need to emphasize this. I think the problem I eventually ended up having with cannabis, it's not the fault of cannabis, it's the fault of Graham Hancock. I think my relationship became abusive with the herb. It was not initially. Initially it was something I would do evenings and weekends. I would not try to write while I was actually stoned. I would do my day's work and then chill out in the evening with a pipe or a joint. That was how it was for me for quite a while. And I went through my first big historical mystery book, The Sign and the Seal, which was published in 1992 with that pattern. In other words, I would be smoking only after I downed tools at the end of the evening and I was ready to chill. And that worked fine. But then when I started writing Fingerprints of the Gods, which was the biggest book I've ever done, a 5 million copy bestseller all around the world, when I started writing that, I thought I'll experiment. Let's see if I can be stoned and write. And I discovered that I could. I could be stoned and write. And I liked being stoned so much that in a way it urged me to just write all the time because then I had this incredibly good reason to be stoned all the time. And I took away all the physical boredom of sitting there in my chair in front of my computer screen. Just everything went away and I went and drifted into this space where I could explore ideas and manifest those ideas down on the page. And I literally, that's when I began what was to become ultimately an abusive relationship with cannabis, which that I would fire up in those days my joint or my pipe at 9 or 10 in the morning. And I would, I'm a hard worker. I work 16 hours a day very often when I'm writing. So come 2 o'clock the next morning, I'd still be there smoking away. And as the years went by, this became a permanent daily pattern for me, whether I was writing or not. I would be stoned from the moment I got up until the moment I went to bed. And most people who came by my house or talked to me on the phone, they would have had absolutely no idea because I was completely in control. I didn't seem high. I could hold a rational conversation. I was just fine. And I just felt really good. And this is how it went on for many years and later on about in the early 2000, around about 2005 actually, I think, perhaps a little earlier. One of my kids told me that, you know, this stuff, this smoke is, you don't need to have combustion products. Why don't you use a vaporizer? So I bought myself a volcano on the internet. And then I heard that the British government was going to ban the use of banal peripherals. So I bought myself two more volcanoes. Volcanoes are quite expensive, but that shows how dedicated I was. You had to make sure that you covered your bases. I had to make sure that I covered my bases. And then I would be vaporizing from 9 in the morning until 2 o'clock the next morning, 7 days a week, and increasingly strong strains. And this is one thing that I would say. If we lived in a regime, an irrational regime, where there was no attempt by the government to police our states of consciousness, we could have much more choice in the kind of cannabis we get hold of. For example, I would have liked to have cannabis with much more CBD and maybe less THC. But the varieties I was smoking were very, very THC loaded. What's the difference in effect? Well, okay. I mean, it depends how much you buy into the research on this. But a lot of good science has been done. And the suggestion is that THC can promote or reveal. I don't want to blame the herb for anything. It can reveal certain psychotic tendencies in oneself. And this is the well-known paranoia, which many people associate with smoking cannabis. The CBD is an anti-psychotic agent. So the natural herb is balanced with CBD and THC. And it looks after you very well. But where we go into intensive breeding of the herb, focusing on the element that makes you really high, which is the THC, then we get a herb that is somewhat unbalanced as a result of the interference of humanity. But you get more bang for your buck. That's a very strong herb. And I began to like a particular variety called cheese. I think it's called cheese because it smells like old socks or stilton, like a blue cheese. And I found a grower who lived local to me who was just having amazing green fingers. I would buy from him. And I would sometimes have five or six ounces of the herb in my house because I was blazing through this stuff at a tremendous rate. That's enough where you could get in trouble for dealing. So that's where the paranoia starts to become legitimate because actually they can break down your door. And they can confiscate your home and take away your liberty and fuck you up forever. They can do that. And so every time I heard a ring at the door or a car came up the street, I would get paranoid. And you were high. And I was high. Yeah, and I was high. Did you get paranoid when you were high? Well, this is one of the reasons why. Look, what happened to me was that around about 2003, I started, for reasons of research initially, working with Ayahuasca, the vine of souls. This is the powerful psychedelic brew which has been consumed by shamanistic cultures in the Amazon for thousands and thousands of years. And it's not called the vine of souls for nothing. It's an extraordinary portal into other realms. And in some ways, those realms are associated with death and perhaps what waits for us after death. Nobody knows the answer to that. But in Ayahuasca, you have certain experiences relating to that. And right from the beginning when I started to drink Ayahuasca, I mean, this sounds nuts to anybody who hasn't done DMT or who hasn't drunk Ayahuasca, but you do meet intelligent entities. And more and more around the world, people drinking Ayahuasca are meeting this goddess figure. She might appear as a serpent. She might appear as a woman. She might appear as some kind of panther or jaguar. Very powerful, tough love kind of lady who reveals to you the truth about yourself and just says, you know, you fucking deal with it because that's how you are. And what the truth that was revealed to me from quite early on was my relationship with cannabis had got out of balance and I needed to get it back into balance. And of course, I ignored those messages completely because I was so much in love with my cannabis relationship. My wife said that really it was like I had a mistress, you know, who I spent all my time with was the cannabis rather than her. And this went on for many, many years. Now, the paranoia aspect, okay, I'm going to bear my heart here. And you know, I believe in being honest. The paranoia aspect began to affect my relationship with my beloved partner, Santa, who I just love from the bottom of my heart. And she is the best, the most pure-hearted, generous-spirited, loving lady it's possible to imagine. I started to develop all kinds of suspicions about her which were completely groundless. I started to imagine all sorts of stuff were going on. And then I started to act towards her as though those suspicions were real. And all of this was also related to my consumption of cannabis. It was not caused by my consumption of cannabis. I think this is a latent aspect of my own personality. It was being revealed by this overabuse of the cannabis herb. And therefore, I was making my beautiful partner's life a misery sometimes, not every day, but sometimes. And she was patiently putting up with this, but she was suffering. And we went down to Brazil in October 2011. And if I had been told when we got on that plane and went down to Brazil that when I came back two weeks later, I would probably never smoke cannabis again. I would have laughed in the face of the person who told me that. But the encounters that I had with the spirit of ayahuasca, whatever that is, I'm willing to accept that there is no spirit of ayahuasca, that it's all something we generate out of our brains. But for me, she manifests as a real, like a goddess. And the encounters I had with that, and I do think she's real. That's just my personal belief system. And those encounters that I had were incredibly powerful. And she took me to a place that was something like hell. And she took me to a place that was something like the judgment scene in the ancient Egyptian religion. Now, the judgment scene is a place where your heart is weighed in the scales against the feather of truth and harmony and cosmic justice. And you do not want your heart to be heavy in those scales. You want to be able to look back on your life and say, I did good. I did not add to the misery in the world. I did something worthwhile with this incredible gift of life that the universe gave me. And everything you've done every second, every minute of your life is completely transparent. Every thought, every action, everything you did from the moment you became conscious until the moment of your death is laid out before you. And there's no hiding from it. Like we're great at creating illusions about our own behavior and persuading ourselves that we're behaving just fine. In the Judgment Hall of Osiris, which is also called the Hall of Mart where the scene takes place, all of that stripped away. And you confront the truth. And I was put there. And I confronted the truth about myself. And I saw the way that I was behaving towards my partner. And I was shown that this had to stop. Otherwise, I was going to pay a huge price for it. And I had a series of terrifying, terrifying experiences which my partner, Sansa, shared with me because we were drinking Ayahuasca together. And at a certain point, entities came to her. And she had the experience of her heart being pulled out of her chest. And the entity said to her, and she thought she was going to die. And the entity said to her, we're going to do this to you to teach Graham a lesson. And Sansa communicated that to me. And I would rank that as probably the single most terrifying night of my entire life. And I've had some terrifying nights. That was just absolutely scared rigid. And I came out of that with a feeling, a very clear feeling. In Ayahuasca, we have sharings. The next day after you've drunk the brew, you share with the rest of the group who you've drunk with the experiences you had the night before, as much as you want to share. And what I shared, because I still didn't believe that I could stop smoking cannabis, what I shared was that I was going to change my relationship with cannabis and to get to a place where cannabis was serving me again rather than me serving her. And that's what I believed. But when I got back to England, long flight, what's the first thing I do? I get out my vaporizer, get out my stash, fire up the vaporizer, and fill a nice bag of vapor. You say it so nostalgically. Well, I miss it. I miss it. You know, this was a bit of a – cannabis is such a beautiful, sensual ally if she's used right. I think it's just an imbalance issue with the CBD-THC ratio. Well, let me just finish with what happened to me. So I fill up the bag, and I'm down there in my basement, and I take the first draw, and I'm suddenly filled with the most intense feelings of horror and loathing. And it is exactly like I'm back in that space that Ayahuasca took me to. And I try a second puff, and I can't do it. I physically could not continue. I knew that I just could not continue. I express the vapor out of the bag. I crumple up the bag. I put it away, and the next day, I got rid of several ounces of cannabis. I know. I know it's terrible. It's a terrible thing to do, but for me, it was the right thing to do. Twenty-four years, nonstop relationship with cannabis, definitely abusing the herb. I had got to the point where the only rational course of action was what I was shown in Ayahuasca, which was to stop. I don't know whether it was because there was way too much THC and not enough CBD, or whether it was just me not being responsible for my own behavior. I go around saying that I believe in adult responsibility, and I do, but I don't think I was being responsible. I don't think I was using the herb in a responsible way. I don't think I was using it in a respectful way, and I paid a price for that. Stop excavating.