On using cannabis in recovery

An update on how my sobriety has changed, and what to expect from me, my work, and this newsletter going forward.

This is a newsletter to share how my definition of sobriety (as well as my relationship to the words “sober”, “sobriety”, and “recovery”) has changed, and what to expect from me, my work, and this newsletter going forward.

I now use cannabis recreationally, and most of what follows is about that.

(For those who don’t know, I quit drinking in April 2013, and stopped using all psychoactive substances in early 2014; I’ve called myself sober since 2013, but since 2014, I have considered my sobriety contingent upon not using drugs for fun, so this is a radical departure, especially given my body of work.)

While many of you might be shrugging or applauding or feeling a kind of relief because you’ve had a similar experience, or having absolutely no reaction whatsoever to this fact—the reality is that for some of you this is going to be a really big deal, with implications for your own path, sobriety, and recovery, and for that reason this will be a long email.

To be super clear before I begin—I’m not writing this now or sharing this information to be understood, to explain myself to anyone, to defend my choices, to maintain my brand or position or relevance, to promote a certain way of being over another, to assert myself as an example or a cautionary tale, to confess a transgression, or to repent. I’m also not sharing this because I think everything I do belongs to the public just because I’m a public person, or because I am looking for absolution, co-signing, or approval.

I’m writing this because I’m ready to, because I am in a place where I can talk about smoking pot without making it an apology or needing something from you in return, because I’m healthy enough to talk about it, because I think a lot of people are going through what I’ve been through, and because I needed to read what I’m about to write.

It’s also because at this point, I can’t continue my work (in this newsletter, in the book I’m writing on this very topic) without disclosing this fact and being able to discuss it—along with the many many tangential topics it spawns (i.e., what qualifies as a “drug” anymore, what does it mean to be “sober”, are we all addicts or are we just calling everything an addiction, etc.) in my work and with you.

That was not always the case, and it was only recently made the case.

There was a period where my cannabis use—and what it implied about my health, integrity, recovery, identity, published work, and much more—was something I needed to protect, a process I needed to be in privately within the context of my actual (non-internet, non-sobriety-spokesmodel) life, and it’s only because of that privacy and time, not to mention the many friends, colleagues, and professionals that have helped me, that I’m able to speak of this experience in a way that today is from a place of strength and fierce compassion for myself, my choices, and my path.

Had I written about this during that process, I would not have been doing anyone a service. I would have been writing from a place of self-protection—performing the correct, audience-approved resolution—instead of how I’m writing today, which is to be of service, without a lot of concern for preserving the legacy of Holly Whitaker, or the need for anyone to understand or validate my choices.

Everything I have already shared and am about to share I’m in integrity with, I have my own back on, and I have considered at length. And while I am naturally scared of what the consequences of me publishing this will be—not just for myself but for anyone who has used my work in their own process—I’ve had to make peace with every potential. I trust that what comes from this disclosure, as well as what comes after, is going to be in some kind of service to at least someone.

In fact, the only way this can be in service is if I am genuinely fine with whatever result may come and let go of any expected outcome.

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I know there will be a lot of questions, and comments, and the reactions will range from validation and relief to fear, anger, and disappointment (or again, no reaction at all because “it’s just pot” etc.).

I’ve decided to leave the comments section open, though I don’t intend on reading through them or responding at this time (this may change). I ask that you don’t send me a text message about this if you have my number, email me if you have my email address, and so on. There will be many opportunities for discussion, and I will be using this community as a sounding board while I finish the book I’m working on.

That said: I want to set the boundary that this is my business, my real life, and I’ll be setting the terms of what I do and don’t discuss.

For years I’ve made myself available to the public in a way that ruined my mental health, which is in part why I started using pot to begin with—because I belonged to a curated image. I don’t anymore. I belong to myself.

I get to decide what I do and don’t disclose, and while I am excited to share my experience and the volumes of related research that a person like me using a little bit of weed has spawned, I am done trying to be an example of how to live, what to consume, what to do or not to do, or feeling the need to qualify the validity of my work through my exemplary lifestyle choices.

I started this career in 2013 under the genuine impression that it would be of service to use social media and myself as an example. My original intention with Instagram, Facebook, and my old blog Hip Sobriety was to start a movement and change something in our society for the better, but by the time I stopped using Instagram in 2021, I was mostly just managing my brand, more concerned with maintaining my relevance—that is, my self—than anything else. (Here’s a perfect example of that in action.)

The cult of personality that defines our current wellness and mental health landscape is toxic and sick, and elevating humans to the status we do is a disaster for them and for us. It is not normal for a human to be an influencer. It is not normal that I’ve wielded as much influence as I have in the past and as others currently do today. It is not normal to constantly film oneself for an audience and share every detail of one’s life, or to be beholden to the public as a kind of hierarchically anointed person who has it figured it out, because no one has figured it out, and most of those who appear to are often operating with a large team behind them, millions of dollars, and a healthy dose of narcissism that combine into the illusion that they have something other people don’t, that the rest of us could get if we did what they did or live how they live, when it’s really just fucking capitalism.

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The last thing I want to say, especially to those of you who’ve been here with me the last few years and supporting my work, is thank you. The easier path would have been for me to disappear completely, and many of you probably know how much I’ve wanted to. I didn’t, first because I think I have more work to do, and second because of how many of you are here and how many of you have held me as I publicly navigated what I can only describe as an ego death (ego slaughter?). I’ve fallen apart, I’ve come back together, many of you have been here with me while I was goo.

The world is going through something that I don’t know what yet to make of, that is terrifying and simultaneously hopeful. We are in process, we are in change, we are in bliss and agony; we are making choices we never thought we’d have to make. The thing that matters to me at the end of the day is the thing that has mattered to me since I started this work, which is to be of service, to be a link in the chain, to leave this place better than I found it.

There is so much trepidation as I type, about whether or not I am upholding that intention; I believe I am.

With love and care,

Holly

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Clarifying points

The rest of this is in listicle form. What follows are *some* of the questions I anticipated you might have. I’m certain I’m going to miss some, and that’s fine because we have time, and this is just the first of many conversations. If this feels incomplete, that’s because it is, and it will be filled in over time.

1. You may not be able to take this ride with me.

For some of you this may be the end of you using my work or being able to read me or anything with me, for myriad reasons. Or this might be where my work finally meets your needs or provides something it was missing. And then there’s everything in-between and left and right of those outcomes. There’s really no way for me to predict how this will go, but I want to normalize that This is okay! Brands stay the same. Humans change.

There are plenty of people who helped me save my own life that I’ve outgrown or no longer feel connected to. In some cases I use their older work, in some cases I am so turned off by their current platform I can’t stomach any of it, and so on. This article isn’t filled with advice, but my advice on this point is to go with whatever feels most in alignment for you. You don’t owe me your loyalty or readership or support.

2. I am writing a book that will answer many of the questions you have.

As I have mentioned, there’s no way I can cover every single conflict or issue this disclosure provokes in one post. In the weeks to come, I’ll be collecting questions as a way to inform what to write about.

I’m in the middle of writing a long and complex book about this (more to come on that in other newsletters) because it requires this level of nuance and research, but also because the culture we live in today is radically different from the one in which the language we use to talk about these issues—addiction, recovery, drugs, relapse—was created. There is a structural mismatch, and our definitions of key concepts (what constitutes a drug, what addiction is, what an addict is) have not evolved to reflect current realities. A lot of the terms we use today that guide our behavior are relics of the past, shaped by forces like eugenics, the War on Drugs, and outdated moral frameworks, yet they continue to shape our understanding in ways that create confusion and contradiction.

I’ll be workshopping these ideas more in this newsletter, but ultimately, the book will serve as the place where I make the clearest and most cohesive points.

3. I still—for now—consider myself in recovery, but my relationship with recovery has changed significantly. I am also not sure if I consider myself sober any longer, which has more to do with the weight of that word and how it can cut both ways than it does some pejorative mark of failure I’m placing on myself. I’m still exploring what these labels mean, the frameworks they reinforce, and the ways they shape both personal identity and broader cultural narratives.

I haven’t had a drink since 2013 and I don’t plan to ever, and aside from cannabis, I don’t currently use or plan to use any other psychoactive compound “recreationally”, and some psychedelics “therapeutically.”¹

I count myself in recovery, and I count myself sober in certain ways, but I’m also now acutely aware from my own experience, the many interviews conducted as part of my research, and honest conversations had with other folks in recovery, how much of a cudgel that word can be and how it entirely fucks some people up. One example: The Abstinence Violation Effect shows that the more precious we are about these words/the closer we identify with them, the bigger the chance of a relapse (and the bigger the relapse). In my own experience, I found that I had more allegiance to a concept than I did my own wellbeing, and that’s a major thread I’ll be pulling in this newsletter and future work.

4. I am in a process with pot the same way I’ve been in a process with social media, food, my phone, shopping, binge watching, etc. That is: I do not have a perfectly healthy relationship with it—I am learning what works and what doesn’t, and I am learning through trial and error and patience.

When it comes to anything else I use more than I want, or that commands a kind of hold on my life that has some sort of enduring negative consequence, or that I use to escape or manage unwanted feelings—be it food, body image, coffee, my phone, the news, social media, buying shit on the internet, aging, or romantic relationships—I feel like I am allowed a kind of process, like I have time and space to experiment and move toward greater clarity about how the thing fits into my life. For instance, I stopped using Instagram about four years ago regularly, and that’s been a process—I just recently deactivated it (and might turn it back on?) which is a further step towards what feels in alignment and healthy for me, but is not fully deleting the fucking thing. I started getting Botox when I was 25 and I just stopped doing that a year and a half ago even though I wanted to stop for the past decade.

When it comes to pot though, I have felt from day one like I’m supposed to have quick and finite answers, and to follow a specific script, rather than doing what I do with all these other complicated things, because it’s bad and I know better! I have had to carve out permission to be in process with this; I have had to be okay with “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

5. The shame of using drugs again has been far more difficult to navigate than the actual use itself.

Figuring out how to incorporate pot in a way that feels like a net positive has been difficult, but it’s also been nothing compared to the internal reckoning of no longer being “sober” in the way I once believed I was supposed to be. It was harder to reconcile a me that uses drugs than it was to use drugs.

6. While I haven’t shared my cannabis use with readers here or the general public, I’ve been open about it from the start with my friends, peers, and professionals.

When I first started using pot I “confessed” to my closest friends, and as I navigated my relationship with pot, I leaned on my inner circle, peers in recovery, and professionals trained in return to use and harm reduction. So while there’s been a disconnect between my public and private selves, in my real life, I’ve been transparent with those I trust. Sharing this process and being supported through it has been one of the most rewarding and illuminating experiences of my entire recovery thus far. I’ve never experienced such acceptance as I have around this, especially from folks in recovery.

I’ve definitely felt like I’ve been living a double life when it comes to my public/professional identity versus my personal reality. But in my day-to-day existence, integrating this part of me has been an essential part of my healing and reducing the kind of shame inherent in doing what an “addict” isn’t supposed to be doing.

7. I don’t think sobriety is a “superior” choice but I also wouldn’t be able to have this conversation at all without having had the kind of sobriety I had for as long as I did. I deeply value total abstinence and the many advantages, benefits, and clarity that kind of sobriety provides, and I think of it as a really good option in a sea of options (rather than the “gold standard”).

When I say “sobriety” here I mean it in the NA/AA sense, as in not taking any form of psychoactive (“mind-altering”) compound recreationally. A sober journalist recently defined her sobriety as not using anything that effects them from the "neck up" and this is generally what people infer sobriety to mean. That said, sobriety is a term that has concept creep, and the origins of its use are complex and have meant different things over the years. 

This is a tricky bit to write, because so much of my work has been highly promoting of full abstinence from all recreational use of psychoactive drugs (or mind-altering substances), and because I’ve personally gained from that experience and wouldn’t have the kind of healing I have had without it. Sobriety saved my life and made me me and gave me everything I was looking for and at least one thousand other things.

I needed that kind of restraint, I needed to have nothing in me at all and to extract myself from drug and drinking culture entirely. I needed years and years of not having that kind of escape available to me, I needed the rawness and the clarity of sobriety and the many, many, many benefits it conferred on me, and I wouldn’t be able to write this if I hadn’t experienced that kind of sobriety for as long as I did—the confidence, clarity, and health I have today comes from that baseline experience.

It also remains unclear if that’s where I’ll end back up. I love sobriety, it works for me, it’s far easier in many ways.

What I mean is, sobriety is fucking great. A blessing. The best thing I’ve ever done. But it’s also the foregone conclusion and what we’ve culturally decided to be the only “responsible” outcome for any kind of drug dependence or misuse or addiction or whatever we fucking call it now, which it is not.

I recently completed a five-day silent meditation retreat, in which I reconnected with myself and my practice in a way I hadn’t in years. I had fallen off the metaphorical path, and at this retreat I found my way back in. One of the teachers at this retreat reminded me that the path never went anywhere—that we fall off but it remains in tact as a place of refuge we can return to, and having experienced it we know we can return to it. Right now that is how I see total abstinence—as a really important place I’ve visited, a place I know still exists, and one I may well return to.

8. Cannabis is notably different than alcohol and many other substances.

While I do not think cannabis is without great harms and potential dangers (especially given our hyper-capitalist roll-out of legalized pot), and believe it’s addictive, and a lot of other things I’ll be getting into more later, it’s also not the same as alcohol or many other drugs.

I would not attempt to reintroduce alcohol for many reasons, the primary one being I don’t want to, and the secondary one being I wouldn’t fuck with it if my life depended on it—I almost died from it and I’m not going back there; ever. And while I’ve never had an issue with pills or powders, I also wouldn’t attempt to use those substances at all knowing myself. In fact, I’ve tried stimulant medication for my ADHD which felt like one of the most dangerous situations I could put myself in and like a one-way ticket to rehab.

In summary: The substance I am using recreationally feels relatively safe and manageable for me.

In my book I wrote a section called “Know what you can and cannot fuck with” and included pot as a thing I cannot fuck with. Harm reductionist Jan M. Brown explained to me a method she employs which categorizes substances as green, yellow, and red—red being never, green being whenever, yellow being with caution. Pot, rather than being a thing I cannot fuck with, is a thing I am cautiously fucking with; it’s yellow for now, and it may go back to red.

9. Using psychedelics (therapeutically) opened the door for other substances and this outcome. (It made it easier for me to consider using pot, and opened the figurative box.)

I’ve used psychedelics in a therapeutic context a handful of times, which include ayahuasca, psilocybin, and MDMA, and while these experiences were extraordinarily beneficial in many regards and led to a lot of healing I do not believe I would have otherwise achieved, it’s important I disclose that using them also made it far easier to consider using cannabis—it “broke the seal” in a certain sense and made it more acceptable for me to use pot.

I want to share this specifically because for those of us in recovery with a past history of substance use issues, there is a certain benefit from just not doing any drugs at all, including the helping kind, and using “plant medicines” (white/classist word for drugs!) for “therapeutic” (acceptable!) reasons isn’t without consequence.

My use of psychedelics also cemented how much I hate altering my consciousness or being out of control. I had a handful of different experiences over five years (about one a year), I hated them all and wanted them to be over as soon as they began, and my last session (a high-dose of MDMA administered by a therapist over an 8 hour period) was just fucking horrible, left me depressed and anxious for months, and made it clear to me that meditation is my path. (The experiences many report back from their psychedelic experiences are what I get from long meditation retreats; so I guess, know thyself.)

All this said: While I’m very in favor of the use of psychedelics for healing trauma and addictions etc., I don’t think they are a panacea, and I definitely think people who are in recovery need to be careful about what it means to open that box. For some of us, meditation or other means of altering consciousness to achieve healing can be just as, if not more, powerful.

10. Using pot galvanized my commitment to other sobrieties.

Prior to this experience I wouldn’t have thought twice about using an opioid pain killer in a medically supervised setting, but now I won’t. There’s a kind of limit on the type of acute damage you can do using pot, but not on many other substances, and this experience has highlighted for me how easy it is to lose control, and how careful I need to be given my background about what I put into my body. (Again, as I mentioned, it’s also what has informed my course of treatment for ADHD and why I won’t use stimulant medication—mama likey too much.)

11. More on why cannabis is complicated.

While cannabis is vastly different from opioids, alcohol, and other substances with addictive potential, it is not an inert substance, and many consumers have limited knowledge about its effects and often conflate it with the cannabis of the recent past.

The cannabis available today—both flower and processed products—is far more potent than what was commonly used just a few decades ago, and the industry remains inconsistently “regulated”. Many products are untested, may contain pesticides and contaminants, and are available in high-potency formulations and novel combinations whose short- and long-term effects are not yet well understood.

Additionally, many cannabis products are engineered for maximum psychoactive impact (THC), which often results in removing the braking system (CBD), raising concerns about their potential for problematic use or other terrible outcomes. As a result, consumers are effectively participating in a large-scale, unregulated experiment driven by market incentives rather than public health considerations.

Further, cannabis is now Big Cannabis, and the same exact ploys used by the tobacco and alcohol industries are coming into play; the majority of cannabis sold is to a handful of users that use far too much of it, it’s being produced and marketed to us in ways that encourage overconsumption.

On the other hand, cannabis also meets six of the seven criteria for Medically Assisted Treatment of Alcohol Use Disorder—meaning it’s not that straight forward.

Making sense of today’s cannabis is not a focus of the book I’m writing, but something I’m interested to explore in this newsletter with those of you who are using pot in this way, or who are considering it. It’s these conversations I’m looking forward to the most, without the moral subtext.

12. I don’t advocate for following my example—my hope is that you are able to use my experience and research without seeing it as a suggestion.

This has been a fucked up experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone. My sobriety as I knew it was my identity, and my life, and losing it in the way I did (which at first felt outside of my control and like a major relapse) was gutting, disorienting, and consuming.

On the other hand, it’s been an incredible teacher, and my recovery today, as well as my general health, is stronger because of this. This has been a growth experience, and one that I am (now) as grateful to as I am to my original healing and definition of sobriety. Just like burnout and failure have been great teachers, so too has this.

13. I am healthier than I have ever been, which means I’m more of an adult than I have ever been, not that I do more yoga or hit some example of peak performative wellness that we conflate with “health”.

When I say I feel healthier than I have ever been, that does not mean I am the pinnacle of abstention and discipline, or that I finally nailed all my wellness goals, it just means I feel like a healthy human, which I think means I feel more like an adult.

There’s a lot of “healthy” people out there that are filming their lives 24x7, sharing it with an audience, doling out their wellness advice from a phone with a ring light, and while yes they may eat aspirationally or look 30 when they are 50 or have perfect unbroken sobrieties, and even claim (and possibly have) great boundaries around their social media use—they are still dedicating most of their existence to the performance of their wellness for an audience, for cash. They are still incentivized to keep themselves up to keep their income up. For instance: Mel Robbins seems healthy to us, and like someone we might aspire to be based on what we are privy to, which is her curated image. But it also looks a lot like she stole art from a woman² and turned it into a book that I’m sure made her millions, and hasn’t to my knowledge addressed it or rectified it, which doesn’t scream health to me; it screams sick.

I am not saying this to trash Mel or any other person this statement might implicate, including myself now or versions past, but to address that we are confused about what health actually looks like anymore because of how far we’ve gone down the rabbit hole of influencer culture, but I promise, you can be completely free of all the things—the pinnacle of sobriety—and entirely fucked up.

I’m healthy.

That doesn’t mean I’m perfect, it means I no longer think I need to be perfect to be happy, find worth, or write these words.

14. I have way different boundaries than I used to.

The first thing I thought I had to do to make myself good again was go on Instagram and confess my pot use immediately prior to any kind of investigation or intervention, so used was I to the idea that I owed the details of my life to an audience, and that any withholding of that information for any duration of time was unethical.

We conflate transparency with trustworthiness, and aspire to be as transparent as possible like it’s some kind of feat rather than compulsory, which it now is—we believe we are owed details. A lot of my research has centered on this aspect (confession, compulsory transparency—especially by that of populations like ours (“addicts”) who are seen as not capable of trust without constant self-surveillance and reporting), and the more I have read the less I’m interested in sharing.

I do not feel like I owe the details of my life the way I used to, which is probably evident from my work if you’ve been here the past few years, and I’ll be speaking about this not from a “telling on myself” perspective but from a thoughtful, discretionary perspective.

While I do believe I owe this disclosure about my pot use given my previous published work and thus influence, I don’t believe I owe an audience updates on what I do or do not put into my body as a qualifying factor of my reliability, trustworthiness, relatability, or quality of my work.

15. I’m leaving a lot out.

This is far longer than I intended and far more involved than I anticipated! And I could still go on and on. I look forward to continuing this discourse over time.

16. I have only been able to do this because I’ve been supported by a thick network of people and because I’ve built an offline life that is a refuge from the internet.

To those of you who have been intimately involved in this process—some of you for years—thank you. There is no way I could have done this without the literal dozens of people, most of whom are in recovery themselves or other recovery professionals, who have held my hand through it all, showing up with a level of acceptance so complete I still struggle to fully grasp it.

You know who you are. Your compassion, levity, generosity, and unwavering kindness has saved me over and again, and I would not have made it through without you.

A special thank you to those who proofread this piece and offered feedback before publishing: Emily McDowell, Laura Cathcart Robbins, Laura McKowen, Afton Swenor, Cody Cook-Parrot, Whitney Combs.

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1. The distinction between “therapeutic” or “medically necessary” and “recreational” is a whole chapter in the book, and reflects our American tendency toward swinging between restraint and excess, and our inability to comfortably exist in gray areas, and many other things including what we morally accept as correct behavior from a specific population.

2. Resource from Laura McKowen