Addiction as a Spiritual Disease

I recently joined Marijuana Anonymous (MA) (also, so much for being anonymous now!). I’m a marijuana addict. And this post is about spirituality and addiction.

It’s taken me a LONG time to be able to say that and say it with conviction. It’s taken me even longer to accept this addiction is something I cannot recover from alone.

Many people might argue marijuana is not addictive. That it’s a medicine. I used to be one of those people.

Until I wanted to quit using it but couldn’t.

They say in MA that the journey with marijuana addiction often goes from magic to medicine to misery. I can attest to that journey.

The past month and a half in MA has inspired humility within me. There is so much I didn’t know. So much I don’t know. So much I thought I knew.

One thing that I’ve heard said in the MA rooms and read in the MA ‘Life with Hope‘ book is that marijuana addiction is a spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical disease. The spiritual part stood out to me.

I have a friend who studies addiction and who is also an addict. I’ve never had an in depth conversation with this friend about the 12 step recovery programs, but have heard in passing that it’s too heavily focused on God.

Maybe it’s why I resisted joining a 12 step program for so long. God, as I knew Him from early childhood, was something that I wanted nothing to do with. Actually, thinking about that God made me want to use.

And what I know now but didn’t know then is that by ‘use,’ what I really mean is numb out. Not feel. Escape the pain that surfaces.

I understand how addiction is a mental, emotional, and physical disease.

There’s a load of science that tells the tale of physiological and chemical changes in the brains of addicts. Science tells us that it’s, in part, genetic (if you have a parent who’s an addict, you’re 6x more likely to become one yourself) and, in part, environmental. That means circumstance and you guessed it, trauma.

When I learned this I was utterly and completely pissed off. I never stood a fucking chance.

I was also a smidgen relieved. It’s a disease. Doesn’t that in some way excuse me from accountability? Can’t I justify my use then?

Even my therapist agrees that I used primarily to self-medicate. I have many mental health clinical diagnoses. I (for my own personal reasons) won’t take pharmacological medication. Ain’t no psychiatrist gonna shove pills down my throat.

So I lit up instead. And when I first started using it in my early 20’s at college parties, it truly was magical. It lit something up inside of me.

And then as I started to become symptomatic with anxiety and depression, the weed became medicine. It helped ease my pain. It relieved me from my suffering, if even temporarily. Until I lit up again, then again, and so forth.

Pot wasn’t the only thing I used to try and help with my symptoms though. I was in active psychotherapy (like weekly for several years). I learned how to meditate and became an avid practitioner. I got witchy. I read more self help books than I’m willing to admit. My god, I went to fucking India, learned Ayurveda medicine, and become a yogi.

I was committed. I knew I needed to heal some deep wounds within my psyche.

And Weed was an ally.

Until it wasn’t.

In MA they talk about “the turn.” When weed turns on you, that is. Weed turned on me when I moved away from living in Colorado where it was legal and all my friends were doing it to Illinois where it wasn’t and I didn’t have any friends. That’s when things began to shift from medicine to misery.

I knew (during the last 3-4 years of using) weed was messing me up physically. My lungs were shit. I succumbed to messed up midnight munchies frequently. My body was inactive because I was lethargic and lazy (especially when Covid hit in 2020 and I was wake and baking more than I wasn’t). I knew addiction was mental; it lived in the brain (though newer research is starting to examine how it also lives in the gut). And, I suspected it was affecting me emotionally. If I got close to running out, I would be on edge. My boyfriend gently pointed out to me more than once that I was irritable when I couldn’t/didn’t smoke. He wasn’t lying.

But spiritual? Nah.

I counted beads on my prayer necklace while chanting ‘OM.’ I taught yoga. I had crystals I charged in the moonlight and could talk at great lengths about expanded consciousness. If anything, weed helped me connect more to my spirituality. Or so I thought.

My boyfriend is the one who suggested I go to MA. I had been clean from weed for six weeks after a lengthy relapse (I had four months sober last year). Then I relapsed again. We were sitting at our dining room table having dinner. I was emotional and stressed and I don’t even remember (because I was high) how my addiction got brought up, but it did.

And he ever so gently suggested I try out MA.

I was quite offended.

“I’m not like that kind of addict.” I was defiant. And he quickly backed off.

But then the thought wouldn’t leave me. I tried to smoke it away. It stuck to me like resin in a bowl (terrible analogy but it’s what I got, y’all). I knew I needed to quit. More than needed to. I wanted to. I hated it. It wasn’t magic or medicine anymore. I didn’t enjoy it anymore. I had tried to quit and failed many times. By that point, it felt like a compulsion. Truly, I was miserable.

The very next morning I logged into my first MA meeting (on Zoom). I listened and sat there in front of my computer (with my video and mic turned off, obviously) and sobbed. And I don’t remember a single thing that was said in that meeting. I just remember how I felt.

I felt a surrendering.

I felt awakened (if even ever so subtle). And I felt a sense of homecoming, within myself.

Over time, these feelings have grown. And as they have grown, my notion of spirituality has grown with it.

In MA they talk a lot about surrendering to “God” or to a higher power. At the risk of going off topic a bit here I will point out, because I think this is key, that MA does not define who or what God is. There is no doctrine. There are no rules. The only requirement for membership is a desire to quit using marijuana. That’s it.

They are wisely intentional about how “God” and “higher power” are spoken about in the meetings and in the literature. They clearly explain “God” as being something of your own accord–something that resonates with you. “God, as you understand God,” they say.

It’s just something greater than you. A force that’s more than what you are.

“Go stand in front of the ocean,” I heard someone say in a meeting. “That’s higher power.”

“The community in MA, that’s God,” said another.

“God can be a fucking acorn,” someone else said (they’re a lot of sillies in MA and I love them all).

And through hearing all of this talk about God, I’ve realized something.

addiction is a spiritual disease.

To recover, which is very different than simply choosing to abstain, you must surrender. Just as I did the moment I chose to enter an MA room (and to be very clear here, surrender is not synonymous with MA– surrendering and recovery can take many unique and diverse forms).

But the catch here is that to surrender, you must believe in something greater than yourself. To surrender, you must yield. You must give up control. You must say “this is no longer mine alone.”

You must surrender your power over it.

And that surrendering is what makes this spiritual. The yielding of the fantasy of control over this disease.

I’ve been in recovery for almost six weeks now. And what I’m more sure of than anything else is that you cannot recover alone. It cannot happen in isolation.

Addiction is genetic and environmental. It happens in relation to an other. We inherit trauma and pain and suffering. We become broken and wounded through relationships.

And to heal, to recover, we must do so in relation to something greater than ourselves. Maybe that’s the ocean. Or maybe it’s community. Perhaps it’s your pet dog or your garden or your art. Maybe it’s even a fucking acorn.

It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s not just you.

---

Offer

Recovery is asking
a lot of me this day.

Asking me to look so far
back down into the depths
of what made me

to see, to hold
the moments I gave me
away

to the demons
to the others
to the doctrine

of rules and hate and
lies
disguised

as truth which did not
serve me
but only kept me

under a hard and heavy
weight that bore on
my shoulders, the world

as I knew it then
was unkind
and condemning

for curious and growing
girls blossoming into skin
too big and too filthy

take Her to the alter,
lay her down
offer Her up. 

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