I’ve been getting high on and off since sixth grade. Two decades later, after a lot of inner work, one thing hasn’t changed: weed gives me paranoia.
I’ll admit it—cannabis has never been easy for me. More often than not, it brings on a heavy sense of doom, like the world’s eyes are fixed on me. And yet I’ve always felt drawn to the plant, curious about its role in culture and eager to connect with others through it.
That curiosity grew into something larger: a need to understand cannabis in places where it’s both sacred and forbidden. In India, cannabis is offered to Shiva, woven into festivals like Holi and Navratri, yet criminalized in everyday life. That contradiction gnawed at me.
So I set out with a simple question: how do I score some weed and see where I stand with it now? I didn’t expect that search to turn into a deeper investigation—not just into my own paranoia, but into the strange paradox of cannabis in India itself.
Darshans in the South
I set out to the streets of Bangalore with the query burning hot. Almost everyone I asked—cigarette shop owners, autorickshaw drivers, street food vendors, even a drunk reveler or two—gave the same answer: no. Sometimes the “no” came with a warning to watch out for pigs sniffing around for easy busts and a thicker buck. Most looked at me wide-eyed, startled that I’d ask so openly.
Shiva is worshipped everywhere here, yet cannabis is cast as a villain in the Indian South. Each time I heard a “no,” I turned it into a conversation—asking why they thought cannabis was criminalized, whether it had always been this way, and what role the police played …
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Author: Raghav Goswami / High Times
