Ceremonial cannabis use is on the rise. So is a stranger phenomenon: cannabis getting demonized by other plant medicine practitioners.
“You’re giving your life force to weed,” plant medicine facilitator Iván Chocron says on a 2025 episode of the Integrating Consciousness podcast. “And weed is giving you something so that you feel that giving your life force away is worth it, but that’s why it’s called weed. A weed in the plant world, any weed, what it does is it’s a plant that sucks up all the resources that are around it. The plant around it starts dying. And that is the spirit that people are inviting in without knowing at all what kind of contract they are signing.”
That’s one side of a fight playing out quietly across the plant medicine world right now. On the other side is a growing number of people turning to cannabis as a holy sacrament, using it with spiritual intention in ceremonial settings to reach higher states of consciousness. Cannabis only numbs pain, Chocron argues, while he advocates for Ayahuasca, which he says “takes you to the root cause so that you can address it and never experience the pain of that again.”
Not everyone in the community sees it that way.
A quiet resurgence
“I think there’s a growing resurgence,” says Maestro Hamilton Souther, who has been a pioneer in the global plant medicine movement for the last two decades, working with a variety of psychedelics after apprenticing with two master Amazonian shamans specializing in Ayahuasca, a psychoactive brew of plants containing DMT.
“I think it’s still early,” he continues while speaking to High Times, “because there’s still the effect of decades of propaganda against the plant as having real merit and purpose for personal …
Read More
Author: Greg Gilman / High Times
