Cannabis doesn’t give you talent you don’t already have. A psychiatrist specializing in cannabis and entheogens breaks down what THC actually does to the creative brain, and why the myth of the green muse is more complicated than it looks.
The myth of the green muse has coasted through history, dodging potholes between the weed Snoop Dogg smoked in sunny 90s Long Beach and today’s trap recording studios, dives overflowing with synthesizers, wisps of smoke, and dry coughs. Cough, cough. It’s a toxic romance, an urban legend that swears up and down that a couple of puffs will turn you into a writer on par with Mariana Enríquez, or somehow hack the Matrix so you can paint with the grace of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
But to understand what really happens in an artist’s mind when THC enters the picture, we need to lower the volume, turn off the autotune, and apply some, let’s say, “biological humility,” a concept that Dr. María Celeste Romero, a psychiatrist specializing in cannabis and entheogens, introduces to High Times and El Planteo. So, how’s your biological humility?
According to Romero, although science is beginning to unravel the plant’s basic mechanisms, the brain remains a map with too many unknown territories: “It’s such a vast, complex organ that we manage so little of… we know enough to recognize the effectiveness of certain treatments, but the exact, exact thing, there, sorry, but I’m a little humble.”
Nevertheless, this starting point, this partial knowledge, is enough to confirm that weed doesn’t give you a talent you don’t already have. No, my friend: it’s not like spinach for Popeye or the mushroom for Mario Bros. Not at all. It does, for instance, function as a modulator of …
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Author: Hernán Panessi / High Times
