Many lifestyle trends that originate in California then spread to the rest of the world. This is because California is where the Spear of Destiny is: the focal point of world cultural influence. The West Coast of America has more soft power than anywhere else on Earth. The latest trend that might spread from there to the rest of the world is called California Sober.
Many people say that life is best with no drugs at all. But for many others, this isn’t realistic. Billions of people feel the need to use chemical assistance to take the edge off the intensity of life on this planet. For those living outside the Abrahamic moral paradigm, using recreational drugs is no more immoral than seasoning one’s food.
The term ‘California Sober’ refers to a lifestyle in which one still uses drugs, but in such a manner that one does very little harm. In fact, one does roughly as little harm as a sober person. The main aspect of the lifestyle is to abstain from the typical drugs of destruction, in particular large amounts of alcohol. In this lifestyle, cannabis replaces alcohol as the go-to everyday social lubricant.
In contrast to the puritanical forms of sobriety so common to the West, in which all psychoactive substances are considered from the devil, California Sober usually involves indulgent cannabis use, with the occasional use of alcohol or psychedelics. Alcohol is still used, but sparingly, such as for celebrations. Psychedelics are also used sparingly, but more for spiritual or mental health reasons.
This arrangement is not merely a fashion. It reflects actual psychological and medical science. Professor David Nutt, perhaps the world’s foremost expert on relative drug harms, conducted a study that found alcohol to be the most harmful drug of all. Figure 3 in this paper (link goes to .pdf) suggests that alcohol is twice as harmful to other people as heroin, and about as harmful to the user as heroin, crack cocaine or methamphetamine.
According to Prof. Nutt’s research, cannabis is less harmful than tobacco, and much, much less harmful than alcohol. Magic mushrooms are considered by this research to be the least harmful of all those surveyed.
The logic of the California Sober lifestyle is to take this modern science into account when making recreational drug choices. As such, the use of alcohol is much less common in comparison to wider Western society. The use of cannabis and psychedelics, by contrast, is much more common.
The lifestyle hasn’t been designed by the dispassionate scientific analysis of a few elites, though. It is, for the most part, an organic development.
Many people have found that they like to use alcohol to take the edge off the stress of daily life, but they really don’t like the side-effects of alcohol: the sickness, the bloating, the hangovers, the mental dullness. For them, cannabis does the job of taking the edge off without the physical suffering.
For these people, replacing alcohol with cannabis seems like an obvious idea.
Some Kiwis, your author among them, have been living California Sober for a while already. I worked as a barman for several years to help pay for university, but by the time I graduated I had come to realise that cannabis was a better lifestyle choice than alcohol for many reasons. Foremost among these reasons: cannabis users seemed much less prone to violence and sluttery.
Using more cannabis, I found that I felt a lot better physically than I did using alcohol. So phasing out the alcohol seemed like a natural choice. Occasional psychedelic use, usually to mark a solstice or equinox, also seems like a natural choice. I believe that many people, if given the freedom to do so, would live a lifestyle similar to this.
The main difficulty with leading this lifestyle in New Zealand, of course, is the law.
Cannabis has been fully legal in California since 2016, the year 57% of Californians voted to legalise it at referendum. New Zealand, unfortunately, voted away our chance at cannabis freedom in 2020. As such, we are now eight years behind California, and counting. It’s not likely that the Sixth National Government will change the cannabis laws, and they might not lose power until 2029 (assuming they win three terms, as National governments tend to do). So New Zealand probably won’t get legal cannabis until 15 or 16 years after California.
Despite this, cannabis is easy to get in New Zealand – Kiwis are some of the world’s heaviest users of it. Thus it’s possible to live a California Sober lifestyle here, but not with the same level of acceptance as in North America. Moreover, medicinal cannabis is now very easy to access in New Zealand.
Most of the reasons that caused the California Sober lifestyle to become popular in North America also apply to New Zealand. We also have severe problems with physical, mental and social damage caused by alcohol, and would benefit from a shift to lower-harm substances. It may be that natural adoption of this lifestyle among Kiwis is what eventually forces a change to the cannabis laws.
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