Smokable Tasks

My wife was reading the latest MAPS Bulletin, that is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies update, Vol XXXI, No 3, 2021, pages 3-4.  

She mentioned to me that Rick Doblin, the founder and executive director, in his “From the Desk of” mentions that in the detailed employment manual of MAPS corporation is a concept of “smokable tasks.”  

I quote “These are work tasks, different for each staff person, that they think, and their manager agrees, they do better while under the influence of marijuana.”  

He goes on to mention that “Smokable tasks for me primarily include strategizing, protocol design, and editing of regulatory submissions…”  

My first response was laughter…  

My second response was to think about this new concept…  

I then read his whole introduction to the current Bulletin.  

He outlines how they grew from 3 staff in the year 2000, feeling like a small family, to 15 staff members in 2011, and now to 140 full time staff, with another 100 part time therapists.  

He outlines how that are now a family of corporations, with standard operating procedures, career ladders, and human resource staff.  

He then relates that Smokable Tasks are one way to retain “the soul of MAPS...”  

The first thing that comes to my mind is who exactly is Rick’s manager, agreeing to his smokable tasks?  

Personally, I like the idea that people can regulate their drug use.  

We let people drink caffeine, often supplied as a perk of the workplace.   

As a teenage pothead myself, I always felt that cannabis was a much safer drug than alcohol.  

I do not advocate driving on cannabis.  It does impair your performance:  

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2788264

However, it felt to me that I was more likely to drive too slow than to drive too fast and recklessly, as one might with the use of alcohol.  

That JAMA article above also mentioned that at 1 hour and 30 minutes, people high on cannabis thought they could drive just fine, when they actually were driving impaired.  

I also remember from my youth, writing down something that I thought was profound, while high on cannabis, later to read it when sober, and thinking, “perhaps not so profound…”    

What is clear is that alcohol is the greater source of violence, especially a factor in domestic violence.  And you can’t die from a THC overdose…

https://drugabuse.com/blog/marijuana-vs-alcohol/

In one study:  “Subjective aggression significantly increased following aggression exposure in all groups while being sober. Alcohol intoxication increased subjective aggression whereas cannabis decreased the subjective aggression following aggression exposure.”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4988999/

 We moved to Colorado, from Wisconsin almost 6 years ago, thinking that eventually we might use cannabis in a counseling practice, using cannabis in a protocol similar to the use of psychedelics.  

We then explored the now legal use of cannabis, keeping our experience notes in a journal… 

When I was a teenager and through college, cannabis was my preferred drug.  

Within our recent explorations, I found I prefer a glass of a nice red wine after work to cannabis.  

Must be my aging brain…  

But, kudos to Rick and MAPS!  

As I have written before, I am an advocate of making all drugs legal…  

http://enlightenedmdphd.blogspot.com/2013/02/addictions.html

Namaste