It was always meant to end. When Joe Rogan and three of his comedy buddies decided to go sober for the entire month of October—meaning no alcohol and no marijuana—they did so knowing November would always come.
Rogan, though, is a known cannabis activist and enthusiast, often touting its social and cognitive benefits to users. His time away from marijuana has caused Rogan to become more introspective about its place within his life and others. He went as far to admit he’d developed a mild dependency on the drug.
“I think there are real creative benefits to marijuana,” he said on episode #1032 with guest Colin Moriarty. “There’s states I think you achieve when you smoke pot that are unattainable without pot. I think pot makes me more introspective, it makes me nicer, it makes me calmer, it makes me have a better sense and understanding of the importance and value of community, it makes me more sensitive to the things I’m saying. I don’t think pot’s bad.”
But on the most recent episode of the podcast, featuring Owen Benjamin, Rogan finally indulged in everything he’d been denying himself. He cracked open a bottle of William Wolf bourbon and “then sparked up a doob,” as he said.
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“It feels good, I missed it,” Rogan said after his first hits. “I tell you what, though, I enjoyed being sober. Not that I needed to be sober, not like I was a junkie with a problem. But it’s nice to take a reset. I’m going to do it every year. I’m going to do sober October every year. You heard it here first.
Ahead of his return to consuming marijuana, Rogan did admit to being “a little nervous.” He worried the weed might hit him like a “freight train” with his tolerance being down.
But he seemed fine on the podcast. Nothing dramatic happened. Instead Rogan returned to his normal, marijuana-consuming self.
“It’s always good to take time away from everything, just to get a better baseline,” he emphasized on a podcast.”
Even though marijuana is now at an all-time approval rating in the country, Rogan believes we maintain a naïve cultural understanding of the plant. As mentioned, his time away caused him to examine the place cannabis has in our society and Rogan still believes we have a ways to go.
“We have a very infantile approach to what marijuana is because of all the prohibition bullshit that people went through from the 1930s on,” Rogan said. “There’s this weird propaganda that marijuana is the devil’s weed and it’s terrible for you. When there’s a lot of cultural and societal benefits to achieving those states of mind. They really make people nicer. It calms you down.”
