How Making Sense of My Child’s Cannabis Use Helped Me Understand The Beauty of Human Adaptation
Does Domestication of the Human Species Really Represent Our Shared Future on the Planet?
My almost-adult child is a gifted and challenged person, navigating the transition to adulthood in post-industrial American society. They’re a systems thinker, who aces every test, and who also can’t sit still or conform to the demands of a quiet workplace or a grid-based schedule. They often miss appointments due to oversleeping, and sometimes sleep for periods that don’t align with respectable industrial grid time.
They are highly engaged in any task at hand, but have difficulty playing the long game of connecting with a regular schedule. They pick up new skills very quickly, but express little interest in developing any of those skills into something that, in a modern context, looks like a career.
The environments they express the most affection for are highly cooperative: soccer is a big one; skateboarding in community, where peers are moving together, both in synchronous and asynchronous formations; making public art in strategically complex spaces, that require collaboration to envision, coordination to plan, and cooperation to execute. They are the epitome of the team player, as long as the team has a clear plan that serves the collective need for transparent and direct expression of experience in a creative and innovative way.
Making Sense of the Early Adult Drive for Autonomy and Relevance
My child’s challenges have moved them toward strategies to mitigate those challenges, and cannabis has been a recurring strategy that serves some need.
As an engaged parent, who is trying to nurture their adult child’s independence, while managing my alarm when witnessing behaviors that appear problematic, or as leading toward future failure to integrate into the workplace, I’ve been trying to make sense of what I’m seeing: a young person who is fiercely dedicated to their friends; who takes pride in a complex task well-executed; who resists being pigeonholed into existing categories of social, ideological, economic, or aesthetic legibility; and who sincerely wants to play a meaningful role in their community, despite repeated experiences of mismatch with established academic and occupational cultures.
Considering all of this, I’ve been unsatisfied with the ‘just say no’ or ‘avoid this substance because of the potential dangers involved’ frameworks of personal discipline, relative to what I see as cannabis use as substance-scaffolding.
I ask instead, “How is this scaffold serving their needs,” and “what is this person seeking to satisfy, according to the tendencies of their nervous system?”
Asking these questions, and exploring the range of possible resolutions, has caused me to rethink everything I know about individual competence, self-medication, and utility-within-community.
Here’s the story that unfolds in my brain, starting with trying to understand my child’s use of cannabis.
Understanding Cannabis as a Regulation Support
Question: A subset of neurodivergent people find cannabis to be highly regulating. Using current diagnostic frameworks, would we be able to reverse engineer this mechanism and suggest alternative supports for regulation?
Answer (from multiple channels): Diagnostic frameworks don’t code this directly—no DSM category for “cannabinoid-responsive regulation phenotype”—but the mechanistic literature gives us enough to reverse-engineer some plausible pathways, and each one maps to a non-cannabis lever.
The candidate mechanisms, each with its alt-support:
- Excitation/inhibition imbalance (the leading cortical model in autism/ADHD research)—the nervous system runs with too much glutamatergic drive relative to GABAergic brake. CB1 agonism works presynaptically to turn down excess signal.
Alt-support: deep pressure/proprioceptive input, rhythmic bilateral movement, anything that mechanically dampens throughput rather than trying to out-think it. - Low endocannabinoid tone—some autism research finds blunted anandamide signaling tied to social ease and anxiety regulation. If the system’s baseline ECS is running lean, exogenous cannabinoids are topping up a deficit rather than adding a foreign effect.
Alt-support: sustained aerobic movement (the “runner’s high” is partly endocannabinoid-mediated), omega-3s as ECS precursors, consistent touch/massage. - Thalamic sensory gating failure—the filter that should mute irrelevant input doesn’t, so everything arrives undifferentiated and loud. Cannabinoids affect thalamic gating directly.
Alt-support: environmental engineering, without pharmacological substitution: reduce raw input volume rather than trying to improve the filter (single-channel environments, structured monotropic focus, noise reduction). - Vagal/parasympathetic underactivation—anxiety compounding the sensory load, cannabis’s anxiolytic effect partly vagally mediated.
Alt-support: direct vagal stimulation—humming, slow exhale-longer-than-inhale breathing, cold water on the face. - Dopaminergic under-stimulation (more ADHD-coded)—restlessness eased by mild dopaminergic modulation.
Alt-support: novelty-structured tasks, high-engagement movement, body doubling.
Considering this data, relative to the questions that framed my inquiry, here’s how I connect the dots when I choose to view my child as perfectly-abled, rather than disabled, and here’s how I attempt to contextualize this for my community.
Greetings, esteemed community:
I compiled this explanation of how cannabis helps regulate the neurodivergent nervous system. This all maps very cleanly onto our child’s character, and shows why they miss soccer so much (missing as ‘longing for,’ and not ‘fails to show up for.’ I think you get my meaning, but it’s good be precise where language suggests multiple meanings).
This all points to running (‘rhythmic bilateral movement,’ ‘sustained aerobic movement’), with intense interest-based focus (‘structured monotropic focus,’ ‘high-engagement movement’) and cooperative participation (‘high-engagement movement,’ ‘body doubling’) as being the the regulation supports they are reaching for, or the activities that they are predisposed to seek in making their character meaningful in a human community engaged in dialogue with a natural environment.
Basically, our child shows the collection of ecological adaptations that would enable ice-age hunter-gatherers to hunt and bring down a wooly mammoth, as a source of food and raw materials for clothing, shelter, and tools. Mammoths were herd animals, much larger than humans, with thick skins and wooly coats that were very difficult to pierce with the projectiles of the time—wood or bone projectiles that were either sharpened or had separate affixed bone or stone tips specialized for cutting/piercing.
Bringing down a mammoth would require a high degree of coordination and sustained movement by a group of humans—to first isolate an animal from the herd; bombard it with a number of projectiles, none of which would be able to kill the animal on its own, but only weaken it when applied in numbers; and then chase the animal until it was weak enough to be able to approach directly, to apply severing cuts with stone knives at strategic points, to bring on death. Then, the animal had to be processed fairly quickly, before bacteria, insects, and scavengers moved in to take their share.
The Mental Health Day
This coordinated activity would involve great risk-taking, and sublimation of fear-response. In other words, badass individuals engaged in a life-or-death struggle to meet the needs of their community.
Engaging in this way would have resulted in a huge output of energy in a specific time period, that would likely extend beyond one cycle of dawn-to-dusk; which could not be segmented into work hours that resemble modern industrial time cycles of work and rest; by an individual who could literally measure their life by their proximity to such a resource as a mammoth herd. The individuals involved in this project would have needed extended periods of rest to recover from the endeavor, perhaps spanning multiple day-night cycles; and the community would have been happy to oblige, considering the benefit of their energy expenditure to the community.
Where Do We Go From Here?
in the context of domesticated society, none of our child’s particular traits make sense. but our period of domestication has been a tiny blip in the overall arc of the human project. human evolution, and adaptation to changing environments, is a very long and slow process, relative to our understanding of adapting to environmental changes within our lifetimes.
Considering those changes, i hope we can find ways to recognize our child’s unique gifts as adaptations that are valuable to the community; to recognize the range of skills required to make the human project work; and to rediscover how a person with these natural predispositions is a valuable contributor to their community — because of, and not in spite of, their characteristic rhythms and sensibilities.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk, and thank you for your cooperation in this project of nurturing a unique person to be their best self in the rapidly-shifting priorities of life in modern industrial society.
big loves,
parent of a mammoth hunter