Cannabis has, in her words, made her a better mother. It’s legal where she lives. Yet she still feels a need to keep her use a secret. Many others feel similarly, fearing legal or child-custody repercussions, or simply the special stigma that society reserves for mothers perceived to transgress.

“I’m still so scared of the stigma, I’m scared of the consequences,” Ashley, 26, told Filter. “I get a lot of comments about how my performance is as a mom. I don’t want to give another reason for people to have a problem with what I’m doing.”

Ashley smoked cannabis occasionally before her daughter came into her life—just a moderate amount every couple of weekends to relax and unwind. When her daughter was born, she ceased smoking entirely, burdened by the guilt she felt of being “a mom taking drugs.” But it wasn’t long before she became curious about other parents out there self-medicating. And when her daughter was around 10 months old, she opened an incognito tab on her computer and searched “moms who do weed.”

“That was when I first heard the term ‘cannamom,”’ Ashley said. “I looked on each social media platform and there’s a cannamom community everywhere. And it was so clear to me that people who engage in [cannabis use] don’t care less about their kids, they don’t love their kids less.”

Connecting with other moms online has alleviated the shame Ashley has felt concerning her own cannabis use.

Ashley, who lives in New York, is able to access cannabis legally at dispensaries, which gives her comfort that she knows exactly what she’s consuming. Initially, she used to cut tiny pieces of gummy edibles and take them when her daughter was already asleep. Now, she occasionally “micro-doses” those gummies when she’s with her daughter, something that helps her manage her anxiety disorder.

“It helps me feel calmer, it helps me hold the moment. I’m not constantly thinking, when can I get a moment to myself? How many pees do I have to take with my child sitting on me? It’s no longer about rushing to the next thing, or trying to make things happen as fast as they can,” she said. “I’m not focusing on the fact that she’s not doing what I want her to do, I’m connecting with her. Instead of placing judgment on either of us, we’re having soft, slow, tender moments. And it’s not that I can’t have those without weed, but it just helps it happen more often.”

Connecting with other moms online has alleviated the shame Ashley has felt concerning her own cannabis use. The communities she visits include r/cannamom on Reddit, where she first found others in her position. Another popular space is r/entwives, a subreddit for women and gender-minority folks who use cannabis. (Its name references the tree people known as “ents” in The Lord of the Rings, a nod to the main cannabis subreddit, r/trees.) It has nearly 120,000 users, who post anything from questions to rants or pictures of their cats.

“It’s a safe space, everyone is kind, everyone is gentle,” said Kara, 52, a moderator on r/entwives who lives in Maryland. “Everyone is super-supportive, and people come with all sorts of questions. It’s just so nice to have that space, it’s vital.”

For many, this online community has led to real-life connections. In Kara’s case, a particularly meaningful one: her girlfriend, Erika.

“We met on Reddit, we started talking on Reddit, and then we started dating on Reddit, and now here we are!” Kara told Filter.

Erika, 49, said that the community focuses on being a positive, stigma-free space—though people have been gently called out for posts that seem to endorse behaviors like driving under the influence or smoking around pets. She’s also seen moms seek safety advice, like how best to store cannabis in child-proof containers.

“It’s about that kind of accountability,” she told Filter.

Erika and Kara both have adolescent children from previous relationships, and Kara is a full-time carer for her 21-year-old son, who has cerebral palsy. They’ve both been open with their children about their cannabis use, but it hasn’t always been that way.

“It was only after legalization that I felt I could have that conversation with my kids without fear of recrimination and repercussions from my ex.”

Erika, who is based in Ontario, said Canada’s 2018 legalization of cannabis made a huge difference to her ability to discuss her use with her kids, mainly by alleviating concerns about custody agreements.

“It was only then that I felt I could have that conversation openly with my kids without fear of recrimination and repercussions from my ex, that gave me the freedom to say, look, we should have this conversation,” she said. “It’s a stigma that’s not there with alcohol, in terms of it being something adults can use in a recreational, responsible way. With marijuana, it’s like, ‘Use it one time, you’re on a slippery slope.’”

Someone all too familiar with the impacts of cannabis-related stigma is Barry Lessin, a harm reduction psychologist in Pennsylvania who has worked with individuals and families impacted by substance use for over 40 years. He often sees patients who are using cannabis to self-medicate anxiety, chronic pain or other health issues, and who are benefiting, he said. However, his patients often feel shame around their cannabis use, which may cause them to hide it from their support networks, as Ashley does when microdosing her gummies.

“Once they’re educated about the idea that your relationship with the substance is like your relationship with nicotine, or your relationship with caffeine, it helps to destigmatize and take the judgment out of cannabis use,” Dr. Lessin told Filter. “They can see that yes, it is medicine. It’s validating for them [to clarify] that a lot of that [stigma] is related to drug laws, drug policy and the drug war, and then they’re more comfortable with using it in a way where they’re not hiding it.”

For many parents who are benefiting from cannabis, medical practitioners’ relationship with the substance adds to the stigma, making it even harder for mothers, in particular, to openly consume it. 

“There’s an awful lot of us who haven’t necessarily found the help or support that they need in the conventional medical system.”

Women are often dismissed in medical settings, with doctors downplaying or ignoring their pain. Erika said that doctors’ lack of experience means many moms have no choice but to self-medicate.

“There’s an awful lot of us who haven’t necessarily found the help or support that they need in the conventional medical system, whether it’s their physical health, hormonal issues, mental health, the assumption is that you’re going to be doing the wrong thing,” she said. “The conception is that it’s not something a professional person, a mother, does.”

Headlines about the continuing spread of legalization may make such experiences surprising to some, but the drug war has a long shadow, as Lessin knows.

“That stigma is really, really engrained,” he emphasized. “Up until 15 years ago, I, as a psychologist working in the field, had an abstinence-only, drug-war infused, one-size-fits-all approach. It wasn’t until I stepped out of that and took a look at the larger picture that I realized, okay, this kind of treatment isn’t helping.”

Very few medical schools, he noted, teach about the endocannabinoid system, which regulates functions like sleep, mood, appetite and memory. So doctors are often uneducated on how cannabis can help with mental or physical health.

“Until it’s being taught in medical schools, it’s going to be a barrier,” Lessin said. “Psychologists and therapists and others coming into the field, 90 percent of them are being taught in the old way of abstinence-only.” he said. He encourages his patients to advocate for their health care, and sometimes speaks to their doctors on their behalf. “It’s part of empowering people. It’s about education.”

“Being an adult is hard, parenting is a different level, and it’s not irresponsible or weak to say that you struggle.”

For Susie*, a 37-year-old mother of two teenage boys, self-medication has been a lifesaver. In the past, she’s struggled with being over-prescribed pharmaceutical anxiety medications, even though she attempted repeatedly to tell doctors she felt numb and couldn’t function on the doses they were giving her. Transitioning to only medicating with cannabis has radically changed her life for the better, she said.

“They had no problem prescribing me Xanax all day long, and they just kept increasing the dosage to the point where I wasn’t a functioning human being anymore,” she told Filter. “I couldn’t have been more medicated, and that was apparently just so acceptable.”

With cannabis, “the fact that it’s decriminalized now means so much.”

In Missouri, where Susie lives, adult-use dispensaries opened in 2023, but it’s been legal medically since 2018 and partially decriminalized since 2014. For Susie, legalization means she’s sure of what she’s purchasing—a kind of security that’s important to her as a mother, she said—and feels able to be open about her use with her children and support circles.

“Not having that would be so exhausting for me, it would be like living a double life,” she said. “I never thought the day would come where I could go and buy weed and not be in trouble at all. Before I couldn’t do anything, but now I can smoke some weed and I can go to dinner, go to the movies, I don’t have issues of freaking out, I don’t have that anxiety anymore.”

Susie also visits r/entwives, where she’s found a community of like-minded women. She’s previously struggled with her drinking, and said cannabis has helped her to rely less on alcohol.

According to Erika, that’s a common type of experience for members of the subreddit to discuss—she’s had her own past struggles with alcohol, too. “The freedom of not having that shame and judgment a lot of time leads people to realize they need help in other areas,” she said. “It’s a lot safer for people to discuss things that are taboo, like relationship issues around the use of substances, and usually it’s alcohol.”

“Being an adult is hard, parenting is a different level, and it’s not irresponsible or weak to say that you struggle,” Erika continued. “There’s a weird, puritanical notion that a woman, or a mother, somehow needs more protection from these dangerous, bad things, because we can’t make decisions rationally, and we aren’t allowed to take responsibility for our mental health.”

“We’re letting go of the fear and the shame.”

As Lessin said, there’s no one-size-fits all approach when it comes to cannabis consumption. Susie, Erika and Kara have each found their own routine with cannabis use that works for them, and Ashley plans to review her use as her daughter gets older.

“The hardest years of parenting, or the most chaotic ones, are the first few ones,” she said. “Once we get through that, I’ll relook at my cannabis use and I’ll refine it, or stop, or cut down. Maybe as she gets older and has sleepovers, I’ll plan a night where I’ll watch a movie and get a little bit high.”

Using cannabis since her daughter’s birth, Ashley recognized, has forced her to come to terms with her preconceived notions about the drug.

“Even a year ago, I would have said that moms who are using cannabis are bad moms,” she said. “And now I realize: No, those moms are sometimes better moms, because it’s about whatever helps us show up for our kids. We’re letting go of the fear and the shame.”

*Names changed to protect anonymity at sources’ request.

Photograph by Elsa Olofsson via Flickr/Creative Commons 2.0

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“It was the most marvelous state of being I’ve ever experienced. And I felt like it was where I’m going to go when I die,” Hughes, 66, told Filter. She experienced her trip under supervision at her therapist’s home in Winnipeg, Manitoba. “I was floating among the stars, there were vines that I was catching onto, and I was laughing. I just couldn’t stop laughing.”

“I think I feared annihilation. I have such comfort now.”

It’s been over a decade since Hughes was first diagnosed with breast cancer, and a few years since she first was told the word “terminal.” Recently, she’s been using psilocybin-assisted therapies in order to better come to terms with her own death—a concept that had previously thrown her into an unending cycle of distress.

“I was experiencing so much anxiety I couldn’t focus on living,” Hughes said. “I think I feared annihilation. I have such comfort now.”

Psilocybin remains banned in Canada under Schedule III of the country’s Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, even if this is frequently ignored. Some very limited exemptions provide pathways to accessing it legally for therapeutic use.

In an email to Filter, Health Canada said that “psilocybin therapies are not available in Canada because there are no approved therapeutic products containing psilocybin in Canada or elsewhere.” Patients can, however, potentially be treated with the drug through clinical trials, or through the government’s Special Access Program, which allows use of non-marketed drugs for the treatment of serious or life-threatening conditions when no other options are possible.

It certainly hasn’t been an easy journey for Hughes to access psilocybin legally. While she wasn’t afraid of the possible repercussions of ordering illegally online—very few people in Canada have ever faced criminal charges for these types of purchases—she wanted to use psilocybin in a controlled setting, with professionals who were trained in guiding her through the trip.

“They said, ‘No, we won’t give you an exemption, and we’re doing this for your safety.’ Are you kidding me? I’m a terminal patient. What are you saving me from?”

But in February 2022, she was denied a Section 56 exemption from Health Canada, which would have allowed her to receive psychedelic therapies from practitioners working with Therapsil—a nonprofit group of health care professionals seeking to make psilocybin therapy easier to access for terminally ill patients.

“They said, ‘No, we won’t give you an exemption, and we’re doing this for your safety,’” Hughes explained. “Are you kidding me? I’m a terminal patient. What are you saving me from? It’s a kind of mental torture.”

After going public with her story, Hughes was contacted by a therapist in Winnipeg working with psilocybin and other psychedelics. She decided she didn’t have time to wait and see if Health Canada would accept her reapplication, and she started working with the therapist in what she termed a legal “gray area”—first microdosing and reflecting on intent, then working up to a medium and large dose.

“Both trips were fabulous. My fear of dying was totally erased,” Hughes said.

With a newfound acceptance of her own mortality, she has been able to live life again, in a way that she couldn’t for years after her initial diagnosis.

“For many people, their anger isn’t only directed at their disease, it’s the fact that their government would rather they die through MAiD than give them access to the medicine.”

For many other patients dealing with overwhelming end-of-life anxiety, it’s not uncommon to choose Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), in the absence of options that make life possible to keep living.

“For many people, their frustration and anger isn’t only directed at their disease, it’s the fact that their own government would rather they die through MAiD than give them access to the medicine that they need,” Therapsil founder Dr. Bruce Tobin told Filter.

According to Tobin, increased psilocybin access for terminally ill patients would decrease the number of people seeking MAiD—opening the door for people who are currently choosing MAiD to be able instead to find peace at the end of their lives.

“Virtually all of us in the psychedelic community consider it a no-brainer that generally speaking, the psilocybin experience will tend to reduce interest in MAiD,” he said. “And people get clarity in their experiences, which allows them to actually make that choice.”

At the same time, Tobin said that for people who undergo psilocybin therapy and then do still choose MAiD, death is often no longer so frightening.

“The psilocybin experience increases death acceptance, so certain patients … come to a place of peace with their understanding that their time to die has come, it’s time to let go, and everything is as it should be,” he said. “So in some cases, the psilocybin experience may actually galvanize the decision to go with MAiD, and people are able to choose to peacefully let go.”

“She was interacting with her family again and cracking jokes, but the other big thing was that she was telling her family and her doctor, ‘I’m ready to go now.’”

One of Tobin’s past patients, Sherry*, chose MAiD after psilocybin therapies. She was suffering with excruciating pain throughout her entire body as a result of terminal cancer, leaving her unable to fully interact with friends and family.

Though Sherry desperately wanted to be free of the pain, her fear of dying stopped her choosing MAiD. It was the morning after her first psilocybin treatment that Tobin got a call from her palliative care doctor to come to the hospital.

“Her pain virtually completely disappeared, they were able to take her off the pain meds and she was fully present,” Tobin related. “She was interacting with her family again and cracking jokes, but the other big thing was that she was telling her family and her doctor, ‘I’m ready to go now.’”

“The following day, she messaged her close friends to come over and say goodbye, and they did,” he continued. “Then she called her MAiD physician, and she died surrounded by her family with ease and acceptance and dignity.”

In this light, Spencer Hawkswell, Therapsil’s president, believes psilocybin also needs to be considered as an adjunct therapy to MAiD, and not only as a replacement.

“We’re talking about human beings who don’t just need medical support in dying, they need medical support in living,” he said. “The entire purpose of our medical system is to ensure that a person is as comfortable as they can be, that we’ve done every single thing that we possibly can to support them in living before we go to that choice of hastening death. Unless we’ve tried psilocybin, we haven’t done everything that we possibly can do.”

“I would love for them to shut down the stores. They should try. The result would be legal psilocybin in this country.”

Hawkswell pointed to illicit psilocybin stores that have been operating openly in Canada in recent years, often online and generally without facing legal consequences. It’s proof, in his opinion, that in upholding its restrictions on treatment, the government is behaving “like a PR firm.”

Hawkswell said the government remains reluctant to prosecute illicit retailers because it would mean a legal case which, he believes, would ultimately prove that Canadians have a Charter right to psychedelic therapy. “I would love for them to shut down the stores. They should try. The result would be legal psilocybin in this country.”

Pointing to the government’s lack of empathy, he asked, “What person in their sane mind would think that it’s okay to deny terminally ill patients access?”

While supporting general legalization, the folks at Therapsil stress the practical and ethical importance of assistance during the psilocybin experience in medical contexts.

“For the right person, done in the right way with the right therapist, this can have profound outcomes,” Dr. Houman Farzin, a trainer and supervisor with the group, told Filter. “But that comes through work, and there’s a misconception that once you do experience it once, it’s all over and everything’s fixed. Usually what happens is you realize what the things are that you need to work on, and then you do that work through therapy and that’s how you make this beneficial.”

“Patients are in a vulnerable state because of the influence of the medicine, so training the right practitioners is of the utmost importance,” he added.

Farzin and the Therapsil team hope that in the coming years, wider access to psilocybin will not only allow more patients to receive better end-of-life care, but also help many other patients—people who may have found other treatments unsuitable or undesirable, and are left unable to live life fully due to pain, anxiety or other conditions.

“My only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner.”

“Psilocybin could be used for all kinds of things, from cluster headaches to anxiety and chronic pain, addiction, so as new research comes out, once it reaches a certain caliber of strength, you may be able to convince Health Canada to grant approval,” he said.

Hughes is equally hopeful that changes could see psilocybin therapies make death less traumatic and more peaceful for families of many other terminally ill patients. Her own experience has been transformative.

“I love myself more. I’m comfortable with myself. I’ve lost so many inhibitions. I laugh more,” she said. “I’m better able to focus on other people and their problems. I just think that’s the best gift you can give your friends and family. My only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner.”

*Name changed to protect privacy.

Top photograph via Peakpx/Public Domain. Inset photograph of Janis Hughes courtesy of Bruno Koehn.

The post “My Fear of Dying Was Erased”—the Call for End-of-Life Psilocybin Care  appeared first on Filter.

PAQ3 is the simple name for Project Autochones du Québec’s most recent project, its Managed Alcohol Program (MAP), which provides alcohol as well as housing and services to people with “severe alcohol addiction.” PAQ is an Indigenous-led organization that supports First Nations, Inuit and Métis people facing housing insecurity in Montreal. The organization uses a “culturally adapted approach based on empowerment and harm reduction.”

PAQ’s MAP house originally opened as a pilot project in 2021, and can accommodate eight residents at a time. Each person has their own lockable bedroom, with access to a communal kitchen and community games room. Participants can choose to be connected with primary care services, and the program has a focus on connecting or reconnecting participants with their Indigenous cultures. Nobody in the house is beholden to overly restrictive rules, only mutual respect and a commitment to the program.

“The MAP is very cutting-edge, they’re very much at the forefront of harm reduction,” Kayla, an intervention worker at the house, told Filter. She formerly used banned drugs, and said that—together with a diploma in addictions, counseling and community—prepared her for her role. “It’s been really cool to be able to experience this, to be able to stretch the counseling muscle, but as well to validate the harm reduction instead of having an abstinence-based sort of thing.”

There’s never an imposed goal to reach abstinence or decrease one’s drinking.

Abstinence-based models of recovery are common everywhere, but particularly in shelter settings. People under the influence of drugs such as alcohol will often be turned away from shelters or services, unless it’s a “wet” shelter. Even if a shelter allows intoxication, it doesn’t always allow consumption on-site, which is where the PAQ3 MAP house differs.

Residents there generally receive one beer an hour, though the amount depends on what they’ve agreed with intervention workers. There’s never an imposed goal to reach abstinence or decrease one’s drinking—instead, the goal is to keep people safe and give residents more control over their own alcohol consumption.

“I’ve witnessed numerous times people have been kicked outta shelters or whatnot,” Pierre Parent, a healthcare navigator with the Indigenous Street Workers Project in Montreal, told Filter. “I know the dire consequences that may occur—that did occur.”

Parent, an Indigenous man from James Bay Cree Territory, has experienced his own addictions and comparable interventions, and has seen many of his peers benefit from MAPs. He noted that this harm reduction approach gives people more autonomy than an abstinence-only policy.

“It’s not realistic, it’s just not realistic [to expect abstinence],” he said. “These are the realities, and we need to believe in a harm reduction approach above all else.”

Parent added that projects like PAQ3 are essential to keeping people alive, helping them to navigate their alcohol use more safely. For people who drink large quantities daily, sudden withdrawal can be extremely dangerous, even fatal. Most MAP participants have been drinking heavily “for years and years and years,” he said. “So this needs to be supervised medically, clinically, properly.”

Residents are permitted to stay at PAQ3 indefinitely. When a space opens up, it’s often filled by people referred from other PAQ sites.

“You’re not meeting people where they’re at if you’re just banning them from using substances.”

“The whole concept of harm reduction means that you have to understand and meet people where they’re at,” Kayla said, highlighting unfair demands made of unhoused people in order for them to “deserve” shelter. “You’re not meeting people where they’re at if you’re just banning them from using substances.”

MAPs across the country have helped people who use alcohol while unhoused; preliminary studies have shown evidence that MAPs “reduce acute and social harms associated with alcohol dependence.” Canada has been a world leader in piloting MAPs, which are now springing up in other countries.

Mary Walsh is a harm reduction researcher at St John’s Women’s Centre, which runs a MAP for women, non-binary and two-spirit folks in Newfoundland. She has seen particular value in asking people about what their goals are for their alcohol use, rather than imposing any expectations.

“We partner with our local health authority’s harm reduction nursing team, and they meet with the health care providers, the case managers and the participants to create a care plan,” Walsh told Filter. “That outlines what folks’ goals are around their alcohol consumption, and what their prescription is going to be for the amount of alcohol they receive through us, as well as what other wraparound supports we can provide to them.”

Walsh noted that there are plenty of goals other than abstinence that participants choose to focus on for their safety and wellbeing.

“We’ve seen people looking to have more choice in the sex work that they do … if they don’t have to worry about getting their alcohol.”

“We found, especially because we’re serving a gendered population, that the goals have been very gendered,” she said. “We’ve seen people looking to have more choice in the sex work that they do, so folks have more choice around what clients they’ll take, or when they can say yes or no to clients if they don’t have to worry about getting their alcohol.”

While PAQ3 works on a residential basis, other MAPs vary. St John’s Women’s Centre doesn’t have access to congregate living settings, so operates on an outreach-based model. Currently, it can work with up to 15 participants.

“We’ve been bringing people alcohol where they live, so sometimes that might look like a shelter, sometimes they have their own independent living, and then depending on the person, they might come pick up the alcohol from our offices and take it back with them,” Walsh said. The program, she emphasized, operates with a high degree of trust and respect, because that’s what its participants deserve.

For Guy Felicella, a harm reduction and recovery advocate who works for the BC Centre on Substance Use, harm reduction was life-saving during his years on the street.

“Being homeless is relentless,” he told Filter. “It’s probably the most mentally and physically punishing condition I’ve ever dealt with or recovered from in my life.”

“You know how they prove that they deserve housing? They’re a human being. That’s the requirement.”

Felicella spent 30 years experiencing homelessness, addiction or jail in Vancouver. During that period he was revived from overdose six times, and faced five bone infections. Shelter housing was never guaranteed. But even if it had been, it wouldn’t have been enough.

“Shelters create an illusion that people are being housed, but they’re not,” he said. “People always say, ‘They’ve got to prove that they deserve housing.’ You know how they prove that they deserve housing? They’re a human being. That’s the requirement.”

Felicella related that he was turned away from shelters in Vancouver multiple times—including during the winter in conditions highly dangerous to people sleeping outside—because he had been using drugs.

On one particular night, “I was turned away from a cold weather shelter because I was high,” he said. “I went and propped open the door to an apartment building and slept in the laundry room. I was woken by two police.” He was then charged with trespassing, before being released back out into the cold.

“I was just saying to myself, man, I just can’t catch a break,” he recalled. “So, you know, the requirement of somebody coming in to get shelter should be that they need shelter, not that you have to be sober to access it.”

“In my hometown, I’ve seen people OD because of the fact that they can’t get help and they feel like they’re stuck,” said Kayla, who is originally from Winnipeg. “People were constantly feeling angry and frustrated, to the point where they just took that anger out on themselves, which was even more detrimental.”

“Flat out, you’d be saving lives. Flat out.”

Both Walsh and Kayla report a high rate of success in that participants in their respective MAPs have gained more stability in their lives. This means more capacity to connect with health care workers, including visiting the dentist and getting consultations for potentially neglected medical issues. Walsh also noted that the programs provide relative financial stability and more food security, as people can spend money they would’ve spent on alcohol on groceries instead.

I asked Kayla what would happen if shelters and services that have abstinence requirements instead allowed consumption on site.

“Flat out, you’d be saving lives,” she immediately replied. “Flat out. You’re saving communities, and you’re saving lives for sure, and you’re undoing harm that has been done by those abstinence-based programs.”

“No place is perfect, and you can’t please all the people all of the time,” Parent said of MAPs. “But during my struggles, I could see myself having to come here. The whole basis for me is harm reduction and trauma-based responses, and you have a safe space here.”

Photograph by Santeri Viinamäki via Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons 4.0

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