Addiction Culture in the Plant Medicine World
Confronting addiction and denial in plant medicine communities
Originally published August 25, 2023. Revised.
If it seems like I have been focusing a lot on rapé and tobacco, there is a reason. I have over twenty years of personal experience with tobacco, including bouts of full addiction. I am not writing this from the outside. This post is about that journey and about what can happen when a relationship with a plant turns unhealthy.
I am sharing it in hopes that it helps someone going through what I went through, and at minimum brings some awareness to something that keeps growing in plant medicine circles. That thing is the masking of addiction behind spiritual language, and the flat denial that addiction exists inside the realm of medicine work at all.
If we are going to integrate plant medicines into Western life, and I believe that is worth doing, we have to be honest about this part of our collective shadow and about the damage addiction is causing in it.
If you have not read my earlier posts on rapé, start there, because a lot of this builds on them. My first one is here and a more recent one is here. There are other addictions worth addressing. This one is vast enough on its own.
Let’s map out nicotine addiction
The phrase nicotine addiction used to make me picture the chain-smoking adults of my childhood, working through multiple packs of Marlboros a day. Those people mostly left my awareness as smoking went out of fashion.
Today the phrase brings up vape pens, or nicotine gum, or patches. None of that resembled what happened to me. So when it happened, I did not recognize it.
I also want to be clear that I am not only talking about physical addiction. I mean all the ways nicotine gets into and reorganizes human consciousness, which I will come back to.
When it began
My first nicotine use was casual and occasional. Hookah, cigarettes, cigars. None of it pulled me in far enough to touch my health, my life, or my relationships. If I was addicted in those years, I never noticed, and I walked away without a thought.
It was not until I was working with plant medicines like ayahuasca and huachuma that I learned about traditions that treat tobacco as medicine, which had only ever looked like an unhealthy drug to me before. In the jungle we worked extensively with mapacho, jungle tobacco, Nicotiana rustica, considered one of the first plant healers.
I smoked a great deal of mapacho there, partly for the mosquitos and partly ceremonially. I loved it and I had no attachment to it. When I left that life I stopped without any issue and did not touch it for months. It was tied entirely to that setting.
A cure for my sinuses?
Everything changed when a brutal sinus infection hit. This was before I came to understand what is actually going on with so-called sinus infections, which is a different story. A friend told me rapé would heal me. I had been failing at antibiotics and home remedies for months, and I figured I had nothing to lose.
The first time I tried it, my sinuses opened instantly and I could breathe. Alongside the familiar nicotine buzz, I enjoyed it. Then the relief faded and my passages swelled up worse than before.
That is where the pattern started. Use rapé to open my sinuses, believe on some level that it was curing me, watch them close up worse than before, and be unable to breathe normally until the next round.
At first it was once a day. Then twice. Then three times. My tolerance grew and I needed more of it to chase that first opening.
Before I understood what was happening, I was in the grip of full-blown nicotine addiction. And I was in denial about it, telling myself this was sacred medicine healing me.
There were times I could feel that the plant had taken up residence in my consciousness and was moving my hands for me.
Something worth knowing, which I did not know then, is that this loop is documented. In a series of long-term nasal snuff users, most had developed chronic rhinitis, with gross swelling of the septum and turbinates, and biopsies showing squamous metaplasia and subepithelial edema. The authors attribute part of it to a drug-related rhinitis driven by the vasoconstrictors in tobacco (Am J Otolaryngol, 2005). Blocked and stuffy is where this road goes. I was not failing at the medicine. I was on the standard route.
Enter the rapé worms
It became more obvious as thoughts of rapé started eating my mind. If I was not actively taking it, I was replaying the last session or planning the next one. I started calling them rapé worms. Intrusive, involuntary, parasitic.
Watching the worms is what let me see the tobacco spirit’s occupation of my consciousness for what it was. I felt powerless, and the only thing I felt capable of doing was justifying more. I tried to stop. Unlike every earlier round with tobacco, I could not walk away from rapé. If it was available I would find an excuse to take it, and then feel ashamed, and then find another excuse.
Other times I just gave in to the cravings entirely. Soon I was sitting with rapé every few hours and building my days around it. Mornings. The middle of the night when I could not sleep. Boredom. Emotional release. Bowel movements. The medicine had become my solution to everything, which is another way of saying it had stopped solving anything.
Misery loves company
One clear sign of rapé addiction that I now recognize in other people is the urge to spread the use. I find it genuinely fascinating how tobacco hijacks a consciousness in order to propagate more dependency through it.
In my addicted fervor I introduced it to friends, served it at ceremonies, and advocated for it constantly. I became one of rapé’s greatest ambassadors. At the time I believed with my whole heart that I was helping people the way it had helped me.
When the “cure” becomes the cause
Eventually I understood that my rapé use was no longer supporting healing. It was driving the problem. Instead of helping my sinuses, it was now producing my sinus trouble. What began as a crutch had started crippling me.
And quitting physically seemed impossible. Nicotine moves hormones, blood sugar, and energy, so stopping meant walking into serious withdrawal. So rapé became the cure for the pains that rapé was causing. That is what addiction is. The cure becomes the cause.
I want to say clearly that I also experienced incredible emotional healing during those years. Both things happened. I was also stuck in patterns that should have been much easier to shift, and looking back, the nicotine addiction shaped most of that period of my life, right down to mirroring the dysfunctional relationships I needed to end.
The only way out was to eliminate my supply and get through the weeks that followed. Having now been through withdrawal several times, I know its shape.
Here I want to correct something in how I used to describe that shape, because getting it wrong keeps people from planning for it. Nicotine itself has a half-life of about two hours. Cotinine, its main metabolite, clears within a couple of days. Chemically you are clean in about seventy-two hours. What takes longer is the brain. Chronic nicotine use increases the availability of beta-2 nicotinic receptors, and imaging found those levels still elevated at one month of abstinence and back to non-smoker levels somewhere between six and twelve weeks (Cosgrove et al., Arch Gen Psychiatry, 2009).
Which means the hard part is not the detox. The hard part is the long stretch afterward when there is nothing in your system and you still do not feel like yourself. If you are in that window and think it is permanent, you will relapse on schedule. It is weeks, not forever.
I quit rapé successfully a few times before it finally stuck. The last time, I went on an iboga retreat to chemically reset my brain, which was a sledgehammer to kill an ant. But it worked. I came out free of tobacco and with deep personal insight I had not gone looking for. That being said, iboga is not a casual experience and itself not something I am recommending for everyone dealing with addiction. It has it’s own dangers, and that is for another article.
Nicotine addiction is a real issue
Some people minimize this. Lots of people are addicted to nicotine, so what. True, and not a defense. About a third of people who take up smoking go on to dependence, against roughly fifteen percent of drinkers and about fifteen percent for other drugs (Anthony, Warner and Kessler, 1994). Nicotine sits near the top of the list. And in plant medicine circles the denial runs deep, so people spiral quietly while everyone around them nods.
Where I have found the line most blurred is in calling an experience like mine simply being out of alignment, or lacking right relationship with the plant. Both phrases relocate the problem into the user’s spiritual conduct and skip the chemistry entirely. They also badly understate how brutally hard realigning anything is when you are in the throes of it.
I know I am not the only one who has had that kind of daily rapport with rapé. Very few people in these circles will use the word addiction for it. That silence gets fed, implicitly and constantly, by influencers and by the commercial interests around these plants.
We have to bring light to this shadow before we can heal it collectively. Until it gets openly named as what it is, addiction, dependency, or misalignment, my experience stays one story among many that nobody counts.
Ads fuel overuse
The rapé marketplace deserves its own discussion, because it is where most people now meet this medicine. As someone who gets targeted with rapé ads constantly, I notice things in the messaging.
Four Visions, now at fourvisions.com, still dominates that ad space. I have ordered good things from them and I recognize their educational intentions. This is not a takedown of Four Visions specifically. It is an analysis of marketing messages that are everywhere, and of what those messages produce.
First, the rapé and tobacco offerings still carry no standard nicotine warning. As a lawyer I have questions about that. When I first wrote this I wondered whether the species might dodge the tobacco designation, and having looked properly, it does not. Mapacho is Nicotiana rustica, which is tobacco. Powdered tobacco sniffed through the nostrils is dry snuff, which FDA names explicitly as smokeless tobacco. Since 2010 smokeless tobacco packages and advertisements have been required to carry one of four warnings, one of which reads that smokeless tobacco is addictive (FDA). Since 2022 the statutory definition reaches nicotine from any source. There is no botanical loophole here. Four Visions’ own age gate now asks buyers to certify they are of legal age to purchase tobacco products, so the category is not in dispute on their own site. The warning is simply absent.
What I find more troubling is the relationship-building framing, offered without any mention of addiction. Their product copy describes hapé as a very powerful plant with the power to heal, and warns that when it is abused and not treated with respect it can cause harm. Then it explains that hapé is made from leaves not grown commercially or hybridized for high nicotine, and concludes that it therefore has none of the negative properties of commercial cigarettes (Four Visions).
That last claim is worth stopping on, because it is checkable and it is backwards. Nicotiana rustica does not need to be hybridized for high nicotine. It is naturally several times richer in nicotine than the Nicotiana tabacum in cigarettes, and analysis of rapé samples confirmed rustica as the tobacco in them (Food Chem Toxicol, 2015). The absence of commercial breeding is being offered as a reason the product is safe, when the plant it points to is the more potent one.
The same pages instruct that hapé “should never be consumed habitually or socially”, and then, a sentence or two later, that “dosages can be increased after prolonged use” once you have grown accustomed to the medicine and built a relationship with the plant (Four Visions). Read those two instructions in sequence.
My translation has not changed since I first wrote it. Once you are tolerant to the alkaloids, increase your dose to chase the same result. Addiction is being described as spiritual relationship building and intuition, which obscures a very ordinary chemical hook.
There is a newer wrinkle. You can now subscribe to hapé on a thirty, sixty, or ninety day auto-delivery, and the pitch beside it suggests subscribers are more likely to experience a profound connection with their plant ally. Standing orders of a nicotine product, with depth of connection as the incentive.
I will also say this. The original version of this post was widely shared, and I know it reached people in this industry. Some language has softened since. Their current explainer, though, states that unlike commercial tobacco products, “rapé tobacco is not addictive” (Four Visions). That is the same alkaloid, delivered faster, from a species that carries more of it.
And in the years since I first wrote this, a dozen more shops have appeared saying the same things in the same voice. The problem was never one vendor. Four Visions sells for profit, and more dependency means more sales, but honestly, the whole scene now runs on this vocabulary. I see it firsthand, constantly, in the people who come to me.
Addiction vs “sacred relationship”
The standard objection is that indigenous tribes use rapé daily without addiction. It is a fair point and it needs nuance rather than dismissal.
A friend went through his rapé initiation with the Yawanawá and came away thinking that by clinical criteria the daily use they saw would qualify as dependence. That is one man’s read and I am not going to hang an argument on it. What I will say is that traditional use sits inside a structure. A role, a season, a purpose, a community that notices. Our use does not have that. Take the practice out of the container and what is left is a potent nicotine product and a person alone with it.
Four Visions markets relationship building without that context. Someone with real intention might develop a non-disruptive rapport with this plant. But nicotine carries high odds naturally, and even the source cultures show daily dependence by any outside measure.
What starts as spiritual ritual very often escalates into habit once tolerance and withdrawal do their work. When your life starts revolving around rapé and the craving for it, the word sacred is doing a lot of load-bearing work.
Thought experiment. Could you have a sacred bond with your vape pen?
On the question of how much is too much, I would rather hand you a teacher than my opinion, and I did that here.
Seeking clarity
Where is the line between medicine and addiction? When does a healing plant like rapé start compounding the very issues it was meant to help? What responsibility do the stewards and sellers of these medicines have around addiction education? These are worth real discussion as we chart this territory.
I am only scratching the surface here, and I understand this may land hard for some people. Please know I am speaking without judgment. I am sharing my own story for perspective.
If you are questioning your own rapé or medicine reliance, honest self-inquiry helps. Can you stop without thinking about it, and for how long? If you cannot quit, that is your answer and you do not need to second-guess it. If you stop and find yourself fantasizing about it, that is obsession and you already know.
Support exists if you go looking for it, whether that is a twelve-step room or some other structure that reaches for the deeper roots underneath all addiction. My path is not the answer. Discovering the parts of myself I had been ignoring turned out to be the essential thing, and those parts needed real care rather than another dose.
More on this to come. Reach out if you need support. Together we heal.
Balancing body and spirit
Properly restoring mineral levels and actually processing emotion are both key to getting out of addiction, because those imbalances tend to be driving the pattern from underneath.
There are good free mineral balancing resources through the Root Cause Protocol if you need somewhere to start. I offer guidance in this realm as my schedule allows.
Healing happens holistically, in spirit and mind and body at once. Keep questioning. Keep learning. More to come.
