TL;DR
A cannabis ceremony is a facilitated gathering built on intention, a held container and a clear ending, with cannabis participation optional. There is no clinical research showing it works as a treatment: what exists is psychedelic research on set and setting, plus one qualitative ethnography of a Catalan community. The documented risks are real, including a 22-30% rate of cannabis use disorder and observed associations with psychotic disorder at daily and high-potency consumption.
People ask me what happens in a cannabis ceremony, and they’re usually expecting me to describe a drug experience. It isn’t that. A cannabis ceremony is a structured gathering with a beginning, a middle and an end, held by someone whose job is to keep the container steady. The plant is optional. The structure is not. I want to be honest with you from the first line: there is no clinical research showing that cannabis ceremony works as a treatment. No trials, no reviews, nothing. So this isn’t an article about proof. It’s an article about what actually happens in the room, why it’s built that way, and what you genuinely need to know before you consider it.
Gentle Reminders
- Cannabis ceremony has never been clinically tested as a treatment.
- Roughly 22-30% of people who consume cannabis develop cannabis use disorder (NIDA, 2024). Daily consumption is associated with a threefold increase in the odds of a psychotic disorder, and daily high-potency products with nearly fivefold (Di Forti et al., Lancet Psychiatry, 2019). Both are observational findings: association, not proven cause.
- What research exists is on psychedelics generally, and on set and setting. Extending it to cannabis is an inference, not a finding.
- Most of what you’ve read about 5,000 years of ceremonial cannabis is wrong.
What is a cannabis ceremony?
A cannabis ceremony is a facilitated gathering in which people come together with a shared intention, and cannabis may be brought in as part of that container. A rare peer-reviewed ethnography of a ceremonial cannabis community, in rural Catalonia, found that ritual structure appeared to function as harm reduction and strengthened community bonds (Kohek et al., International Journal of Drug Policy, 2021).
That study is qualitative fieldwork in one community. It describes a practice and proposes a function. It doesn’t measure clinical outcomes, and I won’t pretend it does.
Here’s what separates ceremony from consumption. Consumption is a person and a substance. Ceremony adds three things: a stated intention, a held container, and a closing. You arrive knowing why you came. Someone is responsible for the room. And there’s a defined point where the experience ends and you return to ordinary life. Take away any one of those and you have a party, or a private habit, or something less kind than either.
In the ceremonies I facilitate, cannabis is always optional and always microdose-level. Never heavy ceremonial dosing. Plenty of people come and never bring the plant in at all, and their experience is not lesser for it.
Where cannabis ceremony actually comes from
The strongest archaeological evidence sits at the Jirzankal Cemetery on the Pamir Plateau in western China, around 500 BCE. Researchers detected cannabinol, a compound left behind as THC breaks down, on the charred interior surfaces of nine of ten wooden braziers and two burnt stones from eight tombs, while external control surfaces came back clean (Ren et al., Science Advances, 2019).
That’s real chemistry, and it’s rare. The burned plants expressed higher THC levels than are typically found in wild cannabis, which suggests deliberate selection. But read the researchers carefully. They write that it is possible a complex set of religious practices occurred. The compounds are confirmed. The ceremony is an inference drawn from where the braziers were found, which was in graves.
Now the story most articles tell you, and why it collapses.
The 5,000-year claim is not true
You’ll read everywhere that Emperor Shen Nung documented cannabis medicine in 2737 BCE. He didn’t. The Shennong Bencao Jing was compiled somewhere between the 1st century BCE and the 2nd century CE, and the name of the legendary Shennong was attached later as a mark of respect, not a record of who wrote it. Worse, the original Han-era text was lost. The version read today is a 19th-century rebuild by a Qing-dynasty scholar, Sun Xingyan. That popular claim compresses roughly 2,700 years and passes a legend off as a date.
You’ll also read about Scythian bongs. Those don’t exist. The claim traces to tabloids misreading a 2015 National Geographic report on a find of gold vessels, which showed no charring at all and were most plausibly for drinking.
What can be said carefully
The Pazyryk burial mounds in the Altai, 5th to 3rd century BCE, produced a wooden tent frame, copper burners holding hot stones, and charred hemp seeds. That lines up strikingly with the account left by the ancient Greek writer Herodotus. But Herodotus was writing second-hand about a foreign people he never lived among, and hemp seeds contain almost no active cannabinoids. Suggestive, not demonstrated.
As for India, a Vedic hymn names a plant called bhanga among plants that relieve anxiety, though whether bhanga meant cannabis is disputed among Sanskritists. What is unambiguous is the later Indian record: bhang in devotional practice, the link to the god Shiva, the festivals of Holi and Maha Shivaratri, and its long-standing place in Ayurvedic medicine (Touw, Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 1981). Documented. Just not Vedic.
What actually happens in the Elevation Ceremony?
The Elevation Ceremony is fully online, free, and recurring. It runs on a simple arc that mirrors the three-phase structure described in the psychedelic therapy literature: preparation, the experience itself, then integration (Cycowicz, Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2025). That shape isn’t decorative, at least not in the psychedelic literature it borrows from, where preparation and integration are treated as part of the work rather than bookends to it.
The circle opens by settling. Bodies land, screens fade into the background, and each person names an intention for themselves. Not a goal. An intention, which is a different thing: what you’re willing to feel rather than what you want to get.
Then the movement begins. Expressive movement comes before anything else because in my experience the body reaches material the thinking mind will happily talk around for a decade. Kriyas follow, breath and rhythm working together, and this is usually the point where people notice something shift. Whatever’s been held starts to surface: anxiety, grief, anger, shame, whatever is actually there rather than what you planned on.
If you’re bringing cannabis in, you do so at your own discretion and at microdose level, and only if it’s legal where you are. Many participants don’t. The container works either way, which is a thing I say often and mean literally.
The close is deliberate. There’s an integration window, because what surfaces in an open state needs somewhere to land. Then it ends. I treat clean edges as part of the safety.
The recording is available for seven days only. That’s deliberate too. This is a live practice, not a library.
Join the next free Elevation Ceremony if you’d like to experience the structure rather than read about it.
Why is it structured this way at all?
Because the container shapes the experience. Norman Zinberg’s foundational book Drug, Set, and Setting (Yale University Press, 1984) argued that the effects of any psychoactive substance are determined by three factors together: the pharmacology of the drug, the mindset and expectation the person brings, and the physical and social environment. Drug, set, setting. Change the setting and you change what happens.
There’s more recent support for the same idea from a different direction. A JAMA Psychiatry review documented that spiritual and existential components are central to outcomes in psychedelic-assisted therapy, and are under-addressed by standard clinical models (Palitsky et al., JAMA Psychiatry, 2023). Yaden and Newberg’s survey of transformative spiritual experience points the same way, toward integration as the thing that determines whether an experience leaves anything lasting behind (Yaden & Newberg, Oxford University Press, 2022).
Now the honest caveat, and I won’t bury it. All of that is psychedelic research. Extending it to cannabis is an inference. The same principles are widely assumed to apply, but they have not been tested for cannabis specifically. I build ceremonies this way because it’s coherent, because participants tell me it holds them, and because the alternative is no structure at all. Not because a trial told me to.
Within Emotional Liberation®, the method I teach, ceremony is one setting among several for the same four tools: psycho-spiritual inquiry, expressive movement, kriyas, and plant medicine. In that order, and plant medicine last for a reason. It’s the optional one. Your deep inner knowing is the thing doing the work, and it doesn’t require a plant to speak.
The real risks you need to weigh
Between 22% and 30% of people who consume cannabis develop cannabis use disorder (NIDA, 2024). In 2021, an estimated 16.3 million people in the US aged 12 and over met criteria for it, around 5.8% of that population (SAMHSA/NSDUH, 2021). That is not a rare outcome, and anyone selling you ceremony without mentioning it is not being straight with you.
On psychosis, the largest multi-site European study found daily cannabis consumption associated with adjusted odds of 3.2 (95% CI 2.2-4.1) for a psychotic disorder compared with never-consumers, rising to 4.8 (2.5-6.3) for daily high-potency products above 10% THC (Di Forti et al., Lancet Psychiatry, 2019). The same paper estimated that if high-potency products were unavailable, 12.2% of first-episode psychosis cases across 11 sites might be prevented, rising to 30.3% in London and 50.3% in Amsterdam.
Read those numbers carefully. They are observational. Lancet Psychiatry later published a formal correspondence, High-potency cannabis and incident psychosis: correcting the causal assumption, challenging that causal framing, with reverse causation and confounding by early self-medication both live objections. Associated with. Never causes.
And the plant is not what it was. Illicit-market THC potency rose from 3.96% to 16.14% between 1995 and 2022, and dispensary concentrates can exceed 40% (NIDA, 2024). Whatever was on those braziers in 500 BCE, it wasn’t that.
Who should not do this
If you’re newer to all of this, the table below is the part to read twice. Any single row is a reason to sit this one out.
| If any of these apply to you | Why it’s a concern |
|---|---|
| Personal or family history of psychosis, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder | This is where the psychosis link is strongest, and stronger still in young males (NIDA, 2023). |
| You’re pregnant or breastfeeding | Not advised. There’s no established safe level during pregnancy or breastfeeding. |
| You’re under 25 | The brain is still developing. Heavy early consumption is linked to lasting effects on memory, processing speed, and academic and income outcomes (NIDA, 2024). |
| You have a history of cannabis use disorder | Roughly 22-30% of people who consume cannabis develop it (NIDA, 2024). A past pattern is reason to abstain. |
| You take psychiatric medication | Speak to the prescribing clinician first. Interactions and effects on your condition aren’t something to guess at. |
Two more, plainly. Don’t drive. And ceremony facilitators, myself included, are not clinicians. What I offer is support alongside care, never a replacement for it. If you’re in treatment, stay in treatment.
Is a cannabis ceremony legal?
Cannabis law varies enormously by country and, in the US, by state, and it’s changing fast. In April 2026, the US Department of Justice issued a final order moving marijuana to Schedule III for FDA-approved and state-licensed medical products (Federal Register, 2026). A separate DEA hearing on rescheduling cannabis more broadly from Schedule I to Schedule III concluded in July 2026 (DEA, 2026), and the outcome may well have changed by the time you read this. Check your own jurisdiction. Nothing here is legal advice.
There’s a distinction people miss. Legality of personal consumption and legality of a group ceremony are different questions. Supply, facilitation for payment, and gathering all carry separate exposure. A jurisdiction that tolerates the first may take a very different view of the second.
This is one of several reasons the Elevation Ceremony is free, online, and never involves me supplying anything to anyone. Each participant is responsible for their own choices, in their own jurisdiction, in their own home.
Frequently asked questions
Does a cannabis ceremony heal trauma?
There’s no evidence that it does. Cannabis ceremony has never been studied as a clinical intervention: no trials, no reviews, no outcome data. What exists is research on psychedelics generally and on set and setting, plus one ethnography of a single Catalan community (Kohek et al., 2021). I facilitate a practice, not a treatment.
Do I have to take cannabis to attend?
No. Cannabis participation is always optional in the Elevation Ceremony, and a good number of participants never bring it in. The structure carries the experience: intention, movement, kriyas, integration, closing. If cannabis is illegal where you live, is contraindicated for you, or simply doesn’t appeal, come anyway.
Is this the same as an ayahuasca or psilocybin ceremony?
No. The pharmacology, the intensity and the duration are all different, and so is the risk profile. I work with cannabis and psilocybin only, at microdose level, never at heavy ceremonial dosing. If you’re weighing up the psychedelic side, I’ve written separately about psychedelic therapy for trauma and what the trials do and don’t show.
How long is the recording available?
Seven days only, and then it comes down. This is a live practice with a defined beginning and end, and the seven-day window keeps it that way. You can find the full details, along with the studies behind how I work, on The Science page and in the FAQs.
The Bottom Line
A cannabis ceremony is a container, not a cure. Intention, a held space, and a clean ending. The historical lineage is real but much shorter and much more specific than the internet claims, with Jirzankal around 500 BCE as the one site resting on confirmed chemistry rather than retelling. The reasoning behind the structure borrows from psychedelic research on set and setting, and that borrowing is an inference nobody has tested for cannabis.
The risks are documented even where the benefits aren’t. If psychosis runs in your family, if you’re pregnant, under 25, on psychiatric medication, or have struggled with cannabis before, this is not for you, and there’s no shame in that.
If the structure interests you more than the plant does, that’s a good instinct. Your deep inner knowing was always the point. The next Elevation Ceremony is free and online, and you’re welcome exactly as you are.
About the Author
Becca Williams is an emotions therapist and plant medicine facilitator, and the creator of Emotional Liberation®. She has been featured in LifeHacker, Psychedelic Invest, and on the Montel Williams show. Learn more about her background and approach on the Meet Becca page.