Welcome to Season Two of Cannabis Koan.

I start this new season by looking at the fascinating parallel between two literary classics on addiction: Thomas De Quincey’s 1821 memoir Confessions of an Opium Eater and William S. Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical 1953 novel Junkie.

Both books conclude with the authors asserting triumph over their drug dependencies. De Quincey claims to have “untwisted, almost to its final links, the accursed chain which fettered me,” while Burroughs states he “awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane.” However, their lived experiences reveal a stark divergence from these tidy narratives of recovery. Opium and heroin remained lifelong crutches for De Quincey and Burroughs, despite their written disavowals.

This glaring gap between memoir and reality is something I’d also like to explore in my own relationship with cannabis which, since the conclusion of Season One, has slipped and slid its way into a resumption of my previous usage.

As much as I’d hoped the once-a-week Cannabis Sabbath was going to work for me, it hasn’t, and for the last few months have been back to vaping every evening, without fail.

Has the time finally come for myself and my "green girlfriend" to part ways for good? Certainly it's time for some change in direction, alongside further unraveling of this riddle of addiction which I call Cannabis Koan. Music used in this episode: -Intro: Paul Simon's demo version of the song -Carmel Ekman & Gal Nisman's cover version -The Persuasions cover version -Rita Wilson & Willie Nelson's cover version -Paul Simon's demo version of the song Books referred to in this episode: -Confessions of an Opium Eater by Thomas De Quincey (1821) -Junkie by William S. Burroughs (1953) -Chasing the Scream by Johann Hari (2015) -Acts of Meaning by Jerome Bruner (1990) -The Stories We Live By by Dan P. McAdams (1993) -The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman (1959) -The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa (1982) -Falling Upward: A Spirituality For The Two Halves Of Life (2011) -Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places (Studies in Jungian psychology by Jungian analysts)