This story is part of a digital issue of Queer Kentucky surrounding Harm Reduction and its intersection with the LGBTQ+ community.⁠ Check out the full digital issue here.

Three years ago, Liz Freedman got sober from the substances that ruled her life starting when she was 12.

“I’m bipolar so I’ve kind of always just had this really bad anxiety,” she said. “When I was a kid I had anger issues, but I wasn’t actually angry. I was just sad and needed something to take me away.”

For Freedman, it started with huffing household chemicals. But that quickly led to abusing pills and alcohol. 

“I would do anything I could. That is what my life revolved around,” she said. “I ended up getting addicted to meth, Adderall and cocaine in my 20s. I also drank very heavily and I also used benzos.”

When she was 28, Freedman woke up one day and realized how unmanageable and dangerous her addiction was. She said she had hit so many “bottoms” by this point, but this day was when she finally decided she wanted to be more present in her life. So she went to rehab.

“ I got sober and I was abstinent from all mood and mind altering things for about two years,” Freedman said. 

In her sobriety Freedman also learned how to manage her bipolar disorder and other mental health struggles, the original reason she turned to drugs and alcohol for relief. But she wasn’t cured of anxiety, trouble sleeping, and flashbacks, so she started thinking about using cannabis as a way to relax her mind.

“I asked myself a lot of questions before I pursued a medical marijuana license,” she said. “ I felt so much shame because of what I personally felt I had heard in AA rooms.”

Programs like Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous promote complete abstinence from any mind altering drug.    

“I don’t want to speak down about AA because I know it helps some people, but I believe that the rhetoric can be very harmful,” Freedman said. “So I’m asking myself in those moments, why has it been so demonized in my brain to take a mood or mind altering substance when it could be so incredibly helpful?”

Freedman says for her, using marijuana feels very different from other drugs and alcohol. She uses it when she wants to calm down a little. 

“Sometimes it’s part of my daily routine, sometimes it’s not,” she said. “I don’t feel the phenomenon of craving with marijuana. I just feel like with marijuana, it doesn’t take it all away. It just soothes it. Whereas when you pop a pill, I personally disappear.” 

Freedman ended up getting a medical marijuana license so she could buy cannabis at dispensaries. She wanted to know what she was buying and wanted to use products with more CBD than THC (the psychoactive component in cannabis) to help her relax. For the last year, she’s considered herself California Sober, a popular term for people who don’t use any drugs or alcohol except marijuana. 

Even though sobriety programs like AA or rehab centers still stress complete abstinence, more people in the recovery world see marijuana use as a way to help people in recovery avoid more harmful substances. 

Dr. Peter Grinspoon is a cannabis specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, an instructor at Harvard Medical School, and a recovering opioid addict. In an op-ed from 2023, Dr. Grinspoon wrote about how using cannabis is not a “slippery slope” for every addict. The common wisdom in many recovery circles (and the true experience for many addicts) is that using marijuana lowers your inhibitions. This could lead to wanting to use the substances that were more harmful. 

But Grinspoon writes this is not true for everyone in recovery and shouldn’t always be looked at as a relapse: 

“Using medicinal cannabis to transition away from more dangerous drugs, such as alcohol or heroin, is an increasingly popular and accepted form of harm reduction. I have had tremendous success in my clinical practice transitioning people from both medicinal opioids and alcohol to cannabis. I find cannabis to be particularly efficacious, because it can help treat or palliate many of the symptoms that may have helped incite and fuel the addiction to these other drugs in the first place, such as anxiety, insomnia, chronic pain, and trauma.”

He also writes that the abstinence model in AA isn’t very effective-only 5-10% of people who attempt it stay sober.

That doesn’t mean cannabis is completely harmless. People under 25 using marijuana could impair her brain development. Pregnant or nursing people shouldn’t use cannabis, and it’s dangerous to drive when you’re high (according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration). But if the choice is between heroin or smoking a joint to take the edge off of a bad week, Dr. Grinspoon says for some people cannabis is a good option. 

Being completely sober for two years helped Freedman understand what her mind and emotions were like free from substances. And even with re-introducing marijuana, she still feels the clarity and peace she found in sobriety. 

“I feel like if you are struggling with addiction, you can’t go wrong with a period of abstinence because I feel you gain a tremendous amount of wisdom and self awareness,” she said. “But  I think addiction is a spectrum. I think we all have our own needs for that, and I think to judge or to down anyone in any way for how she are getting better is out of this world.”