This Is What It’s Like To Be High on Cannabis When You’re Blind
Visually Impaired Stoners Explain How Cannabis Affects Them
When you consider the amount of ways to smoke and the variety of weed types on the market, you start to realize that everyone’s high is different. Getting high is a unique experience for everyone, affecting our senses differently.
So, what would getting high be like for someone with impaired senses? Cannabis culture website Herb went looking for answers by they speaking to stoners who are blind.
For Des Delgadillo, 23, getting high is strictly a physical experience.
The L.A. resident has been blind since age 3 due to a diagnosis of congenital glaucoma – a rare condition in which the optic nerve is damaged, often leading to vision loss.
“Even though my parents remember me interacting with the world visually for those first three years, I can’t remember any of it, which means to me things like light and color are purely abstract concepts,” he said.
Like many of us, Delgadillo first tried pot in a high school bathroom. Losing his ‘cannabis virginity’ wasn’t a great experience, he explains, since he was with bad company that “[egged] on the paranoia that’s already at an all-time high for a first-timer.”
Luckily, he rediscovered Mary Jane in college, and had much better results:
“I had the best time. I remember feeling this incredible sense of euphoria, of finding the funny in everything and feeling incredibly positive.”
You may wonder if getting high could give a blind person any kind of visual reaction, like a hallucination. Delgadillo hasn’t experienced that, but the physical experience of being high is transcendent.
“I feel a kind of weightlessness from my chest down, like I’m almost floating. […] My muscles, which are usually pretty tense, relax and I feel looser.”
So that’s what being high is like for a person with complete blindness. But what about partial blindness? Southeast England resident “Greg” has the answers.
Greg, 48, began losing his eyesight at age 18. As this happened, Greg had already tried weed and loved it. He started to experience something called photopsia – a side effect from vision loss that elicits flashes of light. This, combined with being high, can lead to a psychedelic experience that Greg compares to a “60s hippy wash type of vision.”
Greg’s visions aren’t necessarily hallucinations; with the parts of the world that Greg can’t see, his brain fills in the blanks.
“Because of the gaps in my vision, my brain is always trying to fill in the blind spots with guesses at what should be there. Mostly it’s just bursts of color, but sometimes it’s figures of people or animals.”
It’s great that both of these people have experienced therapeutic qualities from weed. We hope that cannabis can continue to help bring joy to folks with sensory impairments – because every adult should be able to feel a great high.
