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If residue found in tombs buried deep in the remote Pamir Mountains of western China can be trusted, humans have been smoking marijuana since 500 BC. These early adopters, archaeologists posit, selected or cultivated cannabis plants with high THC content, which they then burned using stones heated in a fire. Cloaked in this heady plume, they communed with one another, as well as with the afterlife and spirits that existed beyond regular consciousness; they played music on makeshift harps and ate food from wooden bowls and marveled at how their glass beads refracted the light of the fire. In essence, they seshed.
Two and a half millennia later, the sesh has gone from mortuary ritual to mass-market habit. As of 2024, more than half of all Americans lived in states where recreational weed was legal and nearly 80 percent lived in a county with a dispensary, according to the Pew Research Center. The 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimated 64 million Americans consumed cannabis within the past year. For reference, according to the same survey series, only about 18 million Americans did so in 1996, when California became the first state to allow medical marijuana. In 2022, stoners outnumbered boozehounds for the first time in the survey’s history: About 18
million people said they used marijuana on a daily or near-daily basis, compared with about 15 million high-frequency drinkers
.
“The price of THC has plummeted,” says Jonathan Caulkins, Ph.D., a professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, who researches drug policy. “You’d expect a big increase [in use] from that alone, especially when legalization also reduces public stigma and fear of arrest.”
The new stoner is not always new. “Cannabis has an image as a young person’s drug,” Caulkins says. “But people older than 35 are responsible for half of all its consumption. In olden times, people would try drugs when they were young, but then they’d get a job and a spouse and have kids and they’d leave that youthful behavior behind. As cannabis gets normalized, the adults don’t mature out of it the way they used to.”
Whereas marijuana was a central aspect of just about every notable 20th-century countercultural movement, its ability to convey meaning or identity has been sanded away in the mainstream. In 2026, being a resident of the Pacific Time Zone or a cable television subscriber is a rarer trait than being a cannabis user. When a middle-aged woman takes a gummy on a flight, she’s not in dialogue with Allen Ginsberg. She’s just afraid of flying. When you walk by a construction site at lunchtime and see the crew eating chicken over rice and passing around a blunt, they’re not being purposefully transgressive or anti-establishment. They’re just bored at work.
As weed gets more potent (the average cannabis strain sold at dispensaries today is up to five times stronger than the strongest weed in 1999, per Caulkins’s research), consuming it becomes more frictionless. Getting high has never been easier—and the highs are higher than ever. Flower (the archetypal green buds and stems) still accounts for a plurality of revenue, but most of the industry’s year-over-year growth has come from edibles, vapes, and pre-rolls. For this year, the cannabis industry is projected to produce $47 billion in revenue, roughly equivalent to that of the NFL, NBA, and MLB combined. Scientists in white lab coats create new strains, which are then patented by IP lawyers at white-shoe firms. Your dealer fills out a W-2 form every April, and your dealer’s dealer is the S corp that gainfully employs them.
Since cannabis is now a market, there’s ample market research on its users. In a 2024 survey of marijuana users by the Harris Poll, 64 percent of respondents said they like to get high when they “want to relax and unwind,” and 53 percent said they do so “to ease [their] anxiety.” When asked if “using marijuana provides [them] with a sense of connection and alleviates feelings of loneliness,” 61 percent said yes.
While cannabis, like alcohol, was once considered a social lubricant, modern smokers are more likely to use cannabis for therapy than for partying. When Caulkins asks people why they use marijuana, he says their answers usually fall into two main camps: being high comforts them and they find comfort in the ritual of getting high. Notably, these answers are couched in the language of wellness, not togetherness.
“There’s a stereotype that if you’re using alcohol alone,” Caulkins says, “it’s a sign you have a problem. There are an awful lot of people who use cannabis by themselves, and some of them actually say this is a positive thing. They’re like, ‘I’m taking my vitamins—I don’t need to go to a bar with my friends to take my vitamins.’ ”
In other words, the story of marijuana mirrors the story of everything else. Like those early smokers in the Pamir Mountains 2,500 years ago, people today still seek a sense of connection. But in an atomized, post–Bowling Alone society, it makes sense that the communal sesh has been gradually replaced by smoking a bowl, alone.