When Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson dropped acid in 1956, it transformed his thinking about sobriety. He experienced a spiritual awakening that led him to embrace LSD as a potential treatment for chronic alcoholism, believing acid could put people in touch with the higher power needed to overcome addiction. (Clinical studies have since indicated that Wilson’s instinct was spot-on: LSD use may indeed help reduce alcohol abuse.) Wilson couldn’t have known it at the time, but he was making early contributions to what we know today as the “Cali sober” lifestyle.

When journalist and rave culturalist Michelle Lhooq popularized the term Cali sober in 2019, she may not have known about Wilson’s acid trip, but she did know she wanted to quit drinking and using hard drugs. Both cannabis and psychedelics, she felt, could be allies on that journey—useful substitutes for more harmful compounds.

Cali sober generally means avoiding booze and hard drugs but not weed or psychedelics such as acid, MDMA and psilocybin. But Cali sober is a flexible lifestyle that allows people a nuanced approach to sobriety and intoxication. Some who call themselves Cali sober still drink lightly on occasion, often just one glass of wine or a single cocktail. And as you might expect for a term short for “California,” it comes with healthful associations: Yoga, meditation and other wellness practices are common add-ons to the Cali sober life. Above all, going Cali sober means taking control of your own health and wellness and rejecting rigid, binary definitions of sobriety.

“What matters with Cali sober is that it becomes additive to life and happiness,” culture journalist Jackie Bryant tells me, “not a numbing or addictive way out of life.” Writer Molly Lambert has remarked that going Cali sober means you are “weed edge”—an update of being “straight edge,” a descriptor popularized by sober punk rockers who rejected intoxicants and believed sobriety gave them an advantage.

In recent years Cali sober events, though mostly on a pandemic pause now, have been growing more common, including Weed Raves in L.A. and New York City hosted by Lhooq and high-end cannabis-infused dinner parties from Malibu to Seattle. Numerous Northern California weed farms now host wellness retreats, and this Dope Tutor has attended more than one Cali sober event that was just as fun and social as any booze-infused event.

Though Cali sober might be a prime example of an enlightened 21st century self-care strategy, the practice of choosing cannabis over other recreational drugs emerged long ago. In the Jazz Age of the 1920s and 1930s, some musicians drank booze or took heroin before playing—others just smoked weed. (By my estimation, the weed smokers generally had longer musical careers.) When beatniks and poets began embracing jazz and cannabis in the 1940s and 1950s, some replaced alcohol in favor of cannabis.

As the Age of Aquarius dawned in the 1960s, LSD proliferated beyond government labs and onto the streets. New lifestyle practices revolving around cannabis and psychedelics began to emerge as a backlash to society’s alcoholic predilections. Subculture gatherings like the Rainbow Family of Living Light in the 1970s and early reggae festivals strongly discouraged alcohol, but weed was shared freely and widely. Many hippie communes and organic farms did not allow booze, though ganja and other “visionary” plants were an integral part of operations. This was not a world of microdosing before a cocktail party—this was a world of creating alternative realities separate from the dominant culture. These early pioneers laid the groundwork for the Cali sober lifestyle.

Yet the burgeoning societal shift away from alcohol and toward cannabis and psychedelics ran into a brick wall in the 1980s: Ronald Reagan and the war on drugs. The implementation of widespread workplace drug testing had a huge effect on the ability of working people to consume cannabis: Weed can be detected up to 60 days after consumption, whereas cocaine typically leaves the body after only a few days. Prohibition does not stop people from using drugs, but it can make drug use more dangerous, as users seek other, sometimes riskier, paths to intoxication. And unlike cannabis at the time, alcohol was cheap and easily accessible by anyone of legal age.

In 1996 California was the first state to legalize medical cannabis, launching a post-Reagan renaissance in mainstream pop culture of what we now know as the Cali sober lifestyle. It took more than two decades for legalization to spread, but today about 100 million Americans live in legal-weed states, allowing them to experiment with cannabis consumption and the Cali sober lifestyle.

That’s the beauty of Cali sober: It allows space for experimentation, for a person to define the term based on their own needs and to recalibrate as necessary—including seeking help if needed. I believe our world can be healed with the help of visionary plants like cannabis, and encouraging the Cali sober lifestyle is one way to get more people to the party.