It’s Time to Redefine “Sober”

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This week: Why our definition of “sober” no longer makes sense…and what we should be asking instead.

We’re all addicts.

We just arbitrarily label some addictions destructive while ignoring, accepting or even celebrating others. That’s probably going to piss some people off, particularly those for whom sobriety has been genuinely lifesaving. And obviously, there’s a meaningful clinical distinction between a strong habit & an addiction that causes serious impairment or harm.

But the word “sober” has outlived its usefulness.

I haven’t had a drink in more than 8 years. By most conventional definitions, though, I’m not sober. I use Psychedelics…I’ve taken LSD, Psilocybin, MDMA, DMT, 5-MeO-DMT & other consciousness-altering substances. Some I’ve taken once, some periodically, some recreationally, some for reasons that are harder to put into words. They’ve overwhelmingly added value to my life.

Meanwhile, someone can wake up every morning, drink 3 cups of coffee, use nicotine throughout the day, compulsively check their phone 150 times, eat a bunch of processed sugar, spend 4 hours watching Netflix & then proudly tell you they’ve been “sober” for 10 years.

What exactly is that word telling us?

I’m not arguing against abstinence. For someone whose relationship with alcohol, cocaine, opioids or any other substance is destroying their life, complete abstinence might be exactly what they need.

What I’m questioning is the larger cultural framework we’ve built around sobriety, where consuming certain substances means you’re sober & consuming others means you’re not. Because once you start pulling on that thread, the whole thing gets pretty weird.

We’re All Hooked on Something

I’m addicted to CrossFit. I train 6 mornings a week at 6 am. I structure my life around it. If I go several days without training, I feel noticeably different. When traveling, I book my accommodations in walking distance to the best CrossFit gym in town.

Obviously there’s a difference between having a strong habit & having an addiction that causes impairment or harm. But that distinction is actually part of what interests me.

Human beings are incredibly good at getting hooked on things. Drugs are just one category. We get hooked on exercise, work, sex, food, gambling, shopping, video games, our phones, social media, attention, status, relationships & probably a thousand other things. We build rituals around them, anticipate them, receive rewards from them & feel their absence when they’re taken away.

But these behaviors clearly aren’t equivalent.

Someone compulsively checking social media all day may be engaging in a behavior that makes them more anxious, distracted & miserable. Someone who feels compelled to attend their weekly sound bath meditation might technically have developed a powerful attachment to that ritual too, but if it makes them calmer, happier & more connected to other people, I have a hard time seeing the problem.

CrossFit consumes an enormous amount of my time & energy. It also keeps me healthy, gives structure to my mornings, introduces me to people wherever I live & makes me feel fucking great. If you told me tomorrow that I could never do it again, my life would unquestionably become worse.

So perhaps the interesting question isn’t whether we’re addicted to things…it’s what those things are doing to us.

“Sober” Tells Us Almost Nothing About That

This is where our obsession with sobriety starts breaking down.

We divide people into “sober” & “not sober” based largely on which chemicals they consume:

• Alcohol counts
• Cocaine counts
• Heroin counts
• Psilocybin counts
• LSD counts

Meanwhile caffeine barely registers as a drug despite being consumed every morning specifically because it alters consciousness. Nicotine occupies some strange middle ground. Psychiatric medications don’t count because a doctor prescribed them.

Makes no sense.

Consider 2 hypothetical people. One drinks heavily every weekend, sleeps like shit, fights with their partner, misses workouts & spends Sunday hungover on the couch. The other doesn’t drink at all, exercises regularly, has healthy relationships, works hard & takes mushrooms 6 times a year.

We call one behavior normal & socially acceptable. We describe the other person as someone who “uses drugs.” What useful information have we actually communicated?

California Sober, Colorado Sober…What Are We Doing?

Maybe the clearest evidence that the word “sober” has lost its usefulness is that we keep inventing new versions of it.

There’s “California sober,” which means abstaining from alcohol & harder drugs while still using cannabis. Then there’s “Colorado sober,” another variation that allows for cannabis & Psychedelics while excluding alcohol & substances considered more destructive.

What are we doing here?

Once a word requires multiple geographic modifiers to explain what someone actually means, the original word has lost any significance.

California sober. Colorado sober. Sober sober.

These labels exist because people are recognizing something our vocabulary hasn’t caught up with: there’s a meaningful difference between someone whose life is controlled by compulsive drug use & someone who occasionally alters their consciousness.

Instead of endlessly creating new categories of sobriety, we need a better framework altogether.

Drugs Treating Drugs

Here’s where our definition of sobriety starts getting especially strange: we’re effectively using drugs as treatments for addiction to other drugs.

Psilocybin for Alcohol

In 2022, a randomized clinical trial found that people with alcohol use disorder who received Psilocybin alongside psychotherapy had significantly fewer heavy drinking days than those who received psychotherapy with an active placebo.

LSD for Alcohol

Decades ago, researchers were giving LSD to people struggling with alcoholism. A later meta-analysis of 6 randomized trials involving more than 500 people found evidence that a single dose of LSD reduced alcohol misuse.

Psilocybin for Cocaine

More recently, researchers have turned their attention to cocaine. A 2026 randomized clinical trial gave people with cocaine use disorder a single dose of Psilocybin alongside psychotherapy. Over the following 180 days, those who received Psilocybin had significantly more cocaine-abstinent days & a lower risk of relapse. Perhaps most strikingly, 30% achieved complete abstinence from cocaine compared with 0% of the placebo group.

Ibogaine for Opioids

And then there’s Ibogaine. People dependent on opioids sometimes take one of the most powerful consciousness-altering drugs imaginable specifically to stop taking opioids. The evidence here is much less rigorous, largely observational rather than randomized clinical trials, but studies have reported substantial reductions in withdrawal symptoms, cravings & opioid use following Ibogaine treatment.

Think about how strange this becomes under our conventional definition of sobriety. Someone drinks alcohol compulsively every day…they take Psilocybin or LSD, dramatically reduce their drinking & regain control over their life.

Someone compulsively uses cocaine. They take Psilocybin once & quit.

Someone is dependent on opioids. They take Ibogaine, endure an intense Psychedelic experience lasting many hours & emerge with dramatically reduced withdrawal symptoms & cravings.

Did these people break their sobriety? Or did they become more sober?

If sobriety simply means that no psychoactive substance entered your body, the answer is obvious. But if sobriety is supposed to represent freedom from addiction, compulsive drug use & the destruction those behaviors create, the answer gets considerably more complicated.

We are entering a world where drugs will be used to help people stop compulsively using other drugs. The old vocabulary doesn’t know what to do with that.

Abstinence Is a Tool, Not a Moral Category

None of this means abstinence doesn’t work. Obviously it does for some.

There are people who simply cannot have a healthy relationship with alcohol. One drink becomes ten (been there). One night becomes a weekend bender. The costs accumulate across their health, relationships, career & finances. For that person, “I don’t drink” is an extraordinarily useful rule because it eliminates the negotiation entirely.

The same can be true for cocaine, opioids, cannabis, gambling, sex or anything else that someone repeatedly demonstrates they cannot engage with without losing control.

But abstinence being incredibly valuable for some people doesn’t mean abstinence should become the universal standard by which we judge everybody else’s relationship with substances.

That’s where sobriety culture is limiting. It collapses an incredibly complicated spectrum of human behavior into a binary: you consume drugs or you don’t. Sober or not sober. Clean or dirty.

Real life is much messier than that.

Someone can consume a substance every day & have it slowly destroy their life. Someone else can consume a different substance twice a year & consider those experiences among the most meaningful of their life. Someone can never touch an illegal drug & still spend every waking hour chasing dopamine through their phone, food, work, gambling or attention.

The molecule alone doesn’t tell you enough.

Does It Add Value or Take It Away?

This is the framework I’ve found far more useful:

Forget “sober” versus “not sober” for a minute & ask a much simpler question: is this adding value to your life or taking value away?

And yes, fun counts as value.

We’ve developed this bizarre tendency, particularly around Psychedelics, to believe drug use needs to justify itself through healing, medicine or personal transformation. Apparently eating mushrooms because they helped you work through childhood trauma is legitimate, while eating mushrooms with your best friends because you laugh until your stomach hurts requires an explanation.

I don’t buy that:

• Joy has value.
• Novelty has value.
• Awe has value.
• Connection has value.
• Dancing has value.
• Sex has value.
• Seeing the world differently for 6 hours has value even if you don’t emerge with a fucking treatment plan.

The questions that matter are downstream:

• Is your substance use damaging your health?
• Is it hurting your relationships?
• Is it interfering with your work?
• Are you spending money you don’t have?
• Are you lying about it?
• Do you repeatedly tell yourself you’re going to stop & then find yourself unable to?
• Is your world becoming larger because of this thing, or progressively smaller?

And perhaps most importantly: are you choosing it, or is it choosing for you? Those questions tell me considerably more about someone’s relationship with drugs than whether they call themselves sober.

A Psychedelic World Needs Better Language

Psychedelics are going to make this conversation unavoidable.

We’re moving toward a world where substances that spent decades classified alongside dangerous drugs are being researched for depression, PTSD, addiction & other conditions. Whether or not every promise of Psychedelic medicine comes true, the cultural distinction between “drugs” & “medicine” is collapsing.

Someone might receive pharmaceutical LSD from a physician & be considered a responsible patient while their neighbor takes essentially the same molecule at home with their partner & is considered a drug user. Someone dependent on opioids might travel somewhere to take Ibogaine & return less dependent on drugs than they have been in years.

Trying to fit all of this into “sober” & “not sober” is absurd.

Maybe sobriety shouldn’t describe what’s in your bloodstream. Maybe it should describe your relationship with the things capable of controlling you.

I don’t particularly care whether someone drinks alcohol, smokes cannabis, takes mushrooms, drinks 6 coffees a day, trains CrossFit 6 mornings a week or attends a fucking sound bath every Sunday. I care what happens next:

• Does it make your life bigger or smaller?
• Does it make you healthier or sicker?
• More connected or isolated?
• More capable of choosing your behavior or less capable?
• If the substance disappeared tomorrow, would your life improve, or would it become duller?

Those seem like far more useful questions than asking whether you’re sober. And if someone quits heroin because they took Ibogaine, maybe the most interesting question isn’t whether they broke their sobriety.

Maybe it’s whether they finally found it.

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