There is an interesting phenomenon occurring among a very large group of people in the United States who believe they must be loaded on some form of mind altering substance in order to function. In the recovery community there has been a change taking place, in my opinion, over the last ten years in which we have a lot of people who believe they are sober, even though they are smoking marijuana. Are you sober if you don’t drink alcohol, but smoke marijuana? No, you’re not sober.

In order to be sober, you need to make sure you aren’t taking any mind altering substances into your system. Smoking pot gets you loaded. To be sober, you can’t be loaded. I know that sounds like a very easy concept to understand, however there are a lot of people in our society today who don’t get that. They cannot comprehend the concept of getting and staying 100% sober.

To be able to claim you are 100% sober you need to abstain from drinking any alcoholic beverage, including beer, wine and hard liquor, abstain from taking street drugs, such as cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, magic mushroom, Ecstasy and similar types of hard drugs, abstain from taking pharmaceuticals unless you are being prescribed the medication by a physician fully aware of your need to stay sober, and not smoke marijuana. If you have a problem with mind altering substances, like 70 million or more of your fellow Americans, then you probably need to get and stay sober, because that is the only way to recover from addiction.

You can’t just be a “little bit sober” and claim sobriety. It is 100% or not at all, so if you are abstaining from other mind altering substances and still smoking pot, please reconsider. It isn’t possible to be sober while high on pot.