Everyone Got Cannabis Wrong and It Cost More Lives Than You Think
- 5 days ago
- 11 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Dee Mani is a holistic healing advocate and founder of My Way CBD, who transformed her life after overcoming an aggressive breast cancer diagnosis using natural remedies. She is an author, entrepreneur, and speaker dedicated to empowering others through the healing potential of cannabis and holistic wellness practices.
For decades, cannabis was framed as a dangerous “gateway drug,” blamed for leading people toward addiction, dysfunction, and harder substances. This article challenges that narrative by exploring the deeper roots of dependency, the role of trauma and nervous system dysregulation, and the growing conversation around cannabis, CBD, and plant medicine as tools for regulation, relief, and healing rather than destruction.
The lie we were sold about cannabis
For decades, cannabis has been portrayed as the dangerous “gateway drug” supposedly leading people towards harder substances, addiction, and destruction. Most of us heard it growing up. It was drilled into schools, repeated by governments, reinforced by the media, and backed heavily by industries that had a lot to lose from people turning towards natural alternatives instead of pharmaceutical dependency.
The problem is, that narrative never really made logical sense when you stopped and thought about it properly. The gateway drug theory suggests that using cannabis somehow creates a progression towards harder drugs. That smoking cannabis naturally pushes someone further down a dark path towards heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, or addiction. But that argument completely confuses sequence with cause.
Saying cannabis is the gateway because someone later used harder substances is like saying water causes death because everyone who has ever died drank it first. One thing happening before another does not automatically mean it caused it. That distinction matters enormously, because for decades an entire global narrative has been built on that flawed assumption.
What nobody wanted to ask was the more uncomfortable question. Why were people looking for relief in the first place? Because human beings do not usually wake up one morning and randomly decide they want to disconnect from themselves. Addiction and dependency rarely begin with a substance. They usually begin with suffering.
Stress. Trauma. Anxiety. Emotional pain. Nervous system dysregulation. Depression. Physical discomfort. Loneliness. Burnout. Disconnection. A society where people are overwhelmed, exhausted, overstimulated, undernourished, emotionally unsupported, and expected to continue functioning as though this is normal. People are not usually searching for destruction. They are searching for relief, and that changes the entire conversation around cannabis.
Most people’s first gateway was never cannabis
In reality, most people’s first experience with a mind altering or dependency forming substance does not come from cannabis at all. It comes from substances society has completely normalized.
Alcohol is introduced early and socially encouraged despite being linked to violence, addiction, liver disease, accidents, depression, and millions of deaths globally every year. Prescription painkillers are handed out daily. Sleeping tablets are routinely prescribed to exhausted people whose nervous systems are screaming for rest rather than sedation. Antidepressants are often given after extremely short consultations, sometimes without deeper exploration into trauma, lifestyle, stress levels, diet, nervous system health, or emotional wellbeing.
I am not saying these things never have a place. Of course, there are situations where medication can be necessary and life saving. But we have to be honest about what society has normalized.
We have normalized a culture where symptoms are silenced rather than understood. If someone cannot sleep, sedate them. If someone feels emotionally overwhelmed, numb it. If someone is in pain, block the signal. If someone feels disconnected, anxious, or depressed, prescribe something to suppress the experience.
Yet somehow cannabis, a naturally occurring plant used medicinally and spiritually for thousands of years, became the villain in the story. That contradiction alone should make people stop and think.
What I saw working inside big pharma
Many years before I ever publicly spoke about cannabis or founded My Way CBD, I worked inside the pharmaceutical industry training to become a pharmacist. So my perspective does not come from social media trends or internet opinions. It comes from firsthand experience inside a system I eventually could no longer align myself with.
Part of my role involved handing out daily doses of methadone to people recovering from heroin addiction. Every single day I saw the same faces, the same routine, the same dependency continue under a different name.
Methadone is essentially a controlled opioid used to replace another opioid. It is legal, regulated, government approved, and presented as part of recovery. To be fair, it can absolutely reduce harm and stabilize lives in certain circumstances. I understand why it exists.
But if we are being completely honest, many of those individuals were not truly free. They had often simply swapped one dependency for another, except this version was now medically accepted and legally protected. Very little attention was given to why those individuals turned to heroin in the first place. Very little focus was placed on trauma, emotional pain, nervous system dysregulation, environmental stress, social conditions, or the root causes of addiction itself.
That was one of the moments where things stopped making sense to me. Because if the goal is genuinely healing people, surely the focus should be on helping them reclaim themselves, not simply maintaining dependency in a form that benefits an industry financially.
The more I questioned those contradictions, the more I started noticing them everywhere. Cannabis was demonized relentlessly while pharmaceutical dependency became normalized globally. Natural compounds were dismissed while synthetic drugs with pages of side effects were heavily marketed.
People were told to fear cannabis while opioid epidemics devastated entire countries. The deeper I looked, the harder it became to ignore the financial interests tied into the suppression of cannabis and plant medicine more broadly.
Cannabis is a plant, not the hard drug it was portrayed to be
One of the biggest misconceptions around cannabis is the way it has been lumped into the same category as genuinely dangerous hard drugs.
Cannabis is not heroin. It is not crack cocaine. It is not methamphetamine. It is a plant containing cannabinoids that interact with the body’s own endocannabinoid system, one of the most important regulatory systems in the human body, involved in balance, inflammation, stress responses, mood, sleep, appetite, pain perception, hormonal regulation, and nervous system function.
That is not just my opinion, that is biology. The endocannabinoid system exists whether people like cannabis or not. Once you understand how cannabinoids interact with that system, it becomes much easier to understand why so many people report benefits from cannabis and CBD.
For many people, cannabis has not been the beginning of destruction. It has actually been the beginning of recovery. I have seen people reduce alcohol consumption because cannabis helped calm the nervous system driving the urge to escape in the first place. I have seen people sleep naturally without relying on heavy sedatives that leave them disconnected the next day. I have seen people reduce dependence on pain medication, regulate chronic stress, manage inflammation, feel emotionally calmer, and reconnect with themselves after years of feeling numb.
Not because cannabis “fixed” them overnight, but because their body was finally being supported instead of constantly overridden. That is a very different mechanism to many pharmaceutical approaches.
People also need educating on the difference between cannabis and cigarettes
This is where people tend to oversimplify things, because one of the first arguments always thrown at cannabis is smoking. The second someone speaks positively about cannabis, people immediately respond with “but smoking is bad for you,” as though that somehow ends the entire conversation. But even that argument lacks honesty and context, because not all smoking is equal, and not everything people have been taught about smoking is entirely accurate either.
Modern cigarettes are filled with additives, chemicals, preservatives, combustion agents, and carcinogenic compounds that go far beyond natural tobacco itself. For decades, people were never really smoking pure tobacco in its natural form. They were inhaling chemically engineered products designed to maximize addiction, increase consumption, and ultimately maximize profit for enormous corporations and governments profiting from taxation.
That is a very different conversation to pure tobacco or nicotine in isolation, both of which are now being studied far more seriously for their potential neurological and cognitive effects. Yet the public was taught to fear the entire thing collectively, without understanding what was actually causing the damage in the first place.
That seems to happen repeatedly whenever governments and large industries heavily control something. The original natural product becomes altered, processed, contaminated, monetized, and then the public ends up suffering the consequences while being told the original plant or compound itself was the problem all along.
The same thing has happened with cannabis. People hear the word “smoking” and instantly place cannabis into the same category as heavily processed cigarettes, despite the fact they are completely different substances. Smoking pure cannabis has actually been studied for potential bronchodilatory effects, meaning it may help open airways rather than constrict them. There are studies exploring cannabis and lung function that challenge many of the assumptions repeated for years without question.
Again, this is not about pretending inhaling anything excessively is perfect for the lungs. Common sense still matters. But the idea that cannabis itself is some dangerous hard drug because it can be smoked is incredibly misleading.
People also need educating that consuming cannabis does not simply mean smoking it. Cannabis can be vaporized, infused into oils, ingested, applied topically, concentrated into extracts, or consumed in many other forms. Yet somewhere along the way, the term “medicinal cannabis” was introduced as though cannabis suddenly becomes medicinal only once it passes through pharmaceutical companies and government systems.
That has never sat right with me. Cannabis is medicinal because of the cannabinoids, terpenes, flavonoids, and compounds naturally found within the plant itself, not because a corporation stamped the word “medical” onto the packaging. In fact, much of the so called pharmaceutical grade cannabis people are prescribed and told to trust is produced using toxic, chemical extraction methods like butane processing, while naturally grown cannabis cultivated properly is portrayed as dangerous or inferior.
That contradiction should make people question things. Because the truth is, cannabis was being used medicinally long before governments and pharmaceutical companies found ways to regulate, patent, and profit from it.
For many people, cannabis oils and extracts have been life changing. That became deeply personal for me in 2017 when I was diagnosed with Triple Negative Breast Cancer. I was told that with chemotherapy I may have around two years to live, and without it perhaps one year. Those are words that completely change the way you look at life, medicine, and your own body.
I chose another path. One focused around cannabis oil, nutrition, nervous system healing, reducing toxicity, emotional healing, and supporting my body rather than destroying it in the hope something healthier grew back afterwards.
I am still here. That does not mean I believe cannabis is some magical cure all or that conventional medicine never has a place. But it absolutely raises important questions about why cannabis was demonized so aggressively for decades despite its growing body of research and the countless people now openly speaking about how it has helped improve their quality of life.
Because once people begin realizing that healing and regulation may not always require lifelong pharmaceutical dependency, entire industries suddenly have a lot to lose.
Synthetic cannabis is not cannabis
Another deliberate confusion surrounding cannabis is the way real cannabis is often lumped together with dangerous synthetic substances like Spice. They are not the same thing.
Synthetic cannabinoids are laboratory made chemicals sprayed onto plant material and often contain highly dangerous compounds. In some cases, they have even been linked to contamination with substances like fentanyl and other toxic chemicals.
Comparing Spice to natural cannabis is scientifically dishonest. It would be like comparing naturally grown medicinal herbs to dangerous synthetic street chemicals and pretending they are identical because they share part of a name.
When people experience severe reactions to synthetic cannabinoids, the headlines often simply mention “cannabis,” reinforcing fear while completely ignoring the distinction between natural plant compounds and dangerous synthetic substances created in laboratories. That distinction matters enormously.
CBD was demonized too, even without the “high”
What makes the cannabis narrative even more absurd is the fact that even CBD, which is non intoxicating and does not produce the “high” associated with cannabis, was heavily demonized and remains restricted or banned in some countries even today.
Think about that for a moment. A non-intoxicating cannabinoid with growing evidence around inflammation, epilepsy, nervous system regulation, sleep, stress responses, and recovery was still treated as though it posed some huge threat to society.
Why? Because the demonization was never purely about intoxication. It was about cannabis itself and the fear surrounding anything connected to it.
That is one of the reasons I eventually founded My Way CBD, not simply to create products, but to educate people about the endocannabinoid system, nervous system regulation, and the role cannabinoids may play in helping people feel more balanced in a world making so many chronically stressed, inflamed, disconnected, and unwell.
Maybe cannabis was never the real threat
Cannabis was never the monster it was made out to be. If anything, for many people, it has been the opposite. Not a gateway into destruction, but an exit from it.
Because when you really look deeper into addiction and dependency, the harder substances people often end up turning to are rarely about curiosity alone. They are usually about escape. Escape from trauma. Escape from emotional pain. Escape from nervous system dysregulation. Escape from a body and mind that no longer feel safe to live inside.
That is the part society still refuses to address properly. Most people using harder drugs are not simply chasing pleasure. They are trying to numb something unresolved beneath the surface. Childhood trauma, abuse, neglect, chronic stress, anxiety, depression, loneliness, emotional suppression, disconnection, burnout, grief, and nervous systems stuck permanently in survival mode.
The substance itself is often only the symptom. The real gateway was the suffering underneath it all. This is where cannabis becomes incredibly misunderstood.
Because for many people, cannabis did not push them further away from themselves. It actually helped bring them back. It helped slow racing thoughts, regulate stress responses, improve sleep, calm the nervous system, ease physical discomfort, and create enough internal stillness for healing to even begin.
Cannabis was never the thing creating the void. It was often the thing helping people cope with it in a less destructive way. That does not mean cannabis should be abused or used to emotionally bypass deeper healing work, because true healing still requires people to face themselves honestly and use plant medicine with intention. But there is a huge difference between using something that supports regulation and using substances that progressively disconnect people further from reality, their emotions, and their bodies.
Maybe that is why cannabis became such a threat to certain industries in the first place. Because a naturally occurring plant that helps people feel calmer, sleep better, regulate stress, reduce reliance on pharmaceuticals, drink less alcohol, and reconnect with themselves is far less profitable than lifelong dependency on prescription medications.
Once people begin understanding that many of the so called “gateway drugs” pushed legally through society have created far more destruction than cannabis ever has, the entire conversation starts changing.
People begin questioning why alcohol is socially celebrated despite the violence, addiction, disease, and deaths associated with it. They begin questioning why opioids were handed out so aggressively while cannabis remained criminalized. They begin questioning why CBD, a non intoxicating compound, was demonized globally despite its growing evidence around nervous system support, inflammation, epilepsy, and recovery.
Perhaps most importantly, they begin questioning whether cannabis was ever really the problem at all. Because the deeper I have looked throughout my life, both personally and professionally, the clearer one thing has become. Cannabis was never the problem. The unresolved trauma was, and cannabis was often the solution people were taught to fear.
Read more from Dee Mani
Dee Mani, Cannabis & Natural Health Consultant
Dee Mani is a best-selling author, entrepreneur, and holistic healing advocate who defied the odds by overcoming aggressive breast cancer through natural remedies, including cannabis. As the founder of My Way CBD, she is passionate about empowering others to explore alternative healing methods. Dee's journey from illness to wellness inspires her writing, where she shares insights on natural health, wellness, and the transformative power of nature. Follow her work to discover how to harness holistic practices for a healthier, more balanced life. See here for more info!
