Cannabis, lived time, and the disruption of temporal self-experience

Abstract

Cannabis is the most widely used psychoactive substance subject to legal restriction worldwide, and one of its best-characterized acute effects is a distortion of the lived sense of time: users reliably report that time slows, fragments, or loses its ordinary continuity, an effect documented since the earliest controlled studies of marijuana intoxication and confirmed across decades of subsequent research. This paper argues that the relationship between cannabis use and psychopathology cannot be fully understood without attending to the phenomenology of this temporal disturbance. Drawing on the phenomenological tradition, on the clinical study of self-disorder through the Examination of Anomalous Self-Experience (EASE), and on the empirical literature on cannabis and time perception, we propose that cannabis functions as a temporal modulator whose disruptive action falls on an ipseity, or minimal self, that is itself temporally constituted. We treat the integration of a phenomenological vocabulary with an empirical, dose-response literature as a deliberate and contestable interpretive choice, which we make explicit rather than assume. Because cannabis is used across the lifespan and its subjective effects depend substantially on dose, frequency, expectation, and context, we discuss individual variability in temporal experience as a constraint on the model rather than a footnote to it. Adolescence and the clinical high-risk state are treated as one developmentally significant context for this disturbance. Reframing cannabis-related psychopathology as a disruption of lived temporality yields concrete, low-cost clinical implications: brief inquiry into the experience of time and the ownership of thought, EASE-informed assessment, and serial monitoring of self-disturbance.