Julia Sparkman’s relationship with Cannabis didn’t start as medicine. It started young — “12 was the first time I ever took a puff” — and by high school, she said, “To be honest, I was just wanting to get fucked up … not really medical to me.”
Over time, the plant took on a different role. Sparkman, a San Diego mother, writer and healing arts practitioner, is 19 years into alcohol sobriety. In the years when she was still caught in alcohol and other substances, Cannabis became part of how she got through the day after.
“It was like what I woke up to,” Sparkman said. “It … help(ed) to soften the edges of the destruction from the night before.”
When she stopped drinking and using “harder drugs,” she kept Cannabis less as a party substance, more as a stabilizer — a harm-reduction bridge while she built a different life.
Throughout that vibrant life, Sparkman’s use hasn’t been linear. In those 19 alcohol-sober years, she estimates she’s had “like 10 collective years where I did not use Cannabis,” including a long stretch of about seven years. She stopped completely. Then, almost exactly a year later, she learned she was pregnant. She stayed off Cannabis through pregnancy and breastfeeding, and returned within weeks of stopping, several years and two kids later.
These days, Sparkman is intentional and selective about what she consumes.
“Primarily, I only smoke sun-grown … grown in the dirt, outside Cannabis,” she said.
She shops at Torrey Holistics in San Diego and names Farm Cut and Coastal Sun as preferred brands, gravitating toward lower-potency flower and multicannabinoid profiles rather than “something that was bred to be so intoxicating.”
“My goal is never to feel super high,” Sparkman said, mentioning that she prefers cultivars with different cannabinoid ratios, like Farm Cut’s Four Directions from Mendocino’s Emerald Spirit Farms with THC, CBD, THCv and CBDv.
Now, Sparkman finds medical value in Cannabis for its ability to help with her nervous system.
“I have … complex trauma, so I hold a lot of that in my body,” she said. “For me, it helps bring me back to my body.”
The rest is what she calls expansion — the sense that Cannabis can open perception and soften tension without shutting her down.
“She helps me feel ease in my body,” Sparkman said about the plant. “And she opens me up to how incredible this Earth is.”
