The Rise of #Cannabis and the Decline in #Civilization Lit Review

The Rise of Cannabis and the Decline in Civilization

The Rise of Cannabis and the Decline in Civilization: Rubman, Mitch, Fassett, Mucci: 9781733311076: Amazon.com: Books

Jorge Sánchez Parra

5.0 out of 5 stars Nice point of view

Reviewed in the United States on January 20, 2026

Format: KindleVerified Purchase

This book goes far beyond talking about cannabis: it’s a chaotic, funny, and very human journey through a culture that has become part of everyday life.

Pearl A.

5.0 out of 5 stars A thought-provoking look at cannabis

Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2026

Format: KindleVerified Purchase

The Rise of Cannabis and the Decline in Civilization by Mitch Rubman is a book that shows how cannabis use has increased in modern society and the potential implications for decision-making, culture, and health. 

Johnny Chica

5.0 out of 5 stars An enjoyable chaos

Reviewed in the United States on January 21, 2026

Format: KindleVerified Purchase

What an interesting surprise to stumble upon this "book" in blog format! It's definitely exciting to hear all those stories from someone who experienced them firsthand (not necessarily fully consciously, lol).

 5.0 out of 5 stars High Times and Hard Truths

Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2025

Format: KindleVerified Purchase

The Rise of Cannabis and the Decline of Civilization is more than a story about potheads: it's cultural anthropology in disguise. Mitch Rubman's sharp observations and scandalous encounters expose the colorful chaos of cannabis culture, from smoke-filled lounges to street transactions. His tone is part Hunter S. Thompson and part social critic.

 Piaras

5.0 out of 5 stars High Times, Sharp Observations.

Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2026

Format: KindleVerified Purchase

Mitch Rubman’s The Rise of Cannabis and the Decline in Civilization reads like a sharp-eyed wander through smoke-filled back rooms and neon-lit dispensaries, guided by a journalist who knows how to listen.

 

new review....The Rise of Cannabis and the Decline in Civilization ON AMAZON

THE RISE OF CANNABIS AND THE DECLINE IN CIVILIZATION

The Rise of Cannabis and the Decline in Civilization is less a conventional argument than a long, intimate memoir stitched from diary entries, street memories, travel stories, dispensary scenes, and afterthoughts about what cannabis has meant across one man’s life. Author Mitch Rubman moves from teenage initiation in Queens to Boston student years, New York hustles, Los Angeles smoke sessions, legal-era dispensaries, and the oddly mournful sociology of modern cannabis culture. The book keeps circling the same essential question, not with a thesis so much as with a shrugging, searching consciousness: as weed becomes normalized, commercialized, and everywhere, what exactly have we gained, and what have we lost?

 

What stayed with me most was the book’s candor. It isn’t polished into tidy self-explanation, and that turns out to be part of its force. Rubman is often funny in a way that feels accidental and therefore real, whether he’s rolling while driving on the Major Deegan, recalling the ashtray full of roaches in a borrowed Beverly Hills Mercedes, or chasing cheap shake with the desperate ingenuity of someone who knows both the ritual and the trap of habit. There’s a restless, talky, half-stoned music to the prose that sometimes spills over into repetition or rough phrasing, but even then I felt the pulse of an actual life on the page. The strongest passages have that scruffy memoirist magic where danger, absurdity, loneliness, and appetite all occupy the same sentence. The early robbery with Snake, the eerie New York encounter with the scar-faced dealer, and the Luxor detour into mysticism all give the book a bruised, wandering vitality I found hard to dismiss.

 

Rubman’s central premise about cannabis and civilizational decline is deliberately loose, almost provocatively so. When he lists “locked bathrooms,” hunger, expensive eggs, and mismatched weed-container lids beside “free joint Fridays” and planted trees, the effect is less analytical than diaristic, less argument than worldview. On one level, I wanted a sharper line of thought, more pressure on the title’s big claim. On another, I think the vagueness is revealing. The book becomes a record of how a person thinks while living inside a habit for decades, how economics, friendship, boredom, grief, appetite, and longing all get filtered through smoke. Its most interesting idea is not really that cannabis causes decline, but that the culture around it exposes the texture of a society, its loneliness, its opportunism, its flashes of tenderness, its little indignities, and its odd forms of fellowship.

 

I found this book oddly moving and unmistakably personal. What remains after the last page is the feeling of having spent time with a man who has made cannabis not just a habit but a lens, sometimes comic, sometimes sad, sometimes almost spiritual, through which he’s watched whole decades slide by. I’d recommend it to readers who like unruly memoirs, countercultural diaries, and books that value lived texture over formal neatness.

On the road Santa Monica