Everyone’s got a morning ritual. Some people prefer a regular cup of coffee; some might sweat through the sunrise at the gym. But some people want a much mellower start, kicking off their day with a big ol’ toke of weed.
The country where you’re most likely to find advocates of the “wake and bake” life, according to the results of the 2017 Global Drug Survey (GDS) published on Wednesday, is the United States. The analysis of drug use data from 69,299 marijuana users worldwide showed that 21.9 percent of American weed smokers smoked a joint within the first five to sixty minutes of their day.
Coming in second place, by a fairly large margin, was Mexico, where 18.4 percent of respondents reported smoking after waking up. In third, at 15.9 percent, was Greece. The people least likely to get high in the morning were the Dutch, where only 3.6 percent of respondents reported doing so. Across all the 50 countries surveyed, the average proportion of respondents that wake and bake was 10.3 percent.
While the origin of the term wake and bake is unclear, it’s thought to have been popularized by Grateful Dead fans in the 1960s that advocated waking and baking on 4/20, the high holy day of cannabis culture.
The country with the highest proportion of marijuana users who wake and bake is the United States.
Since its inception, the concept of wake and bake has been elevated to a near-ritualistic status among marijuana enthusiasts, with some users going so far as to pen rules for doing so. On the cannabis website Herb, some of the official rules for wake and bake include: “Thou shalt have no shower before me,” “Thou shalt make unto thee an epic breakfast” (because everything tastes better when you’re high), and “Honor thy shirt and thy pants” (that is, stay in pajamas so your clothes don’t reek of weed).
While revered by many marijuana users, the practice is not condoned by everyone. One team of scientists, writing in the journal Addiction Research and Theory in 2016, noted that morning weed use predicts cannabis problems, much as morning alcohol consumption suggests a drinking problem. In their study comparing people who smoked after waking up and those who smoked only after 12 noon, they conclude that “morning use of marijuana may indicate dependence and increased cannabis-related impairment.”
Being the first time that the GDS has measured the proportion of people that smoke up in the morning, there’s a lot we still don’t know about national wake and bake habits and how they’ve changed over time. But we can make a somewhat well-informed decision about how they might change in the future: With the recent introduction of marijuana-laced coffee, it won’t be surprising if more users decide to start their mornings on a higher note.
