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This paper explores how addicts or “stoners” assume an anti-identity that offers a valuable space of critique of the culture. Many adolescents confront turbulent crossings in making their way from family to the culture at large. This is particularly true of those who grow up feeling marginalized from society. Using drugs in a committed way allows a person continually to change their consciousness, often in resistance to taking on a worldly lens felt to be hostile to their very being. Committed drug use is thus often less about managing emotions than it is about forging an ideology and assuming an identity, one which offers a dangerous but valuable space of critique. In exploring the phenomenon of what I am calling stonerism, I draw from Freud’s great treatise on our love/hate relationship with the culture Civilization and its Discontents (2010) as well as from the work of Fanon. I will also examine my own flirtation with stonerism as an adolescent, with the idea of illustrating through my own circumstances the insights and perils that come with living in a space of critique and assuming anti-identity.