Slang dictionary
ride the snake
[rahyd th uh sneyk]
What does ride the snake mean?
To ride the snake is to use powerful drugs or have a hallucinatory experience on them.
As a humorous colloquialism, ride the snake refers to engaging in risky behaviors likened to doing intense drugs.
Where does ride the snake come from?
In the 1967 Doors song “The End,” Jim Morrison variously sings “ride the snake,” apparently a metaphor for tripping or a spiritual, drug-induced vision quest. His line was adapted into a poetic monologue in Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie The Doors. The line is spoken in a scene, overlaid with sections of “The End,” where Morrison takes hallucinogens in the desert with his bandmates.
In 1995, the punk band Lagwagon released a song titled “Ride the Snake,” with the opening line “Time to ride the snake, oh eyes gone dead and blank.” In an interview the following year, Lagwagon singer Joey Cape explained that the title was inspired by The Doors movie and he had used the phrase “riding the snake” to describe a heroin user with a vacant expression.
In 1996, Jim Carey appeared in a Saturday Night Live sketch as a diet guru who encourages his audience to use methamphetamine. Carey’s character punctuates his manic sales pitch by repeatedly saying “ride the snake.”
Examples of ride the snake
Who uses ride the snake?
Although Morrison’s meaning in “The End” is nebulous, Stone’s movie seems to have cemented the association between ride the snake, drug use, and their subsequent high.
By extension and in allusion to tripping on drugs when riding the snake, sometimes ride the snake is humorously used in colloquial speech and writing for other risky activities, such as eating spicy food or entering into tenuous political alliances.
Note
This is not meant to be a formal definition of ride the snake like most terms we define on Dictionary.com, but is rather an informal word summary that hopefully touches upon the key aspects of the meaning and usage of ride the snake that will help our users expand their word mastery.