That you experience significant physical withdrawal symptoms from marijuana certainty calls into question the street wisdom that pot isn’t (physically) addicting.
The hardest part is understanding and coping with the issue that drives the user to use marijuana so heavily in the first place. If it can be understood what need the marijuana use is providing for, changing use patterns becomes possible.
Drug culture itself is riddled with such booby traps. Fallaious street wisdom backed by egos and peer pressure are powerful tools to indoctrinate a child into an unexpected lifetime of addiction to substances such as pot.
That's what I am trying to get at- problems stem from earlier sources. Whether someone eventually gets hooked on something is a consequence of earlier failure. Whatever drug/habit is ultimately picked up in the aftermath is a genuine negative, which will have its own particulars. But it is not the initial causative agent. This is an important distinction to make, because otherwise we're just rearranging deck chairs instead of managing the fundamental issue.
To expand context, when considering appropriate drug policy at a governmental level I think Portugal's experience is important to study:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...
Pot absolutely catalyzes issues in people’s lives. Many would be far better off not using it at all.
I think we are talking past each other. I fully agree that many would be better off never using anything at all.
My point is that by the time someone gets to the point where drugs/gambling/addiction can act as a destructive catalyst, they're already well on their way to a negative future due to earlier causes.
Do you have anything at all to support this?
(the first bit of the linked article is, well, clearly written for the huff post. But the meat of it well worth the read)
As for destructive catalysts, no, not all people are well on their way to a negative future when they take up such habits. The drugs/gambling etc are the destructive behaviors that should be avoided altogether or stopped as a priority.
Considering the well documented effects of high grade pot, it’s fairly easy to see that a normal child can be profoundly impacted by pot. Their entire lives get off track after getting into weed. So, no, not all people that mess up their lives on pot were well on their way to a negative future.
Please stop denying that cannabis itself cannot ever be a cause of severe harm.
I strongly support legalisation, but for that to happen we must accept that some cannabis users are going to be caused harm.
Opioid withdrawal is actually not fatal at all barring potential dehydration from excessive diarrhea/vomiting.
Something as simple as concentration percentages on packaging, as we have with booze, and smart usage pamphlets could save a lot of lives.
In my experience however, withdrawal only takes a few days, I don't recall being any more irritable than before except that marijuana makes me less prone to irritations to begin with, and the thing that's the worst is the boredom.
It's what do you do with your time? Work can keep you occupied and busy, but at home the activities you are likely going to do you did with marijuana. Video games and television/movies are harder to 'feel' interested in. Eating high is just really enjoyable. And trying to sleep is difficult especially when you know you could just smoke some pot and drift off instead of being too bored and restless to sleep.
This implies that self medication has an outcome comparable to paying for mental health medication and therapy.
I would assert that it does not.
Alcohol dependence prevents cold turkey for some people.
edit Curious why people are objecting to this as I have personal experience in the area. Vivid dreams are common any time you go without dreaming for a while, it's not a sign of a physical addiction.
There are many drugs that aren't strongly physically addictive, but most people recognise that the misuse of those drugs can cause severe harm. Cannabis should be in this category.
With a physical addiction, the substance itself becomes necessary to the body. A psychological addiction involves becoming reliant on a perceived effect of some other stimulus. If you give a brain dead person a physically addictive substance and then stop, they will suffer withdrawals while they can't develop a psychological addiction as there is no perception.
Generally, the two will develop together and both are harmful.
There are a lot of people here speaking on behalf of smokers and people with chronic illnesses and disorders.
I happen to fall in both categories and self medicate.
I can and do stop smoking so the time. It is not physically addictive, and you can become mentally addicted to anything that gives you a dopamine release, like eating junk food.
I have never had "withdrawals," nor do I recognize weed "addiction" as anything other than excess, overindulgence, and a lack of self control.
People claiming that they are addicted to weed are simply looking to blame a bad habit for their lack of self control.
The only severe harm you can get from smoking too much weed is to your wallet.
This what is happening to the top level commenter. I don't know if the nightmares in particular are a result of REM rebound, but it could be that the person is simply prone to nightmares, and part of their addiction could be self-medication for their innately nightmarish dreams.
It seems that there ate a ton of people speaking on behalf of both actual smokers and people with chronic illnesses and disorders.
If you don't have PTSD, you can't comprehend it, nor should you try to.
Top commenters issue is that they lack self control. Their "addiction" to weed is self imposed and akin to overeating or being addicted to masturbation.
When you stop smoking, you don't have withdrawals. You simply begin experiencing the chronic illnesses that you have been self medicating against.
I'd also like to add that for mental issues like anxiety, PTSD, and depression, weed acts like a mild antidepressant that is extremely manageable compared to the prescription options that typically make people even more unstable. Every antidepressant in America comes with a warning that it can increase suicidal tendencies, and I can tell you from experience that it is very true.
Those kinds of "medicines" work by making you numb, not treating the actual problems. You don't feel normal at all; you don't care about anything, become very reckless and unstable, and many kids end up killing themselves because of this mental state when they had taken the medicine to quell suicidal thoughts in the first place.
Next, PTSD can cause flashbacks in several forms. Many people with the illness never have harmful flashback dreams.
I said that this is causing a mental addiction. So on top of everything effecting people differently, these require particular forms of thinking. If you don't know that marijuana can suppress dreams or use it for that purpose, you won't develop this addiction.
A mental addiction isn't a "lack of self control" or "self imposed" as you say. It works by a similar means to the placebo effect, where your belief that something has an effect leads to the effect.
>It seems that there ate a ton of people speaking on behalf of both actual smokers and people with chronic illnesses and disorders.If you don't have PTSD, you can't comprehend it, nor should you try to.
Seems to me that you shouldn't assume what diseases other people have suffered from. As you aren't the only one with first hand experience.
>Those kinds of "medicines" work by making you numb, not treating the actual problems
Though it's true that the prescribed alternatives are not cures, neither is marijuana. Both help you manage symptoms, but can lead to other problems. Therapy has been the only thing shown to be effective as a cure.
I would imagine that people report fewer dreams due to cannabinoids' memory effects, rather than an impact on REM sleep. Failing to remember dreams does not mean an absence of them.
An increase in nightmares could easily be due to increased stress/amygdala function depressed by cannabinoids.
Many people waste away their lives stoned and the problem seems to be getting worse while the quality of pot skyrockets to all time highs.
The country is going through a mental health problem, there are numerous signs of this. Marijuana is one of the poor ways that people deal with this, but it's not the cause of the issue.
Michael Phelps can down McDonald’s but some are better off limiting their fast food intake. Everyone reacts differently to different arrangements of chemicals in different quantities.
If people experience significant physical withdrawal symptoms from cessation of pot use (which seems to be the case for some), then for those people, it absolutely is physically addicting.
>That you experience significant physical withdrawal symptoms from marijuana certainty calls into question the street wisdom that pot isn’t (physically) addicting.
My buddy just quit for a month. The only issues he had were having to deal with his terrible IBS without what had effectively become medicine for him.
I smoke for similar reasons and for anti anxiety. It is FAR less harmful than brain melting benzos like xanax and Klonopin.
Wanna talk about harm? When I was prescribed Klonopin, I essentially blacked out for a month of my life. I didn't "wake up" from that until I missed a dose and promptly tossed it in the trash.
If you are so concerned with some nitpicky level of subjective "harm," maybe we should talk about all the harm prescription drugs can cause. When you have chronic illnesses and the medicine only makes you worse, self medication becomes an enticing prospect.
What about kids with severe seizures, etc? We've seen some of the most conservative states allow cbd oil because it is the only thing that works.
If you have an open mind, you should look into the endocannabinoid system that resides in every human being. We have a massive network of receptors that rely on cannabinoids to mediate chronic illnesses and reduce inflammation in our bodies.
It is thought that we have this system and relationship with cannabinoids because humans have been cultivating and consuming marijuana for thousands of years. Weed and humans have developed alongside each other over time in a kind of symbiotic relationship. To simply pretend that weed is some sort of harmful narcotic is so far from the truth.
Excess is the issue. A person who let's weed run their life is no different than someone that overeats or procrastinates constantly. If you have bad habits and no self control you can take anything to excess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabinoid_hyperemesis_syndro...
Refined carbohydrates (sugar, flour) are definitely addictive. If you have the normal modern diet full of sugar and flour and you quit them cold turkey, you will be sick and miserable for a few days, while your body adjusts. And if you quit carbs enough to go into ketosis, and then "cheat", you'll be right back on the insulin-spike bandwagon. (This is not to be construed as an argument in favor of keto diets, or against carbs!) And unlike water, your body does not need refined sugar or grains. You can live just fine on meats and vegetables.
This isn't "street wisdom"; there's a massive body of clinical research that's gone into marijuana and investigating its effects on the body and brain.
Marijuana is one of the most-studied drugs in existence, far more so than most prescription medication on the market.
No, it's not in contradiction to reality; it's the results of clinical research. To the extent that "addiction" is a relevant term in colloquial use (it's neither a DSM-IV diagnostic criterion nor a formal pharmacological term), marijuana is not known to induce practically significant symptoms of physical dependence.
A great deal of it is, and some of it has more fundamental problems. I forget his name -- this was quite a while ago -- but there was one scientist in particular who had published a wealth of anti-cannabis studies, most of which were obviously flawed or biased in some way. Furthermore, at the time he was one of the only people allowed to do the research, since access to "official" MJ was heavily restricted, and the supply he used was a small batch of plants grown specifically for research, hardly representative of real-world crops. Most of his work was federally funded, and this was during the Bush II era, so you can imagine the pressure to back up the government's anti-MJ stance. Wish I could remember more details, this was a while ago!
When I first learned about this, it was really an eye-opener on how the funding -> research -> policy treadmill works when it is successfully subverted by powerful interests. Fortunately it's hard to keep the process going forever. Science works in the long run, but sometimes it moves too slowly for people facing real injustice.