Hacker News Reader

Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

The real danger with cannabis is not that it'll make you sick or have some nasty side effect like this article describes.

The danger is simply that you will like it, you'll end up using it every day, all different times of the day, and it won't really hurt your health as much as it will make you live your life in a somewhat dopey, detached, less-intelligent way. As time goes on it won't feel "fun" it'll just feel "normal". And you just won't get as much out of your life as you could get, won't achieve as much relationship success, professional success, or personal fulfillment.

View on HN

I thought the way that South Park put it (in the voice of Randy Marsh) many years ago was just about perfect:

“Well, Stan, the truth is marijuana probably isn't gonna make you kill people, and ...it most likely isn't gonna fund terrorists, but... Well son, pot makes you feel fine with being bored and... It's when you're bored that you should be learning some new skill or discovering some new science or... being creative. If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you aren't good at anything.” [0]

To be clear, I don’t wholly agree, I know too many talented and hard-working stoners, but it does sum up the passive danger of cannabis rather nicely I think.

[0] https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/My_Future_Self_n%27_Me/Scr...

I think this is largely the problem with mobile phones as well. Like you probably aren't going to go mad or get rectangular eyes or whatever, but you can just sort of sedate that sensation of boredom with scrolling reddit or facebook or whatever, which does all of bupkis for making us happy in the long term.

This is the same argument with all consuming vs producing.

It's why there was a moral panic in the 1800s over Jane Austen style fiction, in the 1930s over radio, and so on.

Being addicted to cannabis is not really any different to playing computer games 12 hours a day, doing endless marathons, watching sports, investing, or many similar activities.

phones are on a different level than fiction or radio or arguably even cannabis imo

you can do something else while you listen to the radio or smoke pot (e.g., clean your house, hang out with friends or family, with weed you can even read or program)

phones and books both consume your attention, but a book at least demands a bit of effort to follow and might introduce you to new ideas or vocabulary, even if you're reading pulp fiction

on the other hand you can scroll twitter or insta or watch tiktok absolutely mindlessly, and doing so will tend to become a habit all while it chips away at your attention span and your willpower

weed can make boredom feel ok too, and can certainly affect attention, willpower and memory, but if used in moderation it can also magnify your curiosity and sense of wonder, help you introspect, etc

cannabis is a powerful entheogen and it deserves far more respect and restraint than it currently receives

smartphones give us enormous powers but they can also exert massive power over our minds and actions, they too should be treated with caution and used with far more restraint

cannabis might make you lazy or suggestible, and it can even be dangerous for some people or if used irresponsibly, but it won't spoon feed you mind-melting pablum or ads or propaganda or spy on you

If we're going to credit books with potentially expanding your vocabulary, we should at least acknowledge that while you can mindlessly scroll through insta and tiktok you can also be consuming thoughtful and educational content. Even tiktok which doesn't exactly lend itself to useful content has some great stuff.

Books, TV, the internet, cell phones all have the potential to benefit you. They often don't, but it's not the medium that's the problem, it's our own choices - except the spying on you bit. That's 100% a problem with TV, the internet, cell phones and now even books.

I use my phone to listen to podcasts and audio books while I exercise.

I'm 90% sure that "endless marathons" referred to "watching entire seasons of shows on NetFlix", not "running 26.2 miles over and over".

I was previously at a place in my life where I compulsively did endurance exercise (including 3 marathons) to keep myself fatigued and numb my feelings. It was not too different to how some people smoke weed or drink, except that everyone in my life thought it was great and healthy. I spent a long time not making some very hard but positive life choices, and now my stomach lining is shot from pounding NSAIDs to keep exercising through joint pain.

Cannabis and jogging make a lovely combination.

That runner's high is something else after the 104th mile!

Although if you are a good runner, I've heard moderate cannabis usage can help bring on the runners high much quicker making running more fun.

As a (mostly former) distance runner. Running endless marathons is most certainly not harmless. You will face eventually injuries which affect you for the rest of your life.

I’m a distance runner too; I try to distance myself from running.

There's distance and then there's distance. You can be a serious endurance athlete but focus on shorter races, with judicious use of low-impact cross training to reduce the risk of injuries while still building an aerobic base.

Some of those moral panics did lead to action though.

Hard drugs, alcohol, gambling, duels; a lot of this stuff is if not banned then at least restricted and regulated.

That’s not a clear win, as in some cases the cure proved worse than the disease. And was co-opted for goals around discrimination.

Drugs are functionally different, I'd argue. You can quit games any time without pain, given enough mental resolve or motivation. No matter how good a reason it is you still have to deal with physical withdrawal when it comes to drugs

I found this a good review of the physical and chemical impact quitting marijuana. https://youtu.be/7u_cm5b1s7Y

I'd argue that the chemical withdrawal effects of marijuana, are nothing compared to habitual smoking, alcohol or other "hard" drug use. But there are still some chemical withdrawal effects.

Personally I've had Minor irritability after not having an edible for a few days if I've been consistently having them nearly daily for few days. But I've also realized this, and moderate use more to only once or twice a week, and only 5-10mg at a time. I've grown to like the feel of 5mg in the evening overall. Accounting for the blah feeling the next morning/day.

I thought it was pretty well known by now that there isn't really any physical withdrawl with cannabis; it's basically just mental.

I'd say marathons and computer games (except the clickers) should not be on this list due to the difference between active vs passive participation.

Clickers are better than people give credit. Thinking about growth curves is an uncommon challenge. Pretty much nothing else commonly involves things expanding faster than exponentially. You don’t actually just click mindlessly. You typically need an understanding of the system otherwise you’re just waiting for infeasible amounts of time.

>computer games 12 hours a day

I've heard professors say something to the effect of "students a decade or two ago used to be more productive". I don't have trouble believing that; so would I (I think) without the potency of modern entertainment. It's harder to do stuff while eating such good electric lotuses. :p

Being addicted to cannabis is not really any different [from non-chemical habits]

On a psychological level, perhaps. But it is pretty obviously not so when it comes to physical risk (if one smokes in whichever form).

No, but currently cannabis use is the one exploding in popularity compared to those others

Maybe they all were right.

agreed. I started bookmarking a specific open source repo and automechanic wiki and I’m slowly conditioning myself to read those if I want to waste time on my phone. I enjoy reading them anyway as much (or a lot more) than Reddit or w/e, just needed to make it habitual bc I didn’t think about going to those as a first stop to get lost in. Def helps and returns the joy of having internet access, lot of cool stuff to learn.

Consider using an RSS reader and bookmarking that! It’s nice to be able to grow your list of things to “default browse” to, over time.

Hot tip! Thx

Got a link to that wiki? Sounds useful

https://repairpal.com/encyclopedia

Indeed!

thanks for reminding me that's enough hn for today

phonestoned

That's a really good point. I never thought of it that way.

Can confirm.

Two of my kids use THC pretty regularly and they seem content with a life that is paying the bills but not really leading anywhere.

The third does not (AFAIK) and is on a much higher trajectory.

All had pretty much the same upbringing, rules, experiences, and discipline.

I've never used it, so don't have personal experience.

To me, a life that is in content and has meaning trumps all those whatever higher trajectory means. I mean.. isn’t achieving those higher trajectories the goal of being content and having achieve the meaning if it exits at all?

Watching your child being content to work at Taco Bell for the next 50 years is not something to be proud of. Regardless of contentment.

I'd be proud of it, if they were a good person, took care of themselves, took care of the people around them, and were truly happy in their lives. Some people are perfectly happy working low-level positions in restaurants, sanitation, retail, and the like for their lives, and maybe maintaining a few hobbies and relationships that give them personal meaning off their work hours.

It's only a problem if they aren't actually content. I've known tons of people working minimum wage who sneer at "elites", don't seek higher things, and get high all the time, but really resent the fact that they never did anything with their lives. They don't build their hobbies, they don't seek higher levels of employment or skill, and they constantly talk about how they want to do great things that they never do.

There will always be an infinite amount of achievement that you never accomplished. There will always be an infinite number of things you never did. The best thing you can do is prioritize, accomplish the things that you really want to accomplish, and try to do your best to be happy with what you are able to do. Live your life happily, and make the people around you happy.

Everyone is focusing on whether being content with working at Taco Bell is sufficient in life, but I think the more interesting question is whether they truly are content. That's not for me to answer, but if the South Park quote has any truth (and I think it has more than a little), in 50 years' time, they themselves might not be happy with how things went in retrospect. In that case, it's possible they weren't really content all that time, but were using weed to avoid deeply feeling that discontent.

I say this as someone with at least a little experience, not to be judgmental.

Why not? My first job was Wendy's and honestly... It's not the least satisfying job I've had. My unwillingness to do it now has more to do with having become accustomed to the luxury that comes with a software developer salary than anything negative about fast food (same reason I won't go back to being a security guard, which was hands down the best job I ever had).

I feel like there's a strong argument to be made that the person working at Taco Bell and is satisfied with their life is better off than a random cube dweller slowly losing their soul in the name of material comforts.

It's this kind of motivation that fuels the efforts to make sure low-level jobs stay unpleasant, unsafe, and uncompensated. It's the "starter job" philosophy, where some jobs are only fit for an inferior class of people who should have no pride, although they produce and distribute almost everything material that we use. Children, immigrants, foreigners...

I'm reminded every day that my decision to never work with my hands again was a good one. Nobody respects people who provide for you, that's slave's work, mother's work(, teacher's work, nurse's work.) The ultimate CEO-guru would lie on a cushion all day, being washed and shaved by his VPs, periodically emitting syllables in an unknown language that would be interpreted by other VPs as commands to direct the people who actually do the work.

You're assuming that the two content children work at Taco Bell. For all you know they could have a (to whatever degree) higher-paying job doing literally anything else yet still be content with where they're at.

not sure what stereotype you have in mind but I don't see why this should be something keeping a parent from being proud. it's simple, yet honest work and that's about it. so what? not everybody wants or has to be a surgeon ffs

Why?

Billions across the world would be incredibly happy with their kids getting to do something like this.

If you aren’t happy with a content child, sounds like you had children for all of the wrong reasons & would be a horrible, potentially abusive parent.

Of course it is.

Why not?

It's a nice line of thinking, sure—that you can achieve happiness and contentment without having to strive for the "best".

That's the whole point of the matter though, isn't it, that if you don't have ambition, then you voluntarily get yourself stuck in a rut of your making. "I'm content in that my life is shitty in X or Y way, but cannot do anything about it".

There was a time when I found comfort in thinking that I would grow up to be "comfortably middle class". My parents disabused me of that notion, and now that I am at that stage, I feel as though there is so much more I can learn and do, instead of clocking in and out day after day.

But hey, if you find happiness in working at a gas station or something, maybe you are more enlightened than I am.

I don’t understand the thought process of putting someone down based on what they do for a living. Particularly when it just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. The world around you revolves around people that clock in and out day after day. Maybe one day we’ll have 7.5 billion CEOs in the world, huh?

"I'm content in that my life is shitty in X or Y way, but cannot do anything about it".

What is “shitty” in this context?

A zen master is alone in his mountain retreat wherever he stands. A life spent seeking further material enrichment or inner personal development will inevitably build a mansion of a self, requiring increasing maintenance and becoming even more difficult to live outside of, let alone deconstruct.

It is much easier to accomplish a universal perspective when you have much less 'self' to suppress. That's been the nature of monks of all variety for all of human history. I don't think it's a coincidence or disadvantage that cannabis enthusiasts have a less-selfish mentality.

Contentment is overrated. Contentment is a path to stagnation and decay. It's more important to achieve something of lasting value, even if that means a certain amount of angst and dissatisfaction along the way.

Life naturally slows you down with age. Without enough momentum built up during your early years you may burn out and crash before you reach the end

I have seen this, but on the flip-side, the most successful person I know (and they are quite successful) is also the biggest stoner I know.

I've also met some extremely productive weed smokers. It seems like most people become lulled into a hazey life, but there are these idiosyncratic responders who smoke copious amounts and are fully on top of their game.

I think it's equally possible that lazy people who smoke will be lazy and people who are active and always doing stuff will continue to do that even if they smoke. The temptation to be lazy might be greater for the few hours they're high, but not everyone will give into that every time and every other hour of the day they're doing what they'd normally do.

I’ve been using cannabis my whole life and I’m fairly successful. I have a nice house, healthy savings, nice cars and a lovely family.

Who know, maybe I’m not meeting my full potential but I really do enjoy life and cannabis helps.

I’ve struggle with anxiety and insomnia my whole life and medical cannabis allows me to “turn off” in a way that a lot less damaging than other medications I’ve taken.

>> The third does not (AFAIK) and is on a much higher trajectory.

Depends on one's definition of higher, I guess.

Another data point here: 2 kids, the one who uses (a lot) of THC is more successful, got a physics masters degree and had a 40% side-job during most of bachelor/masters phase.

Correlation implies causation here? That is one place where and why this is all so tricky..

Yeah. I used the same schpeel (or something similar), with my kid when we found out she was smoking at 15. You know ~ it's not heroine or cocaine, but it can make you content to just do nothing, when you'd be happier doing something.

Sometimes "do nothing" is exactly what we need in this crazy, hectic, busy world. Sometimes it's good to be bored. But keep it in check. Also, I have no problem with adults partaking, but kids with their developing brains ~ that's another story in my mind.

FYI, spiel :)

More info at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spiel . Pronounced as you (gp) spelled it phonetically because it's borrowed from German.

It's taken from Yiddish, which took it from German.

Personally I prefer 'schpiel' :)

Thank you.

I think it's a substance that can lend itself really well to the creative aspects if used in moderation and with something like taking continuous notes so you don't lose those thoughts and ideas.

I've come up with some really great stuff while moderately stoned, and while I don't consume it on a daily anymore, I can't understate the importance of having some way of recording those thoughts as soon as you come up with them be it a notepad, notepad.exe or even a voice recorder if logging things on paper or text isn't your thing because it tends to mess with your short term memory enough to forget whatever interesting point of view you've arrived on within a minute or so. I think I learned this from comedians actually, George Carlin used to work like this. I bet there's plenty of writers on South Park and may other comedy shows who do, too.

Obviously taking it on a wake-and-bake basis throughout the day is going to give you problems though. Don't use it like that unless you're trying to manage serious illness like to keep your chemotherapy meds down or arthritis or whatever. Hell I don't even drink caffeine on a daily anymore because I find WAY more utility out of it once every couple of weeks or so. Oh yeah and if I'm going to agree with anything in this article it's that extracts are kinda too turbo, but I've also tried them in small amounts in drinks (Around 5-10mg) and that was pretty amazing compared to smoking in terms of lack of side effects from inhaling crap.

Drug use can be a good excuse to put some time aside to let your mind wander, so I see why people end up getting creative on THC. And if you practice creativity while stoned, it makes sense that you'll be more creative while stoned. Like my friend who learned to juggle high, and yet cannot do it when he's sober.

I think it's a bit more than that. It makes your mind wander in different directions, in a way that lends itself to things like writing original jokes or coming up with a different angle on problems or ideas that can be solved with more 'out of the box' solutions. It does something to the associative memory in which it makes associations which you wouldn't normally assert (Which is where I think a lot of people who don't enjoy it end up paranoid - a healthy dose of critical thought and reasoning going into these experiences may be helpful, along with keeping the dose relatively low).

That said since it does have a thought-scattering thing going for it that if you don't bother to try and focus on getting those scattered thoughts on to something which records them, it's kind of a waste of time if we're talking about using it for purely utilitarian reasons.

I always remember that quote as well, the bored part of it really stuck with me.

Unfortunately I smoked my first joint at 13, I'm pretty certain it damaged my short term memory. I think had it been legal I wouldn't have got hold of it until much older plus it would have lost some of its cool factor.

It was mostly hash in my day, I actually never liked weed , it was all super skunk loaded with thc that caused paranoia.

Alcohol, cocaine and mdma are rough drugs too but there's something about weed/hash that makes me think it's overall mental effects might be worse. It's odd that it's written off as harmless quite often. (Btw I think all drugs should be legal, but I also now think they are all horrible and have nothing to do with them , well apart from beer and wine!)

Ya this is what I haven’t understood about weed advocacy and the discussion around it. I think that people who were in the scene in middle/high school, which unfortunately is very very common in my view but just not well known, know more than enough lives torpedoed by getting into it.

Sure, “surprise, doing drugs at 13 is bad,” but I don’t know a lot of teenage drinkers who stopped at drinking (vs further in) in the same bad spot as the teenage smokers I knew (who stopped at smoking).

The difference of smoking at 13 vs 30 is likely different, but idk if I really buy starting in adulthood and trending towards habitual is meaningfully immune from its bad impacts I’ve seen peers deal who stuck with it.

I'm doing what I love buzzed right now, building a cluster for my homelab, creating a hybrid cloud solution to host some services and saving on money by leveraging cheap compute at home.

But yes, Randy Marsh was absolutely right. I've had periods of my life where I've abused it and I regret every one of those days.

> I've had periods of my life where I've abused it and I regret every one of those days.

I think I am starting to wake up to this. I do find enjoyment in it, and there is such a sunk cost fallacy I keep factoring in too.

I mean do I take occasional breaks, but probably not enough. It had definitely helped me lower my inhibitions enough to introspectively identity some issues that were deeply hidden under the surface of my everyday life. However, it's killed my motivation and in some ways it's starting to negatively affect other areas of my life. Regardless of my dependence, I am thankful to not feel clinically addicted or anything.

I will say, it wasn't my first choice of treatment. I tried the mental/medical health professional route. I'm still on that train, and it's been 8 years. Nothing has really improved, so I am not sure what else to do and where else to go. I adopted cannabis around the age of 29 with very limited experience prior. The kind I use is not like the variety in this article either. I use 1:1 THC:CBD hemp because high thc products are illegal in my area. So maybe the damage isn't "as bad."

If all the medical/mental health treatments I tried work as well as the medical research and doctors claim then I probably wouldn't have ever began to use cannabis in the first place. But like I said, what else am I to do? It's exhausting and stressful trying to force yourself to be a way your body naturally fights against.

It's apparent that I cannot function well without some sort of chemical assistance. I guess the only difference is where I get it from (doctor vs. plant), the side-effects, and the societal views that accompany said chemicals.

The way I see it, throughout history I'm sure millions of people have just gone crazy by the everyday burdens of life. We might have more availability to forms of therapy but in the end it's up to you to balance your life. Soul controller.

That is something I have been slowly starting to realize. I lack ambition and without ambition I have nothing to work towards, which in turn makes finding a balance difficult.

I've been trying to do some soul searching to find out what I truly want, but I've chalked it up to, "I'll know it when I see it." And till then, I must keep searching.

South Park also put it well when they understood that total abstinence is not the only way to deal with the situation. Maybe all it takes is a little discipline.

After all, there's a passive danger in many things we do or neglect to do.

> South Park also put it well when they understood that total abstinence is not the only way to deal with the situation. Maybe all it takes is a little discipline.

Exercising a "little discipline" doesn't really work for addictive substances. In my experience, high-functioning people with tons of impulse control often don't appreciate that others around them have more limited capacity for that. Despite drinking a lot in grad school, I just stopped after my daughter was born. Not out of any problem functioning, I was a social drinker and was just too busy with a job and baby. But it would be foolish of me to assume that everyone can just exercise "a little discipline" and go from 5+ drinks a night to nothing just like that.

The south park’s point in that episode wasn’t to deny the existence of substance abuse disorder. Rather the point was that not everyone that does dumb stuff one time while drinking has it.

In this episode Randy didn’t have Substance abuse disorder. He took the kids for a drive after drinking. He was caught and the court ordered him to undergo treatment despite there not being any proof that he was an alcoholic.

This mentality that anyone that does something dumb or illegal while drunk has a problem does no service for either those that actually have substance abuse disorder, nor for criminal justice. You should be responsible for your own actions, and if you are sick you need treatment. But ordering people to undergo treatment after a crime despite no evidence of a disorder is just plain bad. mkay.

In case anyone is curious, the South Park Archives fandom page on Randy Marsh has a section entitled "Alcoholism": https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Randy_Marsh#Alcoholism

If impulse control is an issue for you, I think weed is one of the lesser issues. Alcohol or other substances or habits are much more of a risk for those with little self control.

It all depends on who you are & your physiology, right? I was super addicted to nicotine (I can say that nicotine is perhaps 500x more addictive than weed, and about 10,000x more addictive than coffee, and about 50x more addictive than alcohol - all of which I have been addicted to at varying times in my life).

I've known people that were fine smoking a cigarette every 3rd day. I'm not one and that would put me on a path of relapse in a hurry.

I'll agree that avoiding addiction takes discipline, but once addicted, it depends to what, and who you are whether you need to focus on recurring abstinence or if more moderation is the ticket.

>If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you aren't good at anything

Hah, that's easily done without smoking pot

I guess. But anecdotally, I learned JavaScript, read philosophical text, organize my goals, play games with my children, go for walks outside…while consuming a moderate amount of thc. My creativity goes up. Rarely do I just sit and do nothing but sometimes that’s fine too. Moderation works.

For anyone interested, there's a support community around quitting pot at /r/leaves (that name being a humorous reference to /r/trees, a large subreddit for pot users).

This late 80's PSA style ad covers that perspective as well. This style of ads were easy to mock even in the 80s - but I always thought this one had a point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwQL9ZzJTX0

Moderation is key here, I believe. If you’re looking at successful people who get high all the time, it’s safe to assume they increased their marijuana (or any other substance) intake after having a skill they’re really good at. Most don’t and that’s why we see a correlation with drugs and being not good at much.

Do we see that correlation? Until recently, anyone over 40 was underground about marijuana usage. It turned out, tons of people use cannabis, many executives, plenty of people that we view as successful. One problem with black markets, it's very difficult to get good data, hence - do we really see a correlation? Or do we just perceive a correlation (ie: confirmation bias)

I'm not disagreeing and you can be wildly successful with or without it, I'm just pointing out heavy usage on a regular basis before you ever get to sustain that lifestyle can be detrimental to your success. But yeah, it could very well just be me perceiving a correlation here.

I had a friend who was a heavy pot smoker, and was insistent that there were no health affects. I asked him: "What about motivation?"

He said: "OK, motivation."

weed is a godsend for me. I normally aways feel a bit guilty if I'm not doing something productive. To the point where its a significant source of anxiety and insomnia. when things start getting to hot in the brain, a few puffs and I'm content to relax, watch some anime and sleep early.

completely agree with the op in general though. def not good of for kids who should be working on establishing themselves.

This quote stuck in my brain for a long time and I resonate with it and how I used it at a certain period in my life. It doesn't have to be like this if you approach it differently but in a certain context and state of mind, it's like an anti-adderall. Makes the day go by in comfort and nothing at all gets done.

Until you train yourself to get more things done when stoned which is step 2.

Yes, it just takes the right mindset and some effort (for me)

I think it highlights why we put age restrictions on things like this. A developing brain is far more likely to fall into this trap than and already functioning adult brain.

Actually I'd say its got some sort of anticholinergic effect.

The whitey that people experience, usually first time users or infrequent users, is a release of glutathione, and obviously its messing with the endocannabinoid system.

Its also got a very potent memory wiping effect, which makes it useful for criminals doing stuff to you, like raping you in your sleep if you have been spiked with prescription sleeping pills and/or off the shelf anti histamines sold to aid sleep.

Its a very nasty combination of drugs, when that sort of stuff has been done to you in your sleep, and criminals never tell you what they plan to do to you!

Dont make it easy for them, the legal system wont help you!

clip of that scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G83G0EDE2RY

Conversely you could argue that that's probably a good way to go out after you get an empty nest

> it most likely isn't gonna fund terrorists

Afghanistan?

I don't know if it is the same in Europe, but Marijuana in North America tends to be produced in the country it is consumed. In most places where it is legalized in the states and canada you can even find out exactly what farm it was that produced it.

More than I can say for the food I eat.

Many years ago I was sitting at my computer smoking after work like I normally did, and I asked myself, "What would I be doing if I wasn't smoking right now" and I couldn't answer it. I tapered off pretty easily and began to fill my time with other hobbies.

I was never the type of smoker which was "active". I would smoke socially and began to hate that I could never remember people's names or conversations. It made me fairly quiet and anti-social compared to without.

Now I really can't enjoy marijuana, even when buying low THC high CBD bud and vaping it, it's still very easy for me to overshoot and get into a state I hate. Marijuana turns me into a complete idiot and creates a sort of cerebral haze I can't stand.

I really dislike the lack of education surrounding marijuana. People, especially young people, seem to disregard the impact of excessive consumption. You can argue with me all day it's safer than alcohol or tobacco, and I agree if we're talking equivalent amounts, but I'm not saying you should drink daily or multiple times a day for years.

Everybody is different, my experience isn't necessarily everyone else's. For those that do fall into the trap of spending too much money, time, and failing to understand how weed might be holding them back, better education, regulation, and support should net society a bunch of happy well informed people living their best lives.

> it's still very easy for me to overshoot and get into a state I hate. Marijuana turns me into a complete idiot and creates a sort of cerebral haze I can't stand

I can only enjoy THC as a sleep aid for the reasons you’ve highlighted above. For me, it feels like mj is underclocking my brain. I am aware of it and I hate being slow. It’s a terrible feeling. I enjoy alcohol much more even though mj is safer overall.

The real danger of marijuana is that for a small portion of the population it can induce schizophrenia, but it only affects a very small segment of the population since I believe you have to be in your early 20s or younger and be genetically prone to it

When I was in college I tried weed. It was not a recreation for me, it just put me to sleep, a couple hits and I was out on the couch. So I never got into it.

Fast forward a few decades. I now have chronic insomnia due to things like on-call and anxiety. My brain will not shut down enough for sleep. I had tried Ambien, melatonin, blah, blah. Nothing really worked. I went to a party, they had green brownies. I was on the verge of a migraine, so I had a couple. Out on the couch in half an hour. I woke up without the migraine.

So now I use THC/CBD to deal with migraines and insomnia. I can get a good night's sleep if I take a nice, measured dose gummy just before bed. I wake up slightly before my alarm, alert and refreshed. This is a big change from before. If I feel a migraine coming on I put stuff on hold, take a big dose of CBD and some THC and sleep it off. I wake up without the post-migraine stupids that Imitrex causes.

Used responsibly, in moderation, it can have a life-changing benefit - just like other drugs. If it's abused... well, alcohol abuse will kill you too.

Interesting. For me the roles are reversed. Alcohol makes me feel dumb, like I can't think as fast or clearly. THC has a very different effect. I don't feel slow, I mostly feel calm and clear. Sort of in the ballpark of meditating. I've done some of my best writing on weed. I've written some great code high. I prefer low doses (10mg) of a nice hybrid edibles with a decent amount of CBD (1:1 or 2:1) for this.

And yeah, the schizophrenia risk would make me think twice about it if that ran in my family. Though I'm now at an age where that wouldn't matter (schizophrenia almost always manifest by your 30s which I cleared a while back).

>For me, it feels like mj is underclocking my brain. I am aware of it and I hate being slow. It’s a terrible feeling.

That's funny. I like it because it underclocks my brain. It's not as needed these days now that I have meds for ADHD, but before I was diagnosed my brain felt like I was constantly thinking too fast. While I enjoy that I make connections quickly and that I retrain and recall information quickly, it's a depressing burden when it's out of control. So before the meds weed was the only thing that kept me feeling calm, focused and in control

I am in the same boat… there is a serious lack of education. It’s like the pendulum has swung completely the other way from drug abstinence, and now there is tons of disinfo claiming weed is harmless and non-addictive when that’s not the true story.

I’m still in favor of legalization, but cannabis needs some of the regulations we apply to tobacco. Producers shouldn’t be able to make packaging that looks like a bag of skittles or a candy bar. There needs to be warnings on the packaging, informed consent when purchasing it, possibly even hotlines or pamphlets given out to help young people avoid addiction.

Because children will think smoking weed is like eating a candy bar?

I don't know of any place that allows selling to minors or even allowing them in the store. What good is changing wrappers when kids don't shop in those places?

Cannabis has stronger laws compared to tobacco already. Plenty of medical and church related pamphlets exist. What do you think is missing?

The truth is you grew up and turned into your parents.. it happens to many who have kids.

> Because children will think smoking weed is like eating a candy bar?

Yes and no.

Yes. Kids sometimes find parents/adult things and think it’s candy and eat it. Parents should be careful blah blah blah. Parents make mistakes. Kids are crafty at rifling though cabinets. Making something look like candy increases the odds kids eat it by mistake.

But also by making things taste good (esp addictive or habit forming things) you’ll increase the ease at building the habit. Ask Juul how that’s going. That’s the whole idea behind menthol cigarettes and mango vapes. Make the habit easier. Even for adults.

Cannabis has stronger laws around distribution and dosing… tobacco has way stronger packaging and advertising laws. You can’t make nicotine candies, you can’t use shiny flashy colors, you can’t make fun ads etc. You can do that with cannabis.

> The truth is you grew up and turned into your parents

Sometimes you grow up and find out adults knew a few things about the world.

You can think cannabis and drugs should be legal without thinking it shouldn’t have basic regulation to protect people from themselves and from the product. We have plenty of other laws for other products to prevent bad advertisement or to include warning labels.

For what it’s worth, I personally think we should require things like edibles to be low dosage and packaged with warnings but I think we should still allow candies and fun packaging. But I’m a sucker for a cool package and maybe that’s the point…

The problem is that the weed community actively silences any mention that there might be any danger involved. I’ve had multi hour exchanges where I’ve sent peer review studies showing it is dangerous and been constantly shut down as a federal agent or FUDder

Totally agree. I hate modern weed. It is as if all alcohol producers were in a race to create the highest proof moonshine but I just like having a glass of wine.

Of course, everyone drinking moonshine is also going to lead to more alcoholics than people just having a glass of wine socially.

I use to be able to smoke once a month and not even think about it the next day. Any modern strain I wake up the next day thinking "I should smoke more weed!". Just crazy.

Indica or sativa? Most people with complaints as you describe are smoking indica, sativa is more appropriate for social situations, but can still make you get stuck in your head. Most people I know who use sativa find it helps their creativity.

If one more person tries to tell me it's strain... Both, any mixture, any strain. Edibles, vaping, smoking, all of it.

Some of the more pleasant times are when I mix up ABV (already vaped weed) into edibles. Those I can get weak enough and with only the more stony compounds remaining where it can be pleasant, but it still turns me into a drooling idiot with absolutely horrific munchies.

> If one more person tries to tell me it's strain

It's like telling an alcoholic to try switching from vodka to tequila, because vodka makes you angry and depressed but tequila makes you a fun drunk. THC is THC, and any difference is psychosomatic.

Drinking beer vs vodka is a big jump. Fruity drinks with vodka can leave you trashed because of the high.

If you think all weed produces the same effects then you first need to understand it's not all about thc.

First lesson Terpes: https://www.amazon.ca/Primary-Terpenes-Cannabis-Marijuana-In...

Next lessons: thc vs thca vs cbd

THC is THC, but there are other compounds in the plant that appear important in the texture of the experience. Many people report the same, and following the delta-8 legalization wave they are apparently fractionally distilling the plant extract and separating out many of the active components.

Counter point: I am 37 years old. I quit marijuana three or four months ago, but before that I was vaping marijuana nearly every day for four years. During that time I’ve achieved more success in my career than any other time. I think it was good for me to quit. I feel more alert and more productive now. More level and less tired. Maybe I would have been more successful without it, so perhaps you are right. But then, life shouldn’t be just about success. And then, I still got where I am today, with the best career I’ve ever had. So it doesn’t feel like it held me back at all.

Crucially, I used relatively small amounts of pure sativa. I wasn’t stuck on the couch while I used it. Still, this to me suggests self control is more important than abstinence.

I also used to smoke frequently and fully stopped. I think my grandparent makes an interesting point about how habit forming it is because it's so safe which is a good and bad. Wish I had known how habit forming it is before I started.

And to your point, yes life is not just about success, it's about so much more like friends and family.

That's why I hate weed. It turned my friends who were creative, thoughtful and caring, into people who just wanted to smoke and do nothing when they had time off.

It’s funny because I’m extremely creative whether I’m smoking or not. Late last year I designed a four axis 3D printed robot arm full of custom 3D printed planetary gearboxes and brushless motors. I was stoned the whole time I was designing it. Early this year I met a bunch of skateboarders and we had a great time smoking a bit and skating in empty parking lots. I had successful creativity and good friendships while vaping. But again I used pure sativa that didn’t make me want to sit on the couch. And it was hard to find! Most weed sold in California stores is a hybrid with some of that couch lock feeling. I think some stoners just don’t realize they can get something that doesn’t knock them on their ass.

I’m not saying people should smoke or vape. But I do want to say that with care and self control it can be a habit that doesn’t cause serious problems. Though ultimately I feel much better having quit.

I would guess there are people who do cocaine every day without trouble. That doesn't mean everyone should do drugs. Most people can't handle it.

You dont have to guess, i can assure you these people exist. I know a few.

In fact some of the biggest names in tech and other industries are definately using drugs, its very possible to be a high achiever and be on drugs. in fact, it seems to be, that we really don't even call it addiction until it ruins your live, otherwise its just called "recreational". strange to me.

cocaine is not weed though

most people cannot do cocaine every day without trouble. Coffee? every day is fine

different drugs have different danger

> Coffee? every day is fine

/r/nootropics, common thread is as follows:

OP: "Help, I have bad anxiety every day, what should I take for it?"

re: "Do you drink coffee?"

OP: "Yes, about 4 cups a day."

re: "Stop drinking coffee and come back in a week and tell us how you are doing."

1 week later.

OP: "My anxiety is gone!!"

Caffeine has negative side effects. For some people those side effects are really bad.

Also caffeine messes up sleep cycles. After seeing sleep study results, I won't touch the stuff after 10am or so, if even that late.

Alcohol is even worse in this regard, it will just ruin your sleep cycles at night.

Edit: Let me emphasis this for anyone reading:

YOU WILL NOT GET DEEP SLEEP IF YOU HAVE A NIGHTCAP.

Yes, you will get drowsy, drink enough and you will pass out. The restorative quality of the sleep you get that night will NOT be good. I've seen first hand the sleep study results from this. The effect is so obvious that even the questionable sleep quality results that wrist based wearables give you can easily and consistently show this effect.

Does caffeine have negative side effects, or does caffeine, taken in excess, including in late hours of the day, have negative side effects?

It's an important distinction to make in this discussion, which largely boils down to "off label use", whether we're talking about drinking simply too much coffee or people with developing brains getting too much thc.

Just piggy-backing on this comment; a great book about sleep is Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. The author does seem to fall into the "everything is a nail when all you have is a hammer" trap, but they do know a lot about sleep and the points in the above comment are backed up in the book with solid studies and references.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep

Even these aren't universal though. For me, with ADD, my anxiety goes up when I'm not on stimulants, and the thing that destroys my sleep is intensive, creative coding. Alcohol doesn't do much to my sleep.

I think the most universal things everyone should be doing are: get more exercise, and get more sleep.

> Coffee? every day is fine

I wonder how people will look back on coffee hundreds of years from now. "Almost everyone used to constantly drink an addictive stimulant. Shops on every block sold it. People stated that they couldn't function (or even talk) in the morning until they had consumed the stimulant. At work, people needed to take constant stimulant breaks. If someone went a day without it, they often suffered debilitating headaches." It sounds like dystopian science fiction.

(To be clear, I'm not opposed to coffee. It's just one of those things that seems strange if you think about it from a distant perspective.)

It only sounds like a dystopian science fiction if you describe it as such.

On the other hand, it's not like coffee houses are a recent invention.

https://livesandlegaciesblog.org/2017/05/24/coffee-a-revolut... https://blog.publicgoods.com/a-brief-history-of-coffee-in-am...

Check on the section on WW2, "An average of 20 pounds of coffee were consumed a year per adult. ... This amount was cut in half to 10 pounds a year, as one pound of coffee was allotted to each person over 15 years old every five weeks."

It's even stranger when you look at how I chug decaff.

I hate what caffeine does to me, but I like the taste of black coffee.

Well I certainly wouldn’t take the position that everyone should do drugs! I guess I’m just pushing back against the idea that marijuana use automatically means your life will be worse. I think this depends on your personality, use habits, and level of self control.

Most people can handle it. But that still doesn't mean everyone should do drugs.

You're saying that if everyone in the world started to take cocaine daily, a high percentage of people, say 80-90% can handle it.

What does handling it mean if you're taking cocaine daily? Taking drugs daily is already likely beyond the point of dependence. Regardless of will power, you will almost certainly develop some level of chemical addiction and tolerance trying to use cocaine, recreational-y, daily. I would say the question is invalid.

I meant most people can do cocaine once, or at an infrequent irregular frequency without getting addicted to it and becoming dependent.

FWIW most means > 50%

Higher than that I would guess. Bolivians seem to handle it at a rate of "all of them".

Of course they're using quids, if they were injectors of pure cocaine the situation would be less rosy. But you didn't specify the route and concentration.

This isn't a gotcha, it's a habit of daily use by millions, all of whom are basically fine.

Wrong way around. If everyone in the world consumes something and side effects are very rare and usually mild, then you have to argue what the problem is.

For cocaine and most "hard drugs" probably neither is true. For coffee it seems both are true. For alcohol 1 is true and 2 is tricky.

the poison is in the dose

Counter point taken.

Follow-on question: have you had similar success in your relationships and personal life in the last 4 years?

I was a great student stoned, and a decent heads-down coworker. I became a detached boyfriend and family member and even more detached friend. I made my world smaller, so I could "focus" on work. My time on creative/non-passive hobbies fell to zero. I didn't lose friends but I didn't keep up with them.

I genuinely hope your experience has not been so asymmetrical.

I wouldn’t describe my relationship style as detached at all. I was attentive and used some of my time in therapy to work on issues that came up with my partner and try to resolve them. It didn’t work out but I think that’s due to a bad fit. And she smoked a lot of weed (more than I did) so we were aligned there.

My creative passions exploded. Personal design projects (3D printing, circuit board design, robotics, programming) all were off the charts high, as I reduced the number of hours I worked at my regular job to under 30 hours a week. It was the most productive hobby time of my life.

I think it makes a huge difference that I smoked relatively small amounts of pure sativa, and nothing else.

Biggest issue I think was how it affected my sleep. I would stay up late getting stoned and designing robots, going to sleep around 4 or 5am. I’d wake up at 12 or 1. Made it hard to visit my Dad for lunch since he lives a ways away. Now without weed I go to bed at midnight and wake up at 8. I like that! Much easier to make plans with my Dad and my new partner (who is GREAT).

I quit marijuana three or four months ago, but before that I was vaping marijuana nearly every day for four years. During that time I’ve achieved more success in my career than any other time. I think it was good for me to quit. I feel more alert and more productive now. More level and less tired.

Maybe the next four years are going to be the most successful four years of your career. Good luck!

Oh they probably will be! My open source career is blowing up. Still while it wasn’t said outright, what I read in to my parent comment was that using marijuana will make you a failure or unsuccessful. Obviously I am reading a lot of what my dad used to say in to that comment, which never made such a claim. But I wanted to provide my perspective nonetheless. Also, thanks!

Was a stoner from age 15 to 25 (first joint at 12-13), I started smoking less and less at 25 and have recently just totally stopped in my early 30s (I might take a puff here and there once in while socially, but even then). Most of my friends were also stoners, some still are. I cannot stress this enough, if you get high EVERY day or EVERY other day from 15 to 25 it really does something to your motivation in life.

I still struggle with motivational problems (ADHDish issues), but I think I've been lucky. I have friends that will probably never achieve anything meaningful in life and that is despite having had access to the best education available (private schools), parents that were MORE than okay, welp being privileged you know... Now some of them cannot stand normalcy (i.e.: working).

There is a world of difference between starting weed when you're 25 and smoking a little bit VS getting HIGH almost everyday from 13-15 onwards.

When we were young we convinced ourselves that weed was not dangerous at all...fools.

I'm about to be a dad, I'll make sure my kids know what's up.

> The real danger with cannabis is not that it'll make you sick or have some nasty side effect like this article describes.

That may be true for the majority of users, but the increase in people having significant negative reactions to high-dose THC is a real phenomenon.

This new era of extremely potent THC concentrates and other high-dose products has opened the door to some people using far more THC than previous generations could easily consume. Many of these high-dose users are discovering that the old narrative that weed isn’t “physically addictive” isn’t actually true and prolonged high-dose usage can produce significant physical and mental withdrawal effects. It won’t kill you like extreme alcohol withdrawal can, but the deep impulse to redose and inability to quit easily catches a lot of these high-dose users unprepared after they’ve been told that weed is harmless for so long.

Psychosis among high-dose users is also on the rise, though harder to pinpoint because the connection is very hard to make and quantify in studies. Again, this isn’t something people were taught to watch out for so you see some of these users believing that marijuana is a treatment for their psychosis rather than a cause and they spiral further and further until quitting.

The old street knowledge about marijuana’s biggest downside being laziness doesn’t really apply to people engaging in the more extreme doses and uses heavily processed and concentrated products.

Why is this topic always brought up regarding weed, but nothing else? Should we make video games illegal because they can cause some people to live a lethargic and less productive life?

It is brought up with other things. Perhaps you are extra sensitive about the weed topic for your own personal reasons. "Video games" is a particularly bad counter example, there's a lot of chatter around video game addictiveness and what it can do to vulnerable minds. There's always been some low-key discussion of it but the increasing prevalence of "loot boxes" and their corresponding mechanics have not just increased the volume of the hand-wringing but actually risen up to the level of being banned in certain countries. It's early days on that and I expect to see more regulation of video games over time. As a parent, I can and do directly control my children's access to video games. (My children for various reasons I'm not sharing on the internet are extra sensitive to the issues.)

For example: "The Immoral Design of Diablo Immortal" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o17lBUZgjTs

That's a gambling addiction you're mentioning here, something I feel is a LOT more insidious than smoking a joint on occasion

You are debating a different aspect of video games. The complaint against loot boxes is not that they prevent video game players from reaching their true productive potential. They don't do that. The problem with loot boxes is that they are exploitative.

Before loot boxes existed you had Diablo 2, which instead of your money you were trading your time to get the best items. I wasted thousands of hours of my prime years trying to gamble my way to the “perfect build”. World of Warcraft was the same way, only writ large and perfected with raids. I’ve spent literal years of my life playing Blizzard games and hate myself for wasting so much time.

I'm not "debating" anything. I'm pointing out that people have been complaining about video games for a while, and that the loot boxes in particular have amped that debate up. But they did not create it. Video games have been accused of rotting brains (the favored rhetorical formulation of this accusation for whatever reason) for my entire life. I'm pointing to the existing debates as evidence of this.

Parents have been complaining for literally decades that videogames make kids lazy or that "tv rots your brain". And I have seen videogame overuse fuck up people's academics and careers.

Weed bros get real touchy when anybody suggests something bad about it. Inb4 "alcohol is worse". I'm still for legalization but people need to stop getting so defensive.

Touchiness is a hangover from the unjust war on drugs. Also, why alcohol is worse is so frequently cited. It will probably go away as stigma rapidly fades

All people want is for weed to be legal. These arguments about wasted lives are used to justify keeping it illegal.

I'm 100% pro-legalisation, not because I believe cannabis is harmless (I got psychologically hooked the exact way lacker describes), but because:

1. Putting people in prison for using it causes more harm than the actual usage of it does.

2. The threat of state force being used to strip people of their freedoms is not an effective deterrent. The war on drugs is an objective failure.

3. The war on drugs was nonsensical to begin with. You are legally free to drink bleach. You can legally drink yourself to death on alcohol. You can legally consume enough caffeine to give yourself a heart attack and die on the spot. You can legally smoke 100 packs of highly addictive and harmful cigarettes a day. But you can't legally consume cannabis, which remains a schedule 1 drug?

Legalisation is of utmost importance not because cannabis is good and we ought to encourage consumption, but because the alternative (criminalisation) is irrational, morally reprehensible, and a costly waste of taxpayer resources.

There is no good that comes from criminalisation, only more harm, more waste, and more people being stripped of basic human rights for no justifiable reason.

Users of weed do more to keep it illegal by their off-putting rhetoric than any Refer Madness propaganda does. I've been in favor of legalization for decades but really dislike discussing it with users because of their often lack of self-awareness and tendency to be just as dishonest as those against it.

> And I have seen videogame overuse fuck up people's academics and careers.

Circa 2005, a non-trivial percent of students sat in the back of lecture halls playing WoW during classes.

Games have gotten terrifyingly more addictive since then, though you don't hear so much about games ruining lives anymore in the news. Maybe it just isn't newsworthy anymore?

I think while productivity shouldn't be the exclusive way we measure someone's life (and its implicit frame that someone's worth is measured by that person's material contribution to society), those dialogues hide a more interesting question -- how purposeful someone's life is, and whether regular, recreational use of marijuana supports or discourages living purposefully and meaningfully.

My experiences of marijuna is that it can loosen the societal conditioning on "productivity", and reveal the lack of purpose and meaning in one's life. It's liberating to realize the a lot of the conditioning don't matter as much as it seems.

It's at this point, that it's tempting to continue and just have fun. Here though, is the space in which one can discover one's purpose from within, with societal and external expectations muted. It's paradoxically that here, connecting with that purpose, brings life and joy outside of the mental states that marijuana can bring. When one makes conscious contact with that inner, unconditioned purpose, marijuna is something that is fun that one can occasionally enjoy, but not as a substitute for purposefully living.

It gets brought up in posts about weed because the posts, like this one, are about weed. Similar things are stated about other things in posts about those other things. Do you believe discussion of the relative pros and cons of weed use should be forbidden?

No one said it should be illegal. It's just dangerous.

> Should we make video games illegal

Didn't China do almost exactly that?

Not exactly. They restricted online gaming. "China Limits Online Videogames to Three Hours a Week for Young People - New regulation will ban minors from playing videogames entirely between Monday and Thursday" https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-sets-new-rules-for-youth-...

Online video games are kind of their own thing. I wish normal/local multiplayer games didn't get lumped in.

I don't see much support for criminalization of drugs around here.

But yeah, we should educate people so they notice if this happen due to view games, or Facebook too.

The conversation about whether or not we should make something illegal is a whole other category. We know that alcohol is bad for the brain and has a myriad of health effects and destroys lives, but was prohibition the best solution to end addiction - the jury is definitely out on that one! And don't get me started on the opioid crisis. However, I do think information is power. People often see marijuana is the harmless, kind drug that gets over-criticized. It's important to realize that the impact of the drug is not harmless and that it's also changing as it's become legalized and people are able to make it more potent with higher levels of THC, the impact on human health - and also the environment. It's also not being sustainably farmed the way it was before.

In their never ending goal to control kids' lives, a certain segment of parents know they've lost the war against D&D, comic books, rock n roll, TV, rap music, video games, etc. This is just the topic du jour.

Video games are a similar threat to living a fulfilling life, absolutely.

Definitely not the exact same kind of threat, since video games don't make you dumber like pot, but there is a real risk that a person substitutes accomplishing things in real life in favor of accomplishing things in a video game.

Your comment is kind of whataboutism. You're not really refuting what he's saying, just bringing up a separate topic

I wasn't trying to refute the idea. The idea is true. The question is whether we should worry about it.

Using weed is a recreation activity. Most recreation activities will have a negative impact on your life if they are not done in moderation. I don't think that is necessarily a problem and the fact that this generally isn't discussed in other contexts might indicate that people are subconsciously using this an excuse when their true objections to weed originate somewhere else.

I can't speak for other people, but for me, it's not recreational. Not anymore. I need cannabis to simply feel normal. I feel high only when I'm sober, because sobriety is the atypical state. I can't sleep without it. I can't leave the house in the morning without it. After about 24 hours abstinence, I get debilitating headaches and start to vomit, presumably from the withdrawal. It's not fun. There's not much fun left in it at all, really. It's just an addiction.

Weed may be unique in allowing such a constant level of intoxication with relatively mild side-effects. I think that's how it gets people. Such addiction is not that uncommon and I've watched legalization in Canada with a mix of appreciation (I still do believe it should be legally available) and apprehension (I think we're about to see a small but significant % of an entire generation end up in the same place I've been for the last ~10 years.)

I don't think video games fuck up your lungs and kill you in the long term, at least in capita.

Video games don’t make you lethargic, less productive, and significantly less intelligent for days after playing them.

I disagree. I was fully addicted to Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC) back in the day. A perfect set of circumstances led to me have bit of time to start playing, and it quickly turned into 8+ hours/day. Anytime I wasn't playing, I was thinking or reading about playing. It ruined some important relationships, and definitely stunted my career (I stayed at an easy job far too long), and impacted me physically (stopped working out, ate like crap, etc...).

For days? Neither does weed.

Yes, it does.

Weed has non-acute negative effects on cognition for 7 hours to 3 weeks after use, dropping off most significantly after 72 hours of abstinence.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abst...

In a round-about-way they do - video games are so fun you can end up playing them for days until you get bored.

What the hell did you smoke?

I'm struggling with this right now. Using during the day is still an uncommon occurrence, but it's happening more and more.

The real issue I'm having with it is that I'm using pretty much every night. I come from the gym, take a shower, and grab the vape pen and sit on the couch. It just makes me so lazy.

I stopped cooking and just eat pizza and ice cream nearly every night. Thankfully my weight hasn't taken a hit. But it creates this cycle of not cooking, so I don't buy groceries, so I can't cook, so I just order in.

Yeah exactly. Like a lazy night isn't the worst thing in the world... it isn't even all that bad. It's not like you're breaking into cars for meth money or drunkenly assaulting people. But still, do you really want every night of your life to be vape pen, Netflix, order pizza?

I don't really know the best way to kick the habit or to reduce it. It seems like different things work for different people. Maybe it would help to pick one week to go no-cannabis and see if you can do it. Good luck with whatever strategy you decide to go with....

What's your expience with cannabis that makes you think every weed smoker only watches tv and eats pizza?

They were responding to a weed smoker who claimed to do exactly that.

Just wanted to plug r/leaves . It's a great community that helps people figure out their reasons and quit.

Sometimes that means quitting for one week, feeling good and going back. But it has helped me quit for good and so much happier in life.

Just subscribed. Thank you

I would recommend abstaining entirely for 2-4 weeks. See how you feel. See how easy it is to do. That you should give the perspective you need to evaluate whether it’s something you want in your life or not.

I can relate to this. My solution was smoke if and ONLY if I have already made dinner. Friday and Saturday night are the sole exceptions.

Take a break before it becomes worse. Get a kSafe and lock all your stuff up for a week or two to shake your brain out.

I spent my whole 20s severely addicted to it without even realizing, and when I had to stop I felt like I was going crazy. Couldn't sleep, couldn't think, couldn't eat. It's really better to nip it in the bud.

it seems the problem is not weed or pizza or lack of cooking, but an overall lack of higher level goals. in this regard there's no real difference between gym + cooking and pizza + vaping. of course if you do have those goals and you are making progress, then sticking to cooking seems order for order's sake.

Even if marijuana is 100% responsible for your situation, there's no need to create a moral panic and project it onto others, like the parent poster & NYT article is doing.

What is the purpose of this comment? OP is describing an issue they're having with the drug. I imagine it's not an uncommon story.

That italic "if" reeks of a certain sort of sensitivity.

I mean, you are going to the gym, and you feel lazy? That’s a healthier practice than most people I know. Consider it a reward? :)

By gym, I mean Jiu Jitsu. But that's really just physical entertainment that consumes 1-3 hours an evening. If I'm back home by 7, what do I do with the time between then and bedtime? I don't know if not smoke weed.

sativa strains? force yourself to not use it for a few days. Also, if you do sit lazily on the couch watch some cooking shows (or something similar) so you can inspired for something to cook (or do) later when you’re not feeling lazy.

honestly sounds like you're having a great time lol

It's not a bad time. But I'm doing nothing. I spend each night channel surfing between YouTube, AppleTV, Hulu, and Netflix. It would be so boring if I were doing it sober.

I would recommend that you carve out an hour once a week to try cooking some new recipe and try to get it into your routine. Preferably something healthy, but it doesn't really matter. Do the shopping on a different day than the cooking at first. Start simple, you're not trying to impress Gordon Ramsay here.

As someone who was in that exact situation previously in life - discovering new cooking techniques and finding small local grocers and ethnic food stores around me was eye opening. Local farms (or farmers markets if you're in a city) will have fresh, high quality nutritious products that you can work into ordinarily boring meals. Hell, even a BLT with locally butchered bacon, fresh lettuce and heirloom tomatoes is miles above anything you could get delivered or find at a chain store.

After that look into meal prep (doing bulk prep for multiple meals which saves loads of time), more ambitious recipes that require planning, and upgrading your kitchen tools and skills. Weed isn't that bad in the big picture, but going through life eating sub-par delivery food is no way to live.

I have a similar lifestyle.

I am starting to realize it's not laziness that's holding me back. It's full-blown burnout, stress, and anxiety. I have realized that I am actively avoiding doing anything to make my life better. Upon further inspection, I was doing this before I touched cannabis (about 1.5 years ago). If anything, cannabis just dulls my feelings down enough that I can keep my head above water while going to my dead-end and toxic job that I've been at for almost 6 years.

I know what I need to do and I cannot bring myself to do it. I am still trying to figure out why. Again, this existed prior to my cannabis usage too.

On and off daily marijuana user.

I don't feel "dopey and less intelligent" when I smoke weed at all times of the day. It actually has very little impact on me. But it does help me deal with my chronic anxiety issues.

I take breaks regularly. Sometimes I get into a place where I can't operate in my day to day life because of intrusive thoughts. When I smoke I'm able to break out of cycles of repetitive thought and make real progress in my life. I achieve so much more and get so much more out of life. I'm able to engage with the people in my life better and improve my relationships.

You speak with false authority on a matter you cannot possibly understand, because you do not share the life experience of myself or people like me. It's irresponsible and you should desist. If you have relevant experiences, share them and explain that this is your conclusion. If you don't have relevant experiences, don't include yourself in the conversation. Don't speak in generalizations about other people's lives.

Agree, also a nightly user and I feel way better doing it. I feel more intelligent and better rested.

Also agree that the op shouldn’t speak in generalizations around this.

Weed is a tool. it makes you high. that's about it as far as generalizations go.

if weed makes someone feel fulfilled, then they can farm a lot more feelings of fulfillment by using it than the old fashioned way of actually accomplishing things. I think trying to shame people away from it is silly. People who use it will very quickly realize it isnt bad, and then they dismiss everything they heard about it.

There is a monkey paw warning in that it wears off. It wears off in short and long terms; it is less effective the more you use it over time. So be aware that the spectrum for its effects is along the lines of "kind of cool for a little bit" to "everything you love slowly being ripped from your hands". the latter extreme probably being pretty rare and more applicable to heroin.

Otherwise you could make the same 'danger' argument about video games, porn, social media, reading books, painting, co-dependent relationships, etc. Anything that people use to dump their attention / time into rather than deal with anything uncomfortable in their life. The vessels people use are a matter of preference, and tangential to the underlying problem.

There is always an issue with trying to use 1 tool to fix every problem. obsession. Weed usage requires nuance and an understanding of what it is you are trying to accomplish with it. same as any other drug, same as any other tool.

Honestly, if someone wants to do nothing with their life than smoke weed.. who cares? I certainly dont. They might be one of the last people I offer any sort of charity to, but that's about me not them.

Cannabis is the only drug where I struggle to find a healthy balance.

Other ubiquitous drugs like caffeine or alcohol are easier for me to balance because their drawbacks (dependence, hangovers, weight gain) are more obvious.

But cannabis doesn't have those to nearly the same extent, so it's easy to rationalize frequent use: on an average night without anything planned, it always sounds enjoyable without any downsides. But then frequent use eventually adds up and starts to cause small issues, like being a little lazier and having a slightly worse memory.

As someone who used to be morbidly obese, I can make a better argument for banning Mc Donald's.

>And you just won't get as much out of your life as you could get, won't achieve as much relationship success, professional success, or personal fulfillment.

This applies to being 100 pounds overweight too.

Hell, it can be argued if you cut out beer and switch to cannabis your health will improve.

I don't see gp arguing for banning cannabis

Not sure if this is related, but from what I understand, cannabis is prescribed medically to treat both anorexia and bulimia.

I agree being stoned all the time can have bad effects. Similar to video games, TV, instagram, or going out, if you do it too much then you might look up after a while and realize that you haven't developed as many deep skills or relationships as your peers.

However, I've gotten stoned almost every night for the past ~15 years and I think it's been pretty positive. I actually get a low-level pleasant and productive anxiety to create shit. Like don't get me wrong I can get stoned and play a game or watch TV, but usually it just makes me want to go harder on something I'm working on and makes the work more fun. For certain types of work (writing product stuff, making music, css polish) I find it correlates with small creative bursts or insights. My current rule of thumb... only vape [0] in situations where I don't have to deal with strangers or kids (only at night these days). Like food, alcohol, coffee, being alone, or being social, moderation is key.

My point is just that it depends on the person and setting. It's not necessarily good or bad, more like a power tool for your mind. No panacea.

[0]: https://www.puffco.com

The thing with cannabis (with THC) is that it makes doing nothing OK so you may realize after some time of daily use that you have accepted doing nothing as a legit activity, contrarily when not high you'd either do something to utilize that time or may feel bad that you have nothing to do (bored). Cannabis has not much of physical addiction properties which is great yet one day you may find 10 years have got behind you and you have done not much. Perhaps no one told you to stop consuming it daily or you have just drifted upon losing the handles on your life.

If you want to be a daily user, or already are, do try to still feel the need to do something when there's nothing to do and consume it responsibly. You probably will be fine health-wise but remember that doing-nothing-is-ok is not ok especially when it's become routine.

> one day you may find 10 years have got behind you

Is it a bad sign that I heard that in David Gilmour's and Richard Wright's voices?

I was literally reading with a screen reader and my brain stopped listening to the speech after this sentence to play that clip of audio. I even got the music.

I can't really relate to this. There is a spectrum of how high you get. Maybe we should distinguish between getting super stoned, just sitting on the couch watching TV and smoking half a joint, going for a walk in nature and listen to music or cook or bake.

With psychedelics some refer to a "museum dose" — that amount you can use that would allow a person to visit an art museum and enjoy the experience. There are similarities with cannabis and other drugs (including alcohol of course).

That said, sometimes a little dab is enough to throw things off — fun story: I was practicing the Filipino Martial Arts and my teacher had a hit off a blunt some fellows practicing kinda-wushu in the same park were passing around. His ability to count out our drills went to hell, but in generally all other ways he was fine. It was very humorous at the time.

> a "museum dose" — that amount you can use that would allow a person to visit an art museum and enjoy the experience

This feels sad to me, and sounds like another angle on the same issue raised above.

You should be able to enjoy/engage with culture while sober; I'd describe needing to be high to connect with art as a dependency and a problem.

Stoned is the former, high is the latter.

I smoke very little, not enough to get high. This helps me practice musical instruments and do other tedious stuff. I never ever do nothing when on it, maybe the small quantity has the opposite effect, at least for me.

What about people who use cannabis to work, e.g. people with ADHD or PTSD?

For a few unlucky people, it really can have disastrous side effects as described in this article. At the risk of stigmatising myself, I suffered through cannabis induced psychosis and lived to tell the tale. And I can promise that it's absolutely a real phenomenon, and one that's not adequately recognised in 'stoner culture'.

I am too!

Had a really large 3 day psychosis (including blabbering on Facebook for all to see), and ended up being locked into "involuntary mental health" ward in hospital for 2 weeks, 6 months of recovery with a nurse and 6 years of putting my life back together. Started smoking when I was 18 and had the breakdown just after 21st birthday.

I feel like weed did help me get me out of my shell at the start, but looking back now, I was in a bad place and what I needed was a bigger perspective on life. Being high and browsing the internet / playing games with friends helped that perspective, but it could've came gently.

Now I've got a degree, a good job, a wife and kid :) - not many people I knew from the era still talk to me though, me going nuts was the last impression they got.

I see some parallels but my own problems spiralled a bit further than yours. I was struggling with hallucinations and paranoia on and off for a period of a few years in my early twenties (but luckily didn't leave a trace on social media).

It started after a period of habitual smoking and got progressively worse anytime I smoked. Mental health ward twice (once in a country where I didn't speak the language, but that's another story). Haven't had any problems since I cleaned up my lifestyle and fully ditched weed many years ago. These days I'm also happily married with kids (three), a house and a decent career.

> As time goes on it won't feel "fun" it'll just feel "normal". And you just won't get as much out of your life as you could get, won't achieve as much relationship success, professional success, or personal fulfillment.

You can form a bad relationship with literally anything. Social media, television, video games.

The smartest and most passionate developer I have ever known smoked weed literally every day.

There are many musicians who use marijuana regularly. They perform, practice, and achieve at a level I can only IMAGINE.

What you are really talking about here is something nefarious: Self medication. Personally, I self medicate because I have a very busy mind and I need something to slow my brain down at the end of the day.

Other people self medicate due to depression. This IS bad. It is a way to escape reality because you are unhappy.

Anecdote: I smoked weed in high school pretty frequently. Then, I left for college, was super busy, didn't have any money, so I didn't smoke weed for almost a decade.

Eventually I moved to a state that has legal weed, and I bought a joint, and I smoked it. And I found something: It wasn't just youthful rebellion, I enjoy being a little stoned! So now I do it occasionally.

This is how I cope. My brain runs away with me, coupled with OCD (people love to romanticize it byt forget about the obsessive/compulsive part). With that and depression and anxiety, the meds prescribed to me were insane, as were the side effects (many permanent too- fuck that). Weed was the lesser of the evils. I don't drink because aside from the fact that I hate the taste of alcohol, what I really detest is the loss of self control. I spend most of my waking and much of my sleeping time trying to keep one thing or another under control. I don't have to fight them nearly so much with weed.

I know it's an imperfect solution to myriad problems, but it helps me greatly,but I very much realize I am self medicating.

When I quit smoking weed it takes me about a year to get back to full 'normal'. But I'm also miserable. I can't sleep, I wake in the night in the middle of thoughts that are making me anxious or whatever. I eat too much, I have less energy. I simply become better at hiding my issues.

You should look into Zoloft. A lot of my friends and family take it for anxiety.

It is a pretty safe, minor, and not intense anxiety medication that I hear has a bit of a funky/fun edge to it.

I was gonna start on it next month to try it out.

I did, but one of the side effects it had for me was it killed my sex drive completely. I know in the grand scope of things it may not be important, and maybe I'm being a child, but if I'm being honest I can't handle that on top of goings-on.

I had a friend get a permanent twitch from it, too, but of the people that I know that take it (that I know of), those are the only bad side effects I've really heard of.

On top of that it can still be very physically addictive and hard to wean off of.

I do thank you greatly, I had been pretty excited to try it. I hope it works out for you, I just seem to catch nasty side effects.

May it work for you and your days be peaceful!

> I have a very busy mind and I need something to slow my brain down

I'm taking this a bit out of context but this is the biggest benefit for me.

While sativa can make my mind rush with ideas, it also helps slow things down, especially if I'm learning something. It gives me the patience to do things at the right pace rather than try to rush to get results. This holds for things as varied as learning kubernetes (e.g. going back and forth between documents to make sure everything makes sense rather than only going forward even where there are bits that I don't fully grasp) or making sure I have the proper form during weight lifting (e.g. using lower weights when I notice a discomfort somewhere – I'm much more sensitive to these things while stoned – instead of powering through a too-high load and injuring myself, thus setting my progress back).

This is an old 4% strength THC I-used-to-be-a-stoner argument that is completely irrelevant to the "real" dangers (multiple) to teenagers, which include: concentrated THC in teenagers causes psychosis; moderate THC in teenagers makes them permanently less intelligent.

THC users like to downplay them.

Can you provide sources for "moderate THC in teenagers makes them permanently less intelligent".

This study implies that it's not really true: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1516648113#sec-5

This one comes to the top:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1206820109

> This is an old 4% strength THC I-used-to-be-a-stoner argument that is completely irrelevant to the "real" dangers (multiple) to teenagers, which include: concentrated THC in teenagers causes psychosis; moderate THC in teenagers makes them permanently less intelligent.

>THC users like to downplay them.

What would you have us do then? There are minimum legal ages for using legal cannabis as well as alcohol and tobacco.

That doesn't stop teens from trying it out, nor has it ever done so.

Archaeologists have documented the use of mind altering substances by humans going back at least 8-10,000 years, and it's very likely that such usage goes back much, much farther (e.g., our distant ancestors getting drunk from eating fermenting fruit millions of years ago).

The issue isn't whether or not people should use mind alterng substances, we have done so and we will continue to do so.

The advice I gave to those in the younger generation of my family is that "we've been using mind altering substances pretty much forever. And most people handle it just fine. But if using such substances interferes with your goals and/or functioning as a person in society, there's likely a problem."

Which is why I believe all "drugs" should be legal, with purity and dosages regulated.

From an economic standpoint, it makes a lot of sense. We could spend a fraction of what we spend on "interdiction," "enforcement," incarceration and lost economic output (the result of incarceration and bias against those who have been incarcerated) on treatment programs for the tiny proportion of us for whom using mind altering substances keep us from functioning normally in society.

That makes much more sense to me. Trying to stop folks from doing stuff we've been doing since before we were us (humans), is a fool's errand.

Let's help those who have issues and leave everyone else the hell alone.

I heard you say "we need to regulate cannabis more effectively." I think that makes sense.

I also think we better get used to the consequences of an increasingly psychotic teen population.

>I heard you say "we need to regulate cannabis more effectively." I think that makes sense.

I heard you say absolutely nothing of any semantic value, and certainly nothing that added to the conversation.

Like anything it's about balance. The same could be said about working every day, at all different times of the day.

There is something to be said for turning off the part of the brain that worries about being productive all the time.

Claiming a few 4 hour blocks over the course of a week as your own time to "zone out" and do whatever activity you like is not a bad thing. For some people cannabis helps them get in that zone.

This. I know a lot of people who need to just ... stop. They always have to be busy, doing something "productive" or "beneficial". They don't take time to just be, to stop and smell the roses.

My problem with sleeping was trying to turn off my geek brain long enough to get to sleep and stay 5that way. Weed helps with that.

This argument always pops up as if there aren't a wealth of very successful daily cannabis users.

There are a wealth of very successful alcoholics and cocaine users too. On an average, alcoholism and cocaine dependence still ruins life. Don’t look at the exceptions to define the average.

2x drinks at a happy hour isn't successful alcoholism, that's just a lack of cultural stigma.

I also slightly doubt casual cocaine won't catch up with you eventually, might take years. Stimulants are generally work friendly anyway, see coffee/adderall.

>There are a wealth of very successful alcoholics and cocaine users too.

Not for as long of a duration. Apples to oranges.

There are also a wealth of very unsuccessful people who don't partake in drugs or alcohol. These points prove nothing

That's because the existence of outliers doesn't disprove the existence of a trend.

Saying that there are successful daily cannabis users and therefore chronic cannabis use doesn't have negative effects on one's brain, is similar to saying that you're holding a snowball and therefore global warming doesn't exist.

> That's because the existence of outliers doesn't disprove the existence of a trend.

Yeah, exactly. Either way it proves nothing about a person or their life.

It means the person you originally replied to was correct to call it a "danger", because while it doesn't preclude the possibility of success as you noted, it does make it less likely for a given individual.

Yes, many successful (ie rich) people smoke pot and do not suffer because of it. Those traits are not related. Rich people do not suffer most of the negative social/financial side effects of drugs use. That's the great thing about being rich. It insulates you against most negative consequences of your actions. Normal (ie poor) people do not have such protections. They suffer massively.

A 100$/day habit for a wealthy person is nothing and, unlike cocaine, that addiction will not ramp up into a 1000$/day habit. But for the not-rich that 100$/day is devastating.

There are certainly consequences to cannabis use, but let's not get carried away.

At least for the vast majority of casual users, this isn't anything remotely close to a $100/day habit. Common sense should inform us of that, even if we aren't intimately familiar with how much pot actually costs.

$5-10 a day is closer to the reality for most users.

Flat-out 24/7 high would be 100/day. Pot is a drug that successful people can sustain without any financial issues. Compare cocaine which can quickly ramp into 1000/day and beyond, quickly devastating the finances of even relatively wealthy people.

Hold on, maybe living in Oregon has spoiled me, but 100$ buys like 3 1gram cartridges or more than an oz of weed.

Who the duck is smoking that much in one day???? I don't know a single one of my massively addicted stoner friends who do even a third of that in a day...

While this might be technically true, I don't think it's the case for the vast majority.

The scale of human potential is vast. Who's to say that, for a given definition of success, a person who's "very successful" with one lifestyle wouldn't be 10x or 100x more successful in another?

Who’s to say what my full potential could have been if it wasn’t for all the lead paint in my house as a kid?

Are you suggesting we shouldn’t remove lead paint from houses? Yes, we can’t know exactly on an individual level what potential was lost to lead paint, but we know it was some amount. Can we not act if we don’t know the exact loss?

..did you eat it?

Who's to say anything about anyone? We only get one shot at this. There's no perfect way to live a life.

Sure, we all know a few.

But overwhelming personal observation indicates that in the vast majority of cases -- it blunts your game (and if you pick up the habit in your teenage years, and don't manage to put it behind you -- it can derail your chances at completing your education, or maintaining successful relationships entirely).

Again, not from the toxicity - but simply from what it does.

I don't know any, but I know a whole lot of dope-heads who completely destroyed their lives with daily use of cannabis.

Probably many more under the radar too.

Yep my daughter had a friend introduce her. She spent 5 years on it. 100% dependent on it. Entire time swearing up and down it didn't affect her. Of course we could all tell.

Only when her finance had a psychotic breakdown and tried to kill everyone from it did she finally get off of it. Was 2 months before he didn't sound like an anime villain who was going to take over the world.

She keeps commenting at much more energy and less depressed she is, how she isn't always irritated at everything. She had no idea it was affecting her like that. For us we have our sweet loving and caring daughter back.

You are definitely not talking about weed

Yes. I actually am. They both smoked it. She said it seemed fine. He went insane. They tested him. Weed was only thing in system. Full blown psychosis. He had God talking to him. He was God. He was going to have hurt my daughter in divine punishment. He crapped in the tub. His computer was all powerful and was controlling the world. He showed up at his work to hurt them. That's when we found out about it. He got hauled off to a mental facility where they had to keep him tied down for multiple days. Kept trying to hurt the staff. When he stopped being violent, he was still highly delusional for a solid month.

https://www.brightquest.com/cannabis-induced-psychosis/psych....

Bottom line, he can never touch weed again. They can't be around people that do. They've lost most of their friends. Friends didn't agree about them giving up weed. They are starting to make new friends.

They are doing far better now.

Sounds like reefer madness type claims to me.

You can give someone a hamburger and some people will abuse it til they are obese. It's a personality thing.

To me, the most alarming trend I see among people nowadays is cell phones - people are checking notifications all day like its crack.

> The danger is simply that you will like it, you'll end up using it every day, all different times of the day, and it won't really hurt your health as much as it will make you live your life in a somewhat dopey, detached, less-intelligent way. As time goes on it won't feel "fun" it'll just feel "normal". And you just won't get as much out of your life as you could get, won't achieve as much relationship success, professional success, or personal fulfillment.

As a general rule, I don't disagree, although there could be other important variables in place here as well.

An alternative outcome is that one spends their time thinking about intelligent and important things (that few other people think about), except they may not have an easy route to monetization (professional success) for various reasons that are not the fault of drugs, and in some cases arguably due to a lack of more widespread drug usage, or simple diversity in thinking and discussion.

Huh as a daily smoker who has held titles like “head of infosec” and currently am self employed (self motivated) as a freelancer, I can confidently say this is BS

It’s like anything else; confusing and obtuse then you learn to live with it

No one learns to code before writing bad code. Some of my best and simplest ideas came to me while high af simply because other routine daily thoughts were out of the way

Kindly stop peddling tropes from a place of ignorance and actually figure it out subjectively for yourself. Other peoples tolerances are not the same as yours. Like everything else it’s gradients, ranges, and distributions

Edit: my only non-typical stoner trope is I did not smoke until I was 27. I had life experience behind me. A non-trivial detail. I am 43 now

>And you just won't get as much out of your life as you could get, won't achieve as much relationship success, professional success, or personal fulfillment.

So, like being addicted to an Internet connected, social media infested smartphone?

Watched my dad struggle with this for much of his life. Smoked (cigarettes) from 12 until his early 50s, and pot from some point early in life until late 50s. Struggled for years to quit both, but he says the pot was harder to give up. It may not be a physiological addiction, but you can sure develop a strong habitual/emotional dependency. Certainly watching him struggle with it was enough to make me never want to go down that road.

Did he "need something" before he started trying things? Or only after?

PS Love your work on AutoTempest; the top ten lists I found with some clicking (maybe a partner thing) were really enjoyable.

I think it started as a teenage rebellion sort of thing. Certainly the smoking did. Then later on the culture of the 60s-70s probably played into it. But then as the original comment talked about it definitely developed into a psychological dependency. Thankfully he's been happy done with all that for good for quite a while now. (Must be 15-20 years or so now.)

And thanks, I definitely got lucky kind of accidentally finding a viable business niche with searchtempest and then autotempest, and building on that. It's a fun way to earn a living for sure.

This isn't really a danger of weed so much as a danger of the modern world.

I have given up smoking for long periods at several points in my life. Sometimes I filled the time productively, sometimes I filled it with TV, video games, the internet, etc. The modern world afford people many ways to be happy doing nothing, weed just happens to be one of several that are very good at the job.

This is exactly what happened to me. Luckily it was only a few months and I identified it quickly enough and stopped using it.

But having said that, I know a lot of people who have lives I consider dull but never use cannabis. So it might be nothing to do with the drug at all. After all, I was still able to quit easily. It wasn't like a heroin addiction or something.

The difficulty is how do you separate that issue from the other connected issue: Lots of people use weed to self-medicate for anxiety. How much anxiety is needed to create a sense of motivation and "stakes" in the day-to-day operation of your life?

Anecdotally, I've known people who were prescribed pharmaceutical anti-anxiety meds and done far worse with that feeling of weightlessness and removal of stakes, like you're just wandering around in the Matrix until something bad happens like a car accident. I mean yes that happens on weed (again, anecdotally) but we have no controlled studies about it, and it absolutely should be studied.

So yes, valid point, but it's the tip of a much deeper iceberg.

Saw exactly this happen to a very bright friend of mine from high school.

It actually can make you feel sick if you smoke too much, there is a rare syndrome called Cannabis Hyperemesis Syndrome, and it's agonizing.

The article specifically mentions Cannabis Hyperemesis Syndrome so I assume this is the "nasty side effect like this article describes." that they are referring to.

So much this. Lost a couple of friends to it. Their entire life is about it. They forgot all the other good things they were and did.

Same message I told my kids! The danger is that you'll like it and you'll end up in a life of misery.

Thanks for sharing your wisdom.

refer madness 2.0; better let starbucks distribute the psychoactives

As a person living with complex PTSD, my experience is the polar opposite of what is described in the parent comment.

I could not have relationships or work at all without medicinal cannabis, and there is really no difference between it and recreational cannabis in terms of efficacy, as long as the strain matches somewhat closely.

I know this wasn't your intention, but this is the most compelling argument to try it that I've ever heard.

If you are ever going to try any illegal drug in your life, a vape pen with cannabis is probably the way to do it. It's pretty safe and the effect is really not crazy, it's sort of on the order of magnitude of alcohol. And soon it probably won't even be an "illegal drug" any more - where I live in California it's legal enough that you can simply walk into a store and buy some.

> And you just won't get as much out of your life as you could get, won't achieve as much relationship success, professional success, or personal fulfillment.

Chicken vs. the Egg.

Perhaps many are drawn to cannabis due to the inability to achieve such goals due to whatever individual or societal issues/reasons one may have.

Yes definitely. I love weed and everytime i buy some, I always really enjoy it for a couple of days, without any immediate negative impacton life. but routine sets in, and I just turn into a shadow of myself until i run out. I try to just use it rarely but daily use is too tempting.

I can't help but wonder if normalizing regular use of increasingly potent weed correlating with dramatic increases in anxiety disorders among young people are related.

Yeah there's the general state of the world, economic precarity among families, the effects of social media, the education system and society in general deprioritizing developing resilience and coping skills as part of children's upbringings, etc. I'm sure they all contribute, but I have a hard time believing the weed is helping.

In most cultural practices that revolve around psychoactive substances it's typical to embed them in sort of a ritual context. Alcohol is pretty obvious, but even things like tea ceremonies or ritual practices around use of hallucinogens match. The modern "clinical" approach of just focusing on consuming the substance without any social or cultural thing around it is probably the wrong way to go about things. We do this with alcohol, for example, where we have some socially understood norms about healthy and unhealthy ways of using it, in particular not drinking alone as a habit.

As a wise person once said; Drugs are amazing, drugs are so good they will literally ruin your life.

The article is opposite of your point- that modern cannabis products are much more potent than ever before and that young people who consume them regularly are prone to severe psychiatric repercussions beyond just "being a stoner"

I've found the secret to marijuana not taking away from your personal fulfillment is to limit it to the end of the day before sleeping which would already be spent consuming passively (such as watching TV).

From experience, getting high every night like that is a more problematic usage pattern than dosing steadily throughout the day and not getting especially high.

This has been a serious issue of mine. I have serious PTSD and anxiety, and nothing has ever worked like cannabis. Not even close. However it has a detrimental effect on my work output.

I did most and best creative programming under influence, it also made me suicidal. I have stopped completely. Do i miss it, yes. Will i get back to it, i doubt it but its hard.

Sounds like something people should be free to choose

But! You will be more likely to accept the world as it is - thus making it legal everywhere has great benefits. Mostly for ruling bodies.

> The danger is simply that you will like it

I like bourbon and gin, but I don't drink both everyday.

As they say, "everything in moderation."

If this is "the real danger" then is the potency issue irrelevant? Are we already experiencing peak danger?

I think you are absolutely correct. This is my experience and viewpoint as well.

I did this with video games.

You nailed it -- that's exactly what makes habitual use of the substance so insidious.

Like, why deal with life (which involves risk and rejection, and ick, work) when you can just blast trippy movies through your head all day? (Fun though these movies can be, for a while).

Have you ever used cannabis as a medicine or daily for a long period of time? Do you think we all just watch movies and act like morons all day? Why do you care if other people do or don’t want to deal with your version of life?

Why do you care ...?

I don't. It's just an observation. That doesn't mean I care.

Apologies to mods for low effort reply to low effort post but you obviously care enough to have posted and responded.

Wait until you find out how many people blast Netflix through their head for hours a day while stone sober...

Yes. These days I blast educational YouTube tech talks through my brain instead.

Can't exactly tell whether it was better before or now.

Yeah, tbh I know it's not particularly healthy, but before I was just going to the bar every damn night to stave away boredom.

The solution is simple. Hate what you like.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com