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Why are pregnant women smoking weed to begin with?

Addiction, self-medication (eg. pain/nausea relief), escapism, peer pressure. To name a few.

I used to be sceptical about weed addiction, and then it happened to me. It was relatively difficult to quit even though the habit was severely impacting my work and social life. In the end not having any weed around helped a lot. If you have an easy endless supply, boy, you're in trouble.

If you enjoy weed, consider having a strict limit (eg. max 1 smoke per week). If you smoke every day, you might find yourself unable to quit when need arises (eg. pregnancy, yours or your partner's).

Also, you know, doctor recommended medication. And not just the "weed doctors" do it either, my conservative neurologist even told me to smoke THC heavy marijuana.

I smoke every day. It absolutely impacts my work and social life, as without it I'm a painful ball of irritation that would have to be on opiates to get anything done.

Just to be clear, he told you to smoke? There are other ingestion methods, including vaping, that don't come with a ton of other health risks.

I think it's more addictive than people think. I've known a few people who I think have a problem, but they become violently confrontational if you say it might be addictive for some. I may get comments and downvotes along these lines.

I guess some people may also have some exposure from before they realize they're pregnant. That probably also happens with things like alcohol. I think I've heard some say that's not a big issue, though.

When someone mentions addiction people think heroin addiction, but yeah people can become psychologically dependent on cannabis too. I know I did, many years ago.

> but they become violently confrontational if you say it might be addictive for some

Going out on a limb here but it might be in the same spirit as a similar response to "Strong encryption is for child abuse and terrorism" / "Bittorrent is for pirating movies" in that it's true in some cases but is used as a popular discourse wedge to promote governmental overreach

I asked a then-pregnant still-weed-smoking coworker of my fiancée about this, she said "it isn't that bad for the baby, at least compared to alcohol or meth", and another coworker (female, roughly same age) agreed that "meth and booze are really bad for pregnant women, but weed not so much". from the sound of things (this was on a car trip to a nearby Native American reservation where the then-pregnant girl's parents lived), among this strata of people at least, if you get pregnant, you should definitely stop drinking and consuming meth, but weed isn't a big deal. no idea how this entered the public subconscious but there you have it.

At least they’re not okay with meth and alcohol while pregnant… Or they never consume meth and use the ruse to normalize weed consumption. I my books nothing is worth risking for the baby’s health

> I my books nothing is worth risking for the baby’s health

That's a bad book.

Everything has risk. If you think you're not risking, you're deluding yourself. Trying to avoid "unnecessary" risks is only marginally better. You need to know how big the risks actually are, or your biases will mislead you.

It's about 5% of pregnant women, while about 14% of women report smoking cannabis, and the rate is significantly higher under age 55:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/284135/percentage-americans-smo...

So probably about 20% of women who may become pregnant smoke marijuana, and 75% of them stop when pregnant, before adjusting for whether they are aware of the pregnancy. There are usually a few irresponsible individuals in any group.

It can help with nausea.

Thalidomide helped with nausea too.

thalidomide is still prescribed and is a highly effective drug. What's your point? The entire narrative about thalidomide completely oversells what happened and distorts people's understanding of drug safety.

Presumably, for the same reasons they drink alcohol and consume caffeine.

Most parents are not thinking ahead.

It helps with nausea and pain, both of which are symptoms pregnant people experience.

This is a backlash from anti-cannabis disinformation. People were told lies about how dangerous it is for decades, and now people don't know what to believe.

One response I received was: “weed is natural and comes from the Earth”. It’s absolutely mind boggling how stupid people can be.

And water comes from burning fossil fuels too, but I doubt that water would be good for you. Ibuprofen comes from the bark of tree IIRC, but that pill is a lot better than the soup you’d have to eat to get not nearly the same effect. Everything is natural. I really hate that argument.

In moments when I’m not speechless, I usually just say “and so does Mercury and Uranium“.

Those are minerals, not plants. A better counterpart would be nightshade and castor plant oil seeds.

> Ibuprofen comes from the bark of tree IIRC

This is salicylic acid, in a number of tree barks but most abundantly in white willow.

The medication form is aspirin or acetylsalicylic acid.

"So are sharks and volcanoes..."

To steelman this argument (to the extent that I can): we can in fact attribute a great deal of harm to highly processed ingredients, while there are a number of plants and animals humans have lived with and eaten for millenia, and we've identified the natural products that are poisonous. Weed is one of the plants that humans have coexisted with and consumed for millenia, and societies with high weed consumption don't appear to be significantly sicker than ones that don't.

(I can't think of a way to steelman around the fact that there are many toxic plant and animal substances, and some highly processed ingredients are completely harmless)

morning sickness, the alternatives such as zofran come with their own complications

People are nuts.

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