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Comment by guywithahat | Hacker News Reader

> self-medicating

I know this doesn’t add to the conversation but I hate that term, they should just say they’re addicted to weed. 95% of the time the anxiety is either normal or a result of chronic weed use (ie withdrawal)

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My understanding is that THC is primarily indirectly psychologically addictive. I should also add the irony that at least according to some, weed was pushed for bannage at least in part because it was something migrant farmers would use to help get through the simple monotonous work in their day [0].

To that extent it's not that different from the folks I worked with in many industries that had notable yet not directly debilitating habits in the gacha/lootbox, nicotine in one form or another, gambling, adult entertainers, expensive weekend trips, or whatever else happened to hit their dopamine receptors the right way due to past stimuli.

The bigger question is this; I've had colleagues that within a week of stopping work at a toxic place, stop drunk-dialing me at 2AM. Why aren't we asking that?

What are we not asking about cross-correlation? How many people go to darker paths to get their kicks? [1]

[0] - And maybe that's apocrypha, OTOH every productive JVM dev I've met seems ok with the devil's lettuce....

[1] - Wait NVM they become management

I agree with this in general though of course there are exceptions though from anecdotal experience they're outliers. The amount of people I went through my teenaged and then university years with who adopted the stance of "weed isn't a "real" drug and smoking every day for years on end doesn't make me an addict" when it was clearly affecting their life negatively in a visible way was always baffling. The majority of them didn't start smoking weed to "self medicate", they started recreationally and just got to a point where they didn't WANT to function without it but would begin to associate the "boring" feeling of sobriety as something that needs to be treated.

I had a college friend who claimed it wasn't addictive, and then became addicted. Towards the end of freshman year he quit school for a couple weeks, just to determine he couldn't stop smoking and went right back. Last I spoke to him he was still trying to quit, and he had a new method of locking the weed in a box to limit his use.

His withdrawals included him becoming extremely anxious, which is presumably why so many people think the weed helps with their anxiety. In 30 years we're going to look at weed like a slightly different version of cigarettes and wonder why anyone legalized it knowing what the consequences would be.

Weed isn't physically addictive. Forming habits is a very different thing though - anything can become addictive if you train yourself to need it. I've known heavy smokers who couldn't eat or function normally without weed, but people with less structured and intense habituation who use similar amounts over similar lengths of time without any issues.

I would turn that around and say addiction should be more often seen in the context of self medicating: what issue is the person having that the drug is fulfilling some important need for them, even if it is doing so in an unhealthy way?

There usually is an underlying psychological issue, and this framing gives a path towards understanding and addressing it.

You're right, it doesn't add to the conversation, especially because you're citing at best some anecdotes without any sources.

Plenty of people self-medicate with cannabis. They take regular, measured doses of cannabis products, making sure to pick specific strains or brands that they know to have the needed effects.

A great deal of both the psychological and the drug policy communities disagree with you on this point.

“Self medicating” is to “doing drugs” as “expat” is to “immigrant”.

no idea how this got so heavily downvoted. sorry, but most of these people don't actually have a reason for using it. it hasn't been strongly evaluated for psychological use; there are a few physical conditions for which it can make a difference but essentially nobody is using it for that relative to the population size of abusers.

criticize it on twitter as harmful and addictive and a dozen people will pop up, inveigh at you with a score of mean replies, then block you. of course they're not addicted though. weed's not medicine, dude, it's, like, harmless, man.

i'll admit i'm personally biased here in that i know people who have had both temporary and permanent psychological issues from overconsumption and i just generally think depressants/downers are bad things in most cases.

95% huh? Lets see some sources

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