17 years of daily use and stopped just like that without any issue or side effect. I’m trying to quit smoking now, but that seems te be an addiction on another level.
Really, it depends on your life situation and why you use drugs. The root cause for using drugs is always the toughest thing to tackle. After that, quitting is easy. Fixing your life is the HARD part.
I’ve quit cold turkey several times with little problems - quit for several months or over a year, then used again for x months, then quit again, etc. (This went hand in hand with a certain seasonal job.) Apart from very slight ”I wouldn’t mind a smoke” kind of feelings it doesn’t have much of an effect of me.
My SO was miserable, depressed, craved cigarettes for months and months. For the longest time she was convinced that it isn’t possible for her to quit, since they cravings didn’t go away. (Until they did.)
Anecdotally, I can tell you with absolute certainty I could never become an alcoholic, I have no interest in drinking on any two consecutive days and it's usually several month between any alcohol consumption. Yet there have been alcoholics in my family. But when it comes to weed I will be continually stoned out of my mind as long as any weed is available.
It's a terrible side effect of the legal status of most drugs that we have neglected to study most of them to the extend that would be necessary to actually make progress (with the notable exception of tobacco)
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/marijuana-wee...
The least favorite withdrawal symptom I’ve seen is REM rebound, which causes intense and vivid dreaming, which causes you to wake up in the morning feeling like you haven’t slept at all.
The return of mental clarity also causes some rebound anxiety as you regain mental clarity (especially if anxiety was the reason for smoking in the first place)
I think it does a major disservice to the general population to paint weed in an only-positive light. Yea, I get people unfairly demonized weed for years. But that doesn’t mean we should all go on the complete opposite end of the spectrum and pretend there’s no withdrawal, no side effects, etc.
(Maybe the people downvoting are just occasional once a week users? I could imagine once weekly having zero negative effects. But once you get to daily use, the negative effects are pretty obvious)
But yeah weed is totally harmless and adderall has no negative effects for individuals diagnosed with adhd. Sure.
In most cases withdrawal is as simple as a few restless nights and after 3-4 weeks you're completely yourself again.
It's still a lot milder compared to cigarette smokers who can dream of dancing cigarettes years after they quit.
I’m 50% of Allen Carr’s book [0] and it feels very promising.
0 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Easy_Way_to_Stop_Smoking
Cigarettes for me combined many aspects that are psychological and social rather than physical:
- the sucking reflex. Same calming mechanism as the babies with the pacifier
- the comfort of routine, where they support the familiar (the first cig with a coffee, a morning or evening cigarette)
- the social interactions (smokers areas are a great place for a conversation and there is no hierarchy)
- last but not least - physical effect of calming
- the very strong associative effect caused by movies with smoking scenes
- the nice feeling of appetite reduction caused by cigarettes/nicotine
What helped me was:
0) for the routines - replacing with a different ones that do not need cigarettes.
1) to not set the goal to quit outright, but rather to reduce, and then when it went to zero it was “temporarily stop, I can always restart if I consciously find it worth it”.
2) make every cigarette subject of a conscious decision after a discussion with yourself. Do not prohibit it outright - it only heats up the impatience for it. Make it a conscious decision.
3) Look at adjacent habits, like alcohol. My last infrequent routine, which persisted irregularly for some years after I stopped, was to have a cigarette sometimes socially when I had a drink. After I reduced the drinking to almost zero, I once had tried social smoking and didn’t like how it tasted at all, and had a headache the next day. Which was remarkable as I never had this before. No social impulse felt anymore.
4) take up some sport for half an hour a day, preferably aerobic (I do cycling on a stationary bike). If you manage to go for a streak without cigarettes/alcohol, the difference in performance and feeling will be very apparent which will help at (2).
5) watch out for potential weight gain after stopping smoking. Was hard for me (I gained more than 20 kilos), eventually I lost weight because I moved for half a year to another city where I led a much more active lifestyle.
6) the company of smokers at work. This may be hard but super important if you can tackle it. Eventually I started going for the “breath breaks” but just having a chat rather than smoke, but since this strongly triggers the “routine” programming, this is something I could do only 2 years into stopping.
It is a different journey for everyone, but hopefully some of the above may ring true for you and be useful in your journey. Good luck!