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Comment by WA | Hacker News Reader

Tobacco (nicotine) is also only mildly physically addictive. The main part is psychological addiction.

Weed has also a number of negative side effects over cigarettes. THC, after all, is a psychoactive drug and some people develop a psychosis from smoking weed. This doesn't happen when smoking tobacco.

It depends entirely on what you're comparing here. Do you compare smoking 10 joints vs. 10 cigarettes or 1 joint vs 10 cigarettes (per day? per week? per month?)? If one smokes as much weed as tobacco, he might develop way worse symptoms than someone who "just" smokes cigarettes.

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From wikipedia: ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine )

> According to the American Heart Association, nicotine addiction has historically been one of the hardest addictions to break, while the pharmacological and behavioral characteristics that determine tobacco addiction are similar to those determining addiction to heroin and cocaine.

NHS: ( http://www.nhs.uk/chq/Pages/2278.aspx?CategoryID=53 )

> Cigarettes contain nicotine, which is highly addictive.

> Even if you want to quit smoking, you may find it difficult because you’re addicted to the effects of nicotine. Some research has suggested that nicotine can be more addictive than heroin.

"Only mildly physically addictive"...

A big problem with research into nicotine is that it has been conflated with tobacco smoke. You should really substitute "nicotine" with "tobacco smoke" in these sentences.

There have been plenty of studies on nicotine itself, in isolation...

Are you kidding? Nicotine is extremely addictive. What are you comparing it to as 'mild'?

The physical symptoms of nicotine withdrawal are rather mild, you feel a bit strange for a couple of days.

Not really comparable to getting off of opiates for example.

you feel a bit strange for a couple of days

Err, no. It's fucking horrible. Like most people, I tried to quit many times, usually cold turkey, so multiply your 2-3 days figure by 10 (which I think is roughly the average number of attempts before success). That's a month of your life. A friend from the UK described it as follows: "I feel like I want to climb a tower with a sniper rifle and shoot small children." I think that's accurate.

Besides, the insidious part is that you see it everywhere ... shops, bars, the street, movies ... withdrawl upsets your sleeping so you are awake at night to go out ... you feel you can 'just have one' .. it is usually prevalent in a social scene ... you drink .. you associate it with drinking .. you lose your reason with the alcohol which compounds the sense of 'just have one' ... you want a break from work and you associate it with a smoke .. other people are smoking ..

It's really hard to avoid. Not like heroin, which is hard to run in to by accident. (I also know of multiple people who have quit both and they said cigarettes were harder. Not physically, but overall.)

Citation on developing psychosis? As far as I've read that's a very small number of people and usually linked to people with undiagnosed schizophrenia.

I'm positive I'm not schizophrenic, I've smoked my fair amount of weed during my youth and, while I enjoyed it very much, now if I take a single puff of a joint I get very anxious, and I have had a more than couple panic attacks due to it.

It's taken me some time to forget the good times I had when high, and associate it with anxiety, in order to stop myself from thinking "Yeah, I'd like to smoke a joint now". So while I had no withdrawal symptoms, it's taken me some time to remove the psychological "addiction".

Marijuana may be a drug with a lot of positive health benefits but may exacerbate psychosis and panic attacks in healthy people too. (i.e. not schizophrenic or with other major mental disorders)

True, but it's different for different people. I've known people who would turn get really dizzy to the point they couldn't stand after smoking. It's not for everyone but that doesn't mean nobody should be allowed to use it.

On a personal level, I went through a period of using ~2 ozs a month (every single night) and I was able to cut down to once a month pretty much instantly. Sure I thought about going back but there wasn't any 'physical' addiction as such.

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