This tracks with what I’ve heard. We’ve known for years that cannabis negatively affects children (or at least that’s what I’ve seen plastered on the news for years). If this study didn’t control for age, then it’s not news to me.
Woah, it's a meta-analysis. So, you're definitely not going to get a good summary in 10 words.
Early use of cannabis was correlated with worse outcomes, but those who started later in life were still associated with deficits in the studies surveyed.
> To conclude, meta-analytical data on the acute effects of cannabis use on neurocognitive function have shown that cannabis intoxication leads to small to moderate deficits in numerous cognitive domains, most notably executive functions, verbal learning and memory and processing speed. These acute impairments are in accordance with the residual effects that have been documented in several meta-analyses suggesting that the detrimental effects of cannabis persist beyond the period of acute intake.
and
> Additionally, as youths remain particularly susceptible to the effects
Are both in their conclusion and paint a more complete tl;dr.
> The study found that cannabis intoxication leads to small to moderate cognitive impairments in areas including
> making decisions,
> suppressing inappropriate responses,
> learning through reading and listening,
> the ability to remember what one reads or hears, and
> the time needed to complete a mental task.
I've no first hand experience here, but I can imagine there being tradeoffs. For example, I think creativity is somewhat negatively correlated with memory. Or, I'm often more productive when I'm tired because it's easier to focus. So going into an altered state of consciousness might still be beneficial or preferred even if it has tradeoffs.
I have a decent amount of first-hand experience myself, and while I agree with you (there are definitely benefits!), the sort of creativity that cannabis can induce is of a particular variety.
Specifically, cannabis-induced creativity for me, while tons of fun, tends to be very myopic. I focus more on minutiae and more immediately rewarding things like satisfying textures than on a overall composition and development. How appropriate that is for any given creative task and whether it’s worth the downside described in this paper (which are pretty obvious and also very real) are difficult questions if you enjoy it.
Personally, the output of cannabis-induced creativity often ends up being less rewarding for me in the long run.
I would generally agree that it does focus me pretty specifically on minutiae type details, which is sometimes exactly what I need.
Other times I find myself in a "stoner revelation" moment, which is not some groundbreaking breakthrough into the underlying fundamentals of how the world works, but instead where I will have something that I know, and is generally well known, but because it's so well known, not something I ever give much thought. The impaired state I'm in will force me to think about it at a more-than surface level, and sometimes those things that I normally take for granted get that surface stripped away and I'll end up with a useful thought. I've definitely had some successful changes to both my personal relationships and work organizational processes that have come about because smoking pot put me in the right state of mind. And, obviously, pot was never a requirement for those thoughts to be possible - they just didn't occur to me in my normal mode of operation.
And, of course, I've had plenty of "stoner revelations" that upon further inspection while sober, were completely stupid.
That is my thoght to. One function (like some type of memory)goes down in performance cause it’s performance was based on a trade of with some other aspect of thinking.
For example performance on learning through reading could be a local maximum for that function but part of a local minimum for some type of larger scale thinking like creativity or imagination.
My personal experience certainly agrees with this. I definitely shouldn’t smoke on a work night, and it’s not a good idea on Sunday either. The more hours until I need to perform cognitively, the better. I abstained for months before the last time I did job interviews.
On the other hand, I know people also gainfully employed at top companies who code while high and claim to have no issues. Your mileage may vary, I guess. Maybe they’re a lot smarter than me and can afford the slack, or maybe we react to it differently.
I totally agree. Have recently decided to abstain from smoking on nights before work. I’m never as sharp the morning after and edger going several weeks without smoking, the productivity differences are pretty noticeable for me.
It definitely makes you smarter in some ways. For example, getting to the root of stress, processing difficult emotions. It's much easier to get in touch with those feelings when a little bit high. Meditation / yoga is another thing that works better high imo.
You're so right. It's certainly a tightrope, helping with anxiety vs inducing anxiety, at least for me. But when it works it works. Recently it completely opened my mind about my relationship with my mother and her identity as a person. It was right before a several week stay of her with us after a long time of us not seeing each other. It was the single biggest reason her visit was as enjoyable as it was because it enabled me to see her in a totally different, more compassionate, light.
At least for me I enjoy my job but it’s usually being on conference calls talking about tech with business people. I like to take a 5mg edible every hour or two while working. Everyone always comments how chipper and patient I am with people. So maybe I’m not at my cognitive best but at least on calls it seems to improve my ability to convey my message.
Not all the time. Overthinking is a thing, there is a reason why taking walks or showering helps solve problems when fully focused cognitive attention was leading only to frustration.
All that said, I think it is a good thing to not make anything that affects(increase or decrease) cognitive performance a habit.
>Don’t you want to operate in life at your cognitive best?
No. Especially at bedtime, I want to be cognitively stopped. The fact that the cognitive is keeping me awake even though I'm physically exhausted sucks.
Don’t you want to operate in life at your cognitive best
I'm over 40 and have worked crap jobs most of my life. It isn't like my increasing my cognitive abilities being "best" - whatever the heck that actually means - is going to make a huge difference in my life. To tell you the truth, I'm much more worried about cognitive decline as a side effect of MS than I am the effects of getting high.
It isn't like it makes me stupid. I simply think differently and that isn't all bad. Cleaning house and other mundane chores are less bothersome, and my life is full of this mundane crap. It also isn't like being drunk and I can still participate in society (I personally don't drive and just use public transport, sober or not)
Its much better than that - I get semi-constant stream of creativity in my mind that simply isn't there when sober. You could say I become more artistic. I also literally go for 1-2h of walks and come back with tons of remarks, todos, plans etc. to improve my personal or work life. I just need to quickly note them in my phone or they would be probably forgotten when set of next ideas come. Picking up forgotten bits in life that would bite me later. Planning future with more clarity.
Few of the ideas are later dismissed as unrealistic or overly optimistic, but most of the best long term decisions in my life have been 'found' in Inception movie style while high, and expanded later. The perspective is really different, and I literally get a second, different opinion on my life and all the choices/duties.
I've handled tough breakups with this - the emotions were not suppressed or ignored or twisted to get out easily, rather I've got full exposure to all their sides which allowed me to process them remarkably quickly. The result was I got over it all and properly closed things for good in a rather speedy way.
The thing is, that's me - the next person might get a very different effect, sometimes rather negative and not helpful. Drugs don't work uniformly on everybody, even on alcohol some get cozy and some aggressive.
Its not about dumbing down at all - that's alcohol domain. Just shifting mindset to something alternative, in more than one way my mind is expanded. The next morning I am dumbed down, but in 1000x more pleasant manner than after alcohol, rather too-laid-back for some stressful annoying tasks.
> So why smoke at all? Don’t you want to operate in life at your cognitive best?
For all you know, GP is Einstein and he's working in the patent office, but with no chance of being recognized. Does he really have to be deprived of even one small joy in life so he can be at peak cognitive performance for shuffling patent applications around tomorrow? Who is he supposed to be performing for?
Totally off topic but this sentence of yours perfectly sums up my mental state currently. Being a technologist, I believed tech could solve everything and thing and dedicated my life to it. This was when I was a teenager teaching myself to code 10-12 years ago. Back then tech wasn’t mainstream and geeks weren’t cool.
But now, tech is the new wallstreet and a tsunami of people are hitting its shores every year. I’m not sure what I can bring to the table. I’ve learnt a lot of computer science just for the fun of it. I don’t think I’ll ever use most of that knowledge.
I’m in this weird state where I know how amazing technology can be but at the same time I don’t really have much to contribute to it. Sure, I could set myself up for some big moonshots. But for what? I haven’t found happiness or satisfaction in all this while. I’m not sure if it’ll ever come. I can certainly distract myself with a lot of challenges to keep me from contemplating suicide. Or I could smoke weed. No difference really. No reason to squeeze out all you’ve got just to hit some random performance metrics or criteria.
Sober, I’d be coding and a notification would pop up on my phone, taking great attention away from the work. My child would be crying in the next room over and my brain would be formulating thoughts to discern what the fuss is all about.
My washer is leaking and now I have to set up an appointment for someone to come look at it and due to my busy schedule, I’d have to find time.
Distractions takes away the drive and motivations to code.
On Cannabis, the answers are there in my head and what to do.
Phone notification? Not important, ignore it.
Child crying? She has her mom.
Washer broke? Handle it after work.
Easily said but I think like many on here has stated, any stress reducing solution can make a difference.
>Don’t you want to operate in life at your cognitive best?
Good lord no, I want my cognitive best to be when I'm getting shit done. When I'm doing non-cognitive tasks I want my cognitive best to get back in its box and shut up for a bit so I can enjoy life without constantly over-analysing everything. I'm certainly in that category, though I suspect something like a meditation practice would probably be more useful as a long-term strategy than having a drink after work.
In my case, I use drugs because I have MS and if I didn't, the only signals I ever get from my body are constant pain.
Some occasional drug use reminds me that my body doesn't exist solely to hurt me, that I can still experience pleasure, and that it's still worth trying to find things I might like/be able to enjoy since many of my previous physical pleasures aren't possible or are less enjoyable than they used to be. Without them, my physical existence is only pain, and that's depressing. Being depressed is way worse on my cognitive abilities than doing drugs once in a while.
This is true for most people who use regularly: The drugs are a harm-reduction measure. If weed fucks you up (-10 cognitive ability) but also gets rid of your anxiety (-20 cognitive ability), it's still a net win.
Life isn't about the brain it's about the body, brains came much later in the evolutionary process. I like tuning up the senses and tuning down the cognition, at many points overthinking doesn't help much. Often lateral thinking can offer answers.
I sometimes feel I code better when I'm slightly mentally impaired, because my mind stops getting in the way of getting things done and over analyzing problems.
But then I'm very rarely mentally impaired, as I normally neither drink nor consume cannabis or anything like that, so idk.
EDIT: Oh, just realized the answer is probably simple => less stress.
"I drive better when I've had a few" is something I have actually heard from people in my past. Far, far past. And they think that because they no longer have that voice in their head that tells them they're doing something stupid.
"I code better when I'm high" is something that can only be judged by those around you. If somebody else judges your code to be better, fine. But your self assessment is fundamentally flawed.
Those are wildly different actions though, unless you're modifying live production code for a pacemaker or something like that.
Doing a bit of inebriated coding that you verify later might be just fine. I'm almost certain that the resulting code won't be better, but there may be situations where a clear head would have produced no code at all due to mental blocks.
As a hard rule I'll never be impaired at work or anything like that, though on my personal projects I've found slowing drinking a glass of a good rum is a very useful aid to programming. As others have said there's a wonderful objectivity to programming, you can't really blag it when you're working with others as I am on the personal project. I think it's the lack of inhibition that helps, it's telling the voice in your head to shut up with over-engineering things and just get to the instant gratification of a panel of green tests and features that work.
Debugging while inebriated is another thing altogether, that's no fun at all.
Or maybe we shouldn't center our lives around work - making sure we're 100% optimal for the capitalist system. Even at 50% efficiency, developers provide a tremendous value to a company they work for. If relaxing with some weed daily is something someone enjoys, why shame them for not being 100% at work?
I don't use cannabis and don't know many people who, but I did meet some long time users back in CA when I lived there. They all seemed to have that "permanent high" look on their faces. I wonder if this is related. Maybe it's all worth it, I don't know.
Did they look permanently high, constantly talk about what route they drove to get wherever you were and how the traffic was along the way, refer to highway names with definite articles like "The 101", and say "dude" and "totally" a lot? Then they were just Los Angeles Californias. But yeah, they were also probably actually high.
Hella Nor Cal or Totally So Cal?: The Perceptual Dialectology of California
Mary Bucholtz, Nancy Bermudez, Victor Fung, Lisa Edwards and Rosalva Vargas. Journal of English Linguistics 2007; 35; 325. DOI: 10.1177/0075424207307780
>Abstract
>This study provides the first detailed account of perceptual dialectology within California (as well as one of the first accounts of perceptual dialectology within any single state). Quantitative analysis of a map-labeling task carried out in Southern California reveals that California’s most salient linguistic boundary is between the northern and southern regions of the state. Whereas studies of the perceptual dialectology of the United States as a whole have focused almost exclusively on regional dialect differences, respondents associated particular regions of California less with distinctive dialects than with differences in language (English versus Spanish), slang use, and social groups. The diverse socio linguistic situation of California is reflected in the emphasis both on highly salient social groups thought to be stereotypical of California by residents and nonresidents alike (e.g., surfers) and on groups that, though prominent in the cultural landscape of the state, remain largely unrecognized by outsiders (e.g., hicks).
Extra credit question:
Can you locate the isogloss designating the "101" / "The 101" line?
I typed this in jest but instead of closing the tab I realize that yes, this is a good alternative, perhaps the best, if you can do it. Not everyone can, and typically it’s not their fault if they can’t.
Go to bed/wake up at the same time everyday: might be easy
Learn to cook: might sound more difficult, learn to make 3-4 healthy but easy "cant go wrong" dishes (pulled chicken and broccoli eg.) You'll love eating your own food soon enough.
Exercise: hardest for me as I hate exercise. No silver bullets, just gotta stick with it.
The trick with exercise, I find, is to find something that is fun first, exercise second.
What that is will be different for different people: if you're a social person, you might try dancing(think salsa or other pair dances), or if you're the competitive kind, try some competitive sport that doesn't rely solely on physical fitness: anything where technique is as or more important as physical form will help you forget you're exercising and just focus on having fun/winning the game.
The perfect exercise is the one where you don't realize you've been exercising until you stop and smell the sweat!
I only like doing exercise where my brain is active all the time. So sports where there is competition (I play squash), or where i need to keep thinking about it (swimming so I don't drown), or one that doubles as social activity (like partner dancing)
Those suggestions might hold up for some people but even those seemingly innocuous avenues might cause things to go awry when used as tools for emotional regulation. And, maybe my counter-arguments falls outside of the scope of the qualifier "healthy". But, I'd be mindful of the two devolving into exercising too much, which isn't fun to deal with (persistent injuries), and eating disorders that cause anxiety of their own. At least, that's what happened to me.
For some of us, the way to deal with numbing stuff means changing our lives so there is less numbing needed.
Exercise and healthy diets do not have the same effect on your mind as weed. I say this as a person who has a fairly healthy diet and exercises everyday.
Marijuana alters your state of consciousness. It enhances certain senses (taste being famous) but also allows for socializing and empathy. As a person who’s extremely narcissistic, it has helped me gain a lot of empathy by allowing me to “step aside” and observe my actions and those of others around me. And if you’re high with your partner, you can have a very fulfilling bonding experience (emotionally as well as sexually).
The only thing I’ve experienced come close is meditation. But that takes a lot of time and effort.
my friend does drugs excessively and wonders how I stay so straightedge. I don't drink or smoke, I eat a healthy vegan diet and exercise as much as I safely can.
but it's because alcohol and weed give me panic attacks, and interact with my meds. my body is slowly degenerating so I'm in constant pain and my exercise routine consists of rehab.
I feel like the pain and constant mental strife is aging me faster than weed would. heck, it'd be medical in my case.
i exercise a few times a week and eat well (take out/eat out once a month or so, everything else cooked at home, and vegetarian). That doesn't mean I don't want to have a few beers on a weekend still!
These are not replacements - you cannot replace one with the other. You simply might find you don't enjoy being inebriated. With this advice, honestly, most folks that smoke would ask if you have ever smoked pot regularly and how long that lasted.
To tell you the truth, I'm more likely to exercise and eat healthily if I'm stoned.
Taking a walk while stoned is pretty wonderful, and more taxing exercise aren't as bothersome. I think this is why pot is popular among some bodybuilders: Get stoned, lift weights and enjoy life. (I worked with a competitive bodybuilder, and this routine was pretty popular with non-steroid users). Food tastes really good while stoned, too, and this includes healthy stuff.
In my experience, the main reason to not eat healthy or exercise is because doing those things takes time, easily a LOT of time (e.g. cooking and cleanup easily account for 2-3 extra hrs/day and the numbers are similar for exercise [both active (dedicating time to it) and passive (walking around everywhere)]).
In the same vein, use of psychoactive substances is probably also a tradeoff between taking time to properly conduct mental maintenance v.s. a quick and dirty solution.
> There are TONS of easy and healthy recipes out there.
The cooking itself is not difficult, but you have surrounding activities that take significant time like prep, cleanup (dishes, cookware, table etc.), and extra time for grocery shopping (want fresh vegetables? you're probably going to have to shop every 3 days if not everyday. want diverse meals, you're going to need to spend time planning)
I have timed myself and the extra time cost here is definitely significant. I still cook my own meals because I think the trade off is worth it but I'm completely aware how much time (even the "invisible" time) I'm investing to do that.
> You can also just meal prep and cook for a whole week in lne session.
There's several points here: 1) prepping ahead of time doesn't suddenly make it cost no time... you're just shifting the time (likely into weekends, where a lot of people would probably want to spend that time doing other things!) and 2) pre-prepping means you either limit what type of food you can have (decreasing in quality the further it is from prep day) or it means you need to freeze, seal or can stuff, which negates a lot of the health benefits to begin with, potentially produces waste (sealing) and costs extra time!
Yeah, and it's a big if. Personally, I tried, and ended up having suicidal thoughts every time I exercised. With weed, that's not a problem.
If one has sorrows that need drowning, then the first step should be dealing with those issues and seek help if needed -- not trying cliché things that sound like they came from some mindfulness channel on Youtube.
Are alcohol and light drugs really helping or just covering the problem?
Keep in mind that a psychiatric hospital is working on actual psychiatric disorders, i.e. super serious medical problems (where your brain is rewired in "interesting" new ways, possibly forever). We're not discussing about a psychologist here, who's working on what are comparatively mild conditions.
Seriously. Am I supposed to just work and have a boring milquetoast existence hiking or whatever to make it to 80? When it really comes down to it, the most euphoric moments and best memories of my life have been messed up on weed and alcohol with people and music. Itd be depressing to move on and just reminisce about when times were better…
Your description of being messed up on weed actually sounds depressing.
I’ll take a hike in some beautiful nature anyday over depressing night in smoking weed. You have no idea how positive an effect being outside in nature has on you.
It probably is depressing. I’m expected to choose between a less enjoyable life or knowingly making myself stupider and unhealthier, obstructing other life goals I may have had.
How do you think I’ve never been outside in similar nature? The reality is I’ve experienced both countless times so I literally do know exactly how much of an effect that has while the same can’t be said vice versa. I’ve been to many national parks, forests, beaches, campgrounds, ski resorts, mountains all over the western US for decades. Yes it’s more wholesome and serene, but it’s sadly not a comparison for the sheer euphoria experienced imbibing recreational drugs in a variety of social settings. Why do you think EDC, Woodstock, and other major concerts are so huge?
Sometimes I go hiking. Sometimes it's with camera gear. Sometimes I go camping, or hunting. Sometimes I go into my garage and lift weights. Sometimes I take walks around the neighborhood. Sometimes I sit at home with a glass of scotch and music on. Sometimes instead of scotch, it's pot. Sometimes I have friends over, and we start making our way through my alcohol collection, and the music gets turned up, and we're dancing around like idiots in my kitchen. Sometimes I decide I want to try new things and I make half a dozen cocktails so I can have them in my repertoire while entertaining, and end up quite drunk, even while home alone. Sometimes I get high, sit on my couch, and play video games. I go out plenty (or did before the pandemic), and that frequently meant indulging in these previously mentioned vices. A favorite of mine over the pandemic has been to play the solo journaling RPG 'Thousand Year Old Vampire', and to keep the drinks flowing while I do it. I enjoy all these things, and could not replace any one of them with another.
And while I tend to not imbibe much of anything while out in nature - largely because I'm already clumsy enough - I also know hikers, including thru-hikers, who smoke every night on the trail, and talk about how wonderful that experience is. Not so much on the drinking side of things, for the thru-hikers, but I expect that is more about weight than anything.
Obviously, everything we do has some sort of impact on our bodies, and I suppose you can make an argument about the objective relative health impact of any of them.
But to try and argue that someone's subjective experience is an objectively worse one? That's silly. People can enjoy different things than you, and that doesn't make them "depressing"
These aren't substitutes, but more like you are trying to tell folks how much better chicken is and that you'd rather have chicken breast over an apple any day because it is so much more enjoyable.
It isn't like being outside is lost on folks smoking weed. Do you have any clue how much smoking takes place while camping, on nature walks, in rustic cabins, and so on? You just do it sober.
Just so I'm clear here, you read "the most euphoric nights and best memories of my life" and editorialized that into "depressing"?
You're inserting your own disdain for weed here. That's fine if you don't like it, but it's not like he gave any of the gory details for you to actually make this assumption. If you said "I love eating salmon" it would be poor form for me to say "Your description of your eating habits sound horrible".
I stopped drinking three years ago. Not because any problem just decided to stop. Started working out 3-5 days a week, heavy weightlifting. It’s been great and I feel happy, more motivated and it have split my focus, given me some much needed perspective. The only downside seems like I’m not getting tired as much as I used to which sometimes effects my sleep. No regrets.
Depending on the particular martial art strikes could be light or even missing entirely as is the case of grappling arts such as judo or jiu-jitsu thus lessening the risk of head trauma.
Agree that judo/jiu-jitsu have far less risk of head trauma/concussion, but as far as sports go they are still relatively dangerous - I quit after having one too many injuries.
I would say probably the safest sport, and my current favorite, is Olympic weightlifting, although climbing is in many ways similar to jiu-jitsu, and much safer.
I’ve been finding it interesting how many more communities Ive found that abstain from alcohol and all the white powder drugs, but are cool with all psychadelics (with more than a few people only liking thc and shrooms because theyre “naturally occurring” compared to molecules “made in a lab”).
I wasnt looking for these communities but its predictable now.
I see the merit in it. I just drink other places.
But it does make me wonder if I will be a person that declines a drink and confuses someone’s entire worldview who expects an explanation or tries to push a drink on me. So far with active groups this big and easy to find it just seems like its not hard to go a long time without a drink without needing to consciously try.
Life is plenty worth living without this stuff. But I guess we can't really come to an agreement since you've just defined people like me as "pigs in cages".
Hey, you do you. There are a million reasons not to do something, but if the deciding factor is a low grade long term risk I do suggest a person take that risk and live their life.
You know, everything that's wonderful about life before capitalism, or at least the most popular implementations of it, told us we don't have time for such things anymore, that both partners need to work 40+ hours a week each, and we've been finding shortcuts to fulfillment and stress relief since. Worse, the status quo has co-opted a lot of good things and turned them into tools for further capitalist oppression. See "learn meditation to be a better employee to help with stress" narratives pushed at so many companies instead of narratives about "why is our work so stressful and what can we do about it?"
I feel like I can't talk to a coder before the conversation turns into "So what drugs are you abusing to remain competitive in the workplace?" We're in such a sea of workplace oppression, its practically water fish swim in, and its often difficult to point and say "Look, the abuses of low-regulatory capitalism is the water here, do you see it?" Instead we just go back to talking about doubling up on ADHD medicine, microdosing exotic chemicals, getting high to 'get by,' low-key drinking problems, caffeine usage thats out of control, etc.
This stuff, if not real, would be unbelievable in a dystopian sci-fi novel just a couple decades ago, but here we are. We're becoming Mentats from Dune addicted to sapho juice to please our paymasters.
It seems virtually all stimulants used as a crutch to counter anxiety, depression, physical pain etc wind up killing off a lot of brain cells. My concern with modern (incredibly strong) Cannabis/THC is that some regular users seem to struggle with withdrawal if they don't smoke their bowls regularly, run short on weed etc.
Weed withdrawals can be very hard. I had to borderline force feed myself in the past right after quitting because my appetite was dead. You’re insomniac as hell, tired, irritable, and just generally uninterested
Weed withdrawals can last months for me, severe depression / anhedonia / executive function impairment; duration depending on how much/long I used.
I'll bounce back but man does it suck going through the repair process. Nothing is enjoyable, life just feels dull and flat, and it's hard to get anything done.
I don't know anything about you other than the two sentences that you just wrote up there, but I've known other people who have expressed similar sentiments. After years of struggling with this, they've determined that what's actually going on is that they in fact are depressed and have been for years, and their cannabis use has basically been self-medication of an anti-depressant. They thought it was cannabis withdrawal that was causing these symptoms, but what's actually been going on is that they were stopping treatment that was working (for other reasons, like "I don't want to be a stoner forever" or something)
They also reported the "bounce backs" as you do, but those were never permanent.
You have no reason to take this advice from someone random on the Internet, but I strongly recommend that you get yourself evaluated for depression or something related.
> but what's actually been going on is that they were stopping treatment that was working
Hard disagree. Cannabis isn’t actually an anti-depressant in the same way that alcohol and other euphoric drugs aren’t antidepressants. Chronic cannabis use has also been correlated with increased depression scores over time.
But that’s beside the point: Cannabis withdrawal and rebound is a very real phenomenon. It’s another myth that you can’t get addicted to THC or that it’s okay because it’s not a “physical” addiction. The withdrawal effects described above are consistent with cannabis withdrawal syndrome and are well documented.
There are many caveats that go into posting a Google Scholar link - the quality of the research is unknown, there is the reproducibility crisis to worry about, etc. etc; However, the presence of this ample research means that "Cannabis isn't actually an anti-depressant" is far from settled, and you shouldn't be stating that with such confidence.
Edit: Also, I happen to agree with you that cannabis withdrawal and rebound are real, and I agree with you that it is possible to get addicted to THC, and, sure the effects described above are consistent with cannabis withdrawal. None of that contradicts what I wrote.
However, those effects are also consistent with anti-depressant self-medication, and, as I mentioned, I've known people who went on prescribed anti-depressants, stopped having those effects and have had a marked improvement in their quality of life. (Some continued using cannabis, some stopped; it didn't seem to matter afterwards). I thought it was important to share that anecdata. I was very careful in my message to not say "you don't have cannabis withdrawal"; I was trying to communicate that I knew people that sounded like basq and it turned out they were diagnosed with clinical depression. Basq could have either outcome.
So, yea, sorry - hard disagree with your level of confidence.
Most of those top links are for cannabidiol, not cannabis. One of the top results clearly says that scant research suggesting that cannabis is an antidepressant is lacking in quality.
Your link doesn’t even begin to support your claims.
"Antidepressant-like effect of Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol and other cannabinoids isolated from Cannabis sativa L."
And yes, the majority of the claims are that CBD is the anti-depressant; self-administration of CBD comes primarily from smoking/vaping/ingesting cannabis, so I don't even understand what "cannabidiol, not cannabis" means.
I don't really get the impression that you are arguing in good faith here, especially the "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." part of HN guidelines, so I'm just gonna drop this thread now.
> Chronic cannabis use has also been correlated with increased depression scores over time.
As someone diagnosed with depression long before ever partaking in cannabis, this doesn’t surprise me at all. People with depression seek relief, and cannabis can provide that to an extent.
Yes, it’s a common theme with any drug known to cause short-term euphoria: People will confuse the drug-induced euphoria for anti-depressant effect, but they’re very different.
And that is why you should only take one or two puffs and not smoke a whole joint like 15 years ago. Also, I'm strongly convinced you should not be consuming it everyday, maybe 3 times a week max and even then that is hectic. People are way to chilled out about cannabis/thc dosages.
I think people "should" be consuming whatever they want. We're not free if we're not free to damage or destroy our own damn selves. It's really nobody else's business what goes into one's own body, or how damaging it is or is not to the person ingesting it.
Well, maybe, but I think the parent comment had implicitly meant "should... [if you want to avoid cognitive impairment" rather than making any moral judgement on those who don't.
Sure, if it doesn't affect anyone else. Sadly that's not always the case, e.g. if you are prone to psychotic episodes from consuming said thing or just having society paying for your cancer treatment later on
Taking drugs doesn't affect anyone else. Having psychotic episodes doesn't affect anyone else. Doing already-illegal things that violate the rights of others during psychotic episodes, that affects other people.
Taking drugs doesn't affect anyone else. Getting cancer doesn't affect anyone else. Receiving cancer treatment doesn't affect anyone else. Using public funds to pay for that cancer treatment, that affects other people.
Those things should not be conflated, or treated as identical.
I wrote the parent comment and mostly agree with you about personal choice @sneak, except 'Taking drugs doesn't affect anyone else'. Whether alcohol, weed, opiates or whatever substance abuse is hugely costly and damaging in modern society to those who don't have this disease. There is a strong argument for pre existing substance dependency condition in people but the toll on those around them is huge.
You are smudging cancer and substance abuse together but in many cases complete abstinence in an individual due to awareness of a pre existing familial susceptibility can help that person to never become addicted because they are aware of the danger and biological weakness in themselves. 12 step programs etc can help people abstain if they become addicted although it is a huge and heroic struggle back to the surface.
Mmm sounds like American individualism. You do not live in isolation and nothing happens in isolation. Everything we/you do affects others. Freedom is a false carrot that's been used to make people feel good enough so they don't burn down their governments when things go wrong. Stop paying rates/taxes and see how free you are.
Every single person who end up in EC/ER due to drugs/alcohol/jumping off roofs, are a drain on society. Yes it great that we can fix those people up when they hurt themselves, but where is the line when people get reckless etc? Someone is paying to get your broken leg fixed. We all need to acknowledge that and appreciate one another. Every hour that I work, someone in my country gets fed by a government grant, all I ask is that the person take care of themselves and not waste my money.
Having rights to one's own physical body has nothing to do with America.
If we don't have ultimate physical control over our own physical body, to do with it as we please, we can't really be said to have any meaningful rights at all. All other basic rights as an existing entity stem from the fact that we are ourselves, and others are not.
It's absolutely not individualism to say that every adult human being should have unrestricted rights over their own person-as-object, to enrich or damage as one sees fit. That seems plain as day to me. How can you even have the concept of a society of people if the societal group claims ownership rights over the bodies of the people that supersede those of the people themselves?
(If you think society shouldn't be spending money to repair damage caused by individual choices because it's unfair, we're in agreement there, but your broken leg case is a bad example, because you end up illustrating a point which I don't think you meant to make: that healthcare costs, something extremely variable based on individual choices, probably shouldn't be borne by society as a whole but by individuals themselves.)
> How can you even have the concept of a society of people if the societal group claims ownership rights over the bodies of the people that supersede those of the people themselves?
Uh... how can you have the concept of a body of cells if the body claims ownership over the entirety of each one of it's cells?
Did you stub your toe? Well it's not actually, your toe, it's an independent living organism, and you need to respect it's God given right to run into hard objects every now and then.
Really though, I think if you explore the wide variety of human cultures that have existed over time, you'll find that historically speaking, the default level of organization has been the tribe, not the individual. Indeed, individualism as we know it is only possible in highly organized societies, with super-powerful governments that create a monetary system, common language, infrastructure, legal and judicial system to enforce contracts, and other things that enable one to live "independently" like Ebenezer Scrooge.
For a right-wing take on this, please see "The Rational Optimist" by Matt Ridley. If you prefer a more moderate view, I recommend "Better Angels of our Nature" by Steven Pinker. Finally, the book "Debt, the first 5000 years" by David Graeber touches on more than a few of these topics.
Granted, I may be misunderstanding your argument, so please clarify if this is the case. :)
Parent isn't doing anything more than suggesting users consider dosage and frequency. It's good advice IMO. Nothing was said about taking away your right to kill your own brain cells.
> It seems virtually all stimulants used as a crutch to counter anxiety, depression, physical pain etc wind up killing off a lot of brain cells.
First off, medications used to treat medical disorders aren't a crutch. Knock that off.
Second, this simply isn't true. "If it works well, it must be destructive" is the sort of zero-sum folk wisdom nonsense you find in backwaters. Stick to the facts.
Any thread about commonly used psychoactive drugs brings out all of these thinly-veiled attempts at moralization over others. :(
Not even alcohol (one of the "dirtiest" drugs as far as physiological effects go) kills brain cells. I wish this myth would die. The issue is in the way they affect your dopaminic and serotonergic regulation and how this can fuck up your brain chemistry, not that they're literally killing off your brain cells.
> My concern with modern (incredibly strong) Cannabis/THC is that some regular users seem to struggle with withdrawal if they don't smoke their bowls regularly, run short on weed etc.
That said, this is a very legitimate concern I have as well. It doesn't help that a lot of stoners seem like they're in denial over the fact that they gasp have a dependence on this substance like an alcoholic or smoker does.
Alcohol can kill brain cells, but from overactivity of withdrawals.
> Scientists postulate that this
syndrome [Alcohol Withdrawal] represents the hyperactivity
of neural adaptive mechanisms no
longer balanced by the inhibitory
effects of alcohol
> Increased NMDA receptor activity
significantly increases the amount
of calcium that enters nerve cells.
Although calcium is essential for
nerve cell function, an excess of this
substance within neurons has been
reported to produce cell toxicity or
death
Near daily smoker, these days pretty exclusively of the high potency stuff.
I've quit cold turkey multiple times for a variety of reasons, sometimes for 6+ months at a time. I've never noticed any withdrawal symptoms, thankfully. Or cravings on days/weekends/whatever where I don't smoke.
It's anecdotal experience, obviously, but it leads me to believe that there's not some near-universal withdrawal process that pot smokers go through that you would see with someone who is going through opiate withdrawal or similar.
I believe it ends up why one was smoking (or using any substance in any way) in the first place.
If you're enjoying and it just becomes a (not super healthy-but not my point here) everyday habit, sure, you probably won't have withdrawal symptoms.
If you're using something to get away from some reality in life that is too unbearable, and that unbearable thing is still a matter when you want to quit, then it'll be hard. But it's not actually the substance (excluding hard/chemically super addicting class of substances like heroin or sugar) but the fact of facing the problems.
I wouldn't assume that it did. I would focus on its remaining extreme plasticity. It seems likely that you could do an enormous amount of self-cultivation via practices like meditation.
Cannabis absolutely affects brain development if you use it consistently throughout adolescence. Don't get me wrong, I still favor legalization and decriminalization, but the number of people who like to pretend like it's some super happy wonder drug with no downsides whatsoever bother me. Like any drug, there are side effects, and this is one of them.
Since the article and the study are light on the details of "persistent" Here's the supporting data's in a bit more detail[0].
Overall this makes sense to me as an individually who personally enjoys it. The whole point of getting high is to be impaired (for me). So it's not really telling me anything new. Like drinking, I can't expect myself to be 100% functioning the next day so plan accordingly.
The question is how long is that persistence and how much does it affect? Permanent? Doesn't really seem to be answered in a way that I was hoping.
Your comment strikes me cause I’ve been doing the same with alcohol - not to get drunk but to impair some of the logical thinking and analysis in the evenings.
Funnily enough I started to deal with ADD/ADHD in my family recently and learned from the doctor that this kind of behavior is symptomatic in adults.
Interestingly, this is the reason I decided many years ago _not_ to drink (or consume cannabis).
Like the parent, I don't find the reported results especially surprising - the part that would have been most interesting would have been how long after intoxication the observed effects last. Also, unfortunately, it's also clear that not everyone is as prudent with their cannabis consume as them, taking their performance even on the day after into account. I respect that sense of responsibility.
To cut it short, I think a tiny amount of alcohol can be a superb bargain. It allowed me to stay a bit neutral in parties (instead of crippled by anxiety and phobia). And being around people, even like a wallpaper had strange positive effect on my moral. I don't know if doing that long term (even tiny amount of beer) would harm your body, but having zero social life is also very very damaging.
Well, we are social creatures. Even the most introverted of us (finger points at self). So no surprise that being around parties/other people has a positive effect on moral.
The health benefits of the social contact almost certainly outweigh the negative health impacts of a tiny amount of alcohol.
A lot of drugs make you more social, but sadly they are all outlawed except alcohol. MDMA was used for years to lubricate psicotherapy sessions, until the FDA found out that some people was having "too much fun", banned the thing, and denied it has any possible positive effect. Only two years ago it seems that it is going to be reseached again.
Thomas Szasz has some books about drug history and the paths that turns a substance from legal to illegal. It only takes a high level guy to find the usage, made up some "facts", and illegalize it. Sadly, society is quick to buy those lies. E.g. someone claimed that some guys on LSD stared the sun for too long and got blind. It was a hoax, but so many media repeated the story that it got ingrained in the society that LSD is highly dangerous.
I am surprised to learn that Szasz was in support of any drug use in therapy, given that he went on to cofound CCHR, a branch of the church of scientology whose mission it is to ban psychiatry.
These are the people who claim "psychs" killed Kurt Cobain
Perhaps slightly TMI, but it's HN so let's share some fun ideas I have about this.
__Stress is most likely super linear__
Not a doctor, but from what I know, the biggest negative effects of alcohol occur with binge drinking. From a logical perspective it makes sense that the negative effects are super linear, because that is the case with many forms of stress. When it comes to stress, there is always some threshhold value that you need to reach. When it is just over that threshhold value, you hurt, but you hurt a lot more if you reach 1.5threshhold value because there is 0.5threshhold value to wreak full havoc on your body while 1*threshhold value is being occupied with your body. Obviously, this way of thinking is simplified, but I think that's the intuition as to why many (but not all) forms of stress are super linear.
__Effects of alcohol in small and large quantities__
I think I've learned this particular fact about alcohol in my psych classes though, I can't fully remember so I can't cite sources (!). Another thing that I have learned is that alcohol is an upper at low quantities (1 to 2 standard glasses of beer), it gets your heart rate up, etc. It is a downer at larger quantities (e.g. drunk people at 10 standard glasses of beer). If you don't drink much alcohol, then you are most likely experiencing it as an upper, it doesn't continue that way.
I like to drink 1 to 2 glasses as well because of what you said, but also because it's an upper. When I was in my drug experimentation phase a few years ago, I've noticed I like uppers more.
__How to create upper effects without alcohol__
You don't have to drink alcohol to create an upper effect, when you go to a party, try this the next time: exercise beforehand, like a 3 to 6 mile run (if you have the stamina for that otherwise build it up). That will also produce a mild upper effect like alcohol. Another trick you can do is to present yourself as a hugger at the party (well maybe not with corona) and hug everyone you meet, that will also produce an upper effect. Also, dancing at parties will produce an upper effect (any aerobic exercise really).
My workshop on partying is open again in the summer, applications are open :P I guess I miss that time of my life. Partying sober is something to get used to, but it's possible (before I started experimenting with drugs, I started experimenting with partying sober, I've seen both sides).
> Another trick you can do is to present yourself as a hugger at the party (well maybe not with corona) and hug everyone you meet, that will also produce an upper effect. Also, dancing at parties will produce an upper effect (any aerobic exercise really).
This advice is not very productive for people who drink because they have social anxiety at parties though :-)
> Another thing that I have learned is that alcohol is an upper at low quantities (1 to 2 standard glasses of beer), it gets your heart rate up, etc. It is a downer at larger quantities (e.g. drunk people at 10 standard glasses of beer). If you don't drink much alcohol, then you are most likely experiencing it as an upper, it doesn't continue that way.
> I like to drink 1 to 2 glasses as well because of what you said, but also because it's an upper.
That's an awesome share! Thanks for mentioning it it.
More importantly, it's definitely not the case that that organization is real, it's merely fiction. And I definitely am not trying to thwart it by inticing people to drink one to TWO glasses.
However, if it were to be real, then one could say that my plan might be diabolical indeed.
Normally people say exponential, but I think that's a silly term as it is quite a specific term since it means that the exponent is a variable (e.g. 2^x, 3^x, for every n, so n^x). For example, x^2 is super linear, but it isn't exponential. Yet, I'm fairly sure that I've heard people say that something is "exploding exponentially" but what they meant is that it's super linear since they got the faintest clue how much faster their projections are going compared to a linear projection.
What was the treatment, I presume medication, but was anything preventative-proactive or non-medication prescribed or suggested first re: lifestyle changes like cleaning up diet etc?
Unfortunately, a lot of research is focused on children and and not a lot of things are being tested (due to safety of children research I presume), however this start to change and more adult-based reasearch is being made. While there is no golden bullet most of the proposed changes are non-intrusive.
What we're doing is changing our diet foremost. More Omega-3 acids, shifting toward protein diet and supplementing magnesium and vitamin D. We put a bowl with a lot of nuts (and small bits of chocolate) and it's disappearing astoundingly fast (we were eating nuts before, but by making it more accessible it's just "the stack" and because there are like 8 varietes in the bowls + chocolate chips no one complains about it being bland). ADD/ADHD has a lot of comorbidity with gut issues, so fibre is important too.
And there is more and more and more. Making sure that physical activity is present (as it's great dopamine booster), keeping track of sleep patterns (sleep deprivation is common as many ADD/ADHD are light sleepers), recognizing activities with hypnosis like effects, so to not get too drawn in and so on.
But in the end there's a lot of knowledge that is power itself. ADD/ADHD has ~70% (lately I heard 76% figure from one doctor) transmissibility, and thus being able to work with it better makes for better family life and parenthood. Family member had a burst of anger this year during Christmas like pretty much every year prior. Few years back? Everyone were scared of escalation and sat in silence for 2 days. This year - everyone shrugged it off as a brain explosion and we went on with holiday celebrations.
I would really recommend getting tested if you just as suspect that you or those close to you might be affected by ADHD. ADD/ADHD in adults (and women!) is somewhat new discipline so it might be hard to check oneself out (especially since in some countries it's trivialized by general practitioners as a simple gateway towards stimulants). Worst case you spend some money but the best case you get a portal to a wealth of self knowledge.
Another view, is that, except for the extremely strong willed, getting used to a serene state of mind is addicting and kind of counter productive.
Perhaps, addictive is not the right word. But it seems to me (purely from a human nature perspective) its similar to obesity (Eating food is not "addictive", but there is a definite element of "craving" and inability to overcome that craving).
All in all, such substances are not natural and, with unchecked use, might put a whole society in danger. This is the reason I am ambivalent about the whole movement to legalize it.
Yes, it's almost as if society has developed firmly established norms about substance use which are so irrational as to be totally incoherent, and ITT you can find people reflexively confabulating justifications for those norms or trotting out the same tired old bromides to reassure themselves that the topic is being debated and that everything is fine.
Or maybe my drug-addled brain is just seeing pink elephants everywhere ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Given the amount of alternative “medicines” building on that heuristic, I fail to see where it is useful other than for scam artists.
Sure, there are biological inventions we can copy and refine for possibly even better inventions - but those are useful not because they originated from nature but because evolution found a locally optimal solution to a problem.
Well, being able to identify potentially locally optimal solutions without having to go through an entire optimization process yourself is a pretty powerful heuristic in my book.
Out of curiosity: How does any argument become more or less logical depending on its context?
Your comment reads to me as if the concept of logical fallacies is only useful or valid within the framework of rhetorical competitions – or alternatively that logically invalid reasoning is useful if you're only interested in making a decision, rather than making a correct or well-informed one.
So don't smoke. There are other ways of consuming with out inhaling the aftermath of burning. Yes, I know the effects are different in how one is affected. The smoking of anything has always been a curious "ritual" to me as it is so against everything the body is made to do.
I have developed this pet theory that humans have grown fond of fire and will feel secure in its presence. How do they know they're at a fire instead of just basking in the sun? When they are inhaling, I mean smelling, its fresh smoke of course!
I don't find it far-fetched to assume that an affinity to fire was selected for over the last millennia. Why, we even have a mutation that makes us less susceptible to carcinogens in smoke compared to other mammals. That would make smoking, and smoking indoors, an activity that replaces the open fires we're accustomed to.
Standard disclaimer for evolutionary theories: They are ill-suited to determine social policy.
That's some theory. Personally, I don't buy in to it. The concept of a burning end of a ciggy replacing an actual fire is just too far out there for me to accept in some far reaches of the human psyche is out there.
Smoking is an acquired taste. As is alcohol. We learn to like things that make us feel good, and learn to dislike things that make us feel bad (poisonous or spoiled).
"Appeal to nature" isn't a logical fallacy, it just assumes some things about how things should be. You might disagree with those assumptions, but you, too, have beliefs about how things should be.
In which case it would be much more honest to say "I think this is good or bad" or "these are my values and they are not subject to debate" rather to propose that thing you like is the natural state of affairs and offer that up as if it were a proposition that you were debating. Or worse, the null-hypothesis from which some nebulous burden of proof is assumed for the opponent.
In other words, it is a dishonest strategem which relies on the other party making the logical fallacy that the natural state of affairs must be good, or that a burden of proof lies with them, instead of recognizing this as the sleight-of-hand that it is.
So I think GP was just being polite by calling it a logical fallacy :)
But they are natural, aren't they? No less natural than the watermelon we are all eating (it might be cultivated), and I don't see anyone wanting to criminalize eating watermelon. Weed, tobacco, alcohol, coca leaves, poppy, they are all natural.
Also, even if it's natural, it has nothing to do with its dangerousness, so I don't follow your argument.
With regards to legalizing it, I'm on the side that if alcohol and tobacco are legal, weed should be legal, too. They are all bad for you in some sense, but we need to balance that with freedom and individual choice, and to me, they are pretty similar.
They are not "natural" in the sense that humans don't consume ethyl alcohol to survive, in fact it is often quite damaging to biological systems. Apart from some microbes I'm not aware of any other organisms that use alcohol as their energy source.
Alcohol/thc/caffeine/nicotine (you name it) do not fall in the "natural" diet of humans. Most psychoactive substances are metabolites which plants/fungi store in them to deter other animals from eating them.
Is anybody in this discussion advocating alcohol as a staple food?
A staple food is something that makes up a dominant portion of one's diet; it's beyond a mere common or everyday food.
A staple food, food staple, or simply a staple, is a
food that is eaten routinely and in such quantities
that it constitutes a dominant portion of a standard
diet for a given person or group of people, supplying
a large fraction of energy needs and generally forming
a significant proportion of the intake of other nutrients
as well
I would certainly agree with you that alcohol is not a very safe choice for a staple food!
Sure, but what if you tripped and sprained your ankle? Yeah it hurts in the moment, but would it cognitively impair you the next day? It certainly might; maybe when you're thinking about something while in the shower, you put too much weight on the ankle and the pain makes you drop your train of thought. I think the point that GP was going for was (or what I read at least) that there are many human experiences which cause some form of cognitive impairment; it's more important to see how deleterious the impairment actually is to the individual and to society before judging it.
Your argument is absurd. Sure, some caveman consumed alcohol that happened to occur naturally a gazillion years ago. So? You think huge factories producing alcohol and all the issues associated with it are justified?
By what you say, if whole of humanity consumed only naturally fermented fruit, I would half-heartedly agree.
> You think huge factories producing alcohol and all the issues associated with it are justified?
Humans also don't "naturally" need to be writing fictions, or draw pictures or make movies. And conversely, murder is pretty natural - take a look at how often it happens in nature!
Whether something is "natural" or not is a bit irrelevant - the big question is whether the action should be acceptable for humans to do. Drinking alcohol affects the person drinking it, but it gives them some comfort, or happiness. As long as they don't drink so much that it harms another person, i say they can do what they wish!
Still we are not hamsters - hamsters can take 20x the amount of alcohol per body weight as humans, because for them it IS natural to base their diet on fermented fruits from their stashes. Humans are not like that.
For thousands of years humans routinely (e.g with every meal, even children) consumed low alcohol beer/wine), because it could be safely stored for extended periods, unlike water.
Sure, just like lacto-fermenting foods to preserve them. However stored water could always be boiled? I have always thought it was funny that the most obvious "health benefit" of tea-drinking was boiling water to prepare it (yes, I realize not all teas are brewed so hot, and there are plenty of interesting compounds in there, but still...)
SSRI's or Benzodapines have severe side-effects, yet relying on them to survive isn't seen as disruptive to society. There may be an argument against self-medicating with Alcohol or Cannabis, but them being un-natural isn't it.
Maybe. It may be worth considering, however, that the reactions humans/other animals have to these substances are not necessarily accidental. Mammalia is young, plants are old, and have tamed us in many ways.
By natural, I meant, natural for regular human consumption. Not as in natural from mother earth.
Alcohol and tobacco are extremely dangerous and detrimental to any society.
What blows my mind is young teens, barely out of education, harping and celebrating the ability to drink. To me, that's insane. Why does a young person need to drink alcohol? When studies after studies have show how it affects human life in general. From health issue to societal problems to relationship issues.
In my view, alcohol should be shunned and should never be glorified.
When you bombard a child with images, videos, movies and acts of drinking day in and day out, you normalize it. And that is terrible.
I think there is a cultural aspect. As a kid in Italy (>10yo), it was "ok" to have a glass of something like beer+sprite or wine+sprite during a meal. Maybe 1-2% of alcohol, it was cool and would obviously not get you drunk nor tipsy.
Having a glass of wine during a family meal, or a beer with your pizza with friends, was likewise pretty common and done mostly because of basic gastronomic pleasure.
This is _very far_ from the binge drinking/getting wasted culture which has been prevalent in the anglosphere for a while, and that has sadly expanded to a large part of the world since.
It's not drinking that should be shunned, but getting drunk.
Exactly on point. In Portugal, another southern-europe country, the rituals are quite similar. Drinking is normal.
Getting drunk though, used to be very not appreciated and shameful. Actually it is not very "macho" to be drunk because then you look vulnerable; out of control. The contrary of the cultural form of macho. This goes to the point that there used to be a thing where people who got drunk knew they should either quietly leave or just be very quiet. Hell even I still follow that. The downside of that is that alcoholism in Portugal is a very private matter and often not properly treated. Families break apart, but nobody from the outside sees it. When drunk, leave or shut up.
One thing I have a bit of a difficulty in Poland is that generally people have a very fast drinking rhythm that I know will lead me to drunkenness pretty fast and i come out as a wuss or not a jolly guy, because I reject such rhythm. On the other hand people look at me sideways when if I drink regularly a glass of wine or beer at meals. One of the things that got me a bit sad was losing the ability to drink a beer(20-0.33cl) beer at work break lunch as this is illegal here and very frowned upon. Another thing is the drinking and driving. In Portugal and quite a lot of countries in Europe(Germany for example) the blood-alcohol limit is 0.5, which allows for a single glass of wine or a 20cl beer, but in Poland it is 0.2 which means one is effectively banned from drinking at all if driving. Truth be told I believe the 0 drink and driving is the way to go. I know of too many situations where people start with good intentions and get carried away. Nowadays when i go to Portugal I feel be guilty if i even touch a drink at a meal and drive afterwards(very common due to the restaurant culture).
In Portugal, nowadays there is a normalization of the drunkenness in younger people as a way to signal one is having fun, but it feels an imported thing. Binge drinking is also on the rise, with day to day drinking falling.
Unless incredibly severe I think the consequences should not impact it’s legality.
People will use it legal or not. If it’s legal you can charge taxes and spend that money on addiction prevention and treatment. Help people with addiction problems instead of putting them in jail.
Addiction is often a symptom of underlying mental health problems, you don’t solve those with punishment.
And that’s even disregarding the amount of crime and violence illegality creates.
Being legal adds a whole lot of marketing push and general acceptance in the population, especially young ones.
Time and again I see so many stories of young people fucking up their lives, and wasting so much of their lives trying to correct mistakes. Something which should have been guided by elders and well-wishers. But US society is neck deep into "individuality" at their own detriment.
A society that is taught from day one to be "independent" will discover that generations after generations will keep making the same mistakes. Same debt traps, same drug problems, same unhealthy choices.
It should be the same for any potentially dangerous drug. Legalize it, tax it and ban advertising it completely. This should be applied to alcohol and tobacco as well. Advertising beer, wine or smoking should be forbidden.
It sounds like you've identified the thing that should be illegal. Unfettered capitalisation on any product that can harm the population is generally a terrible idea, and the product frequently has nothing to do with it.
As the others mentioned; Advertising should be banned.
I do agree though that general change is needed.
Imo it comes down to education on drugs, facilitating safe use, and treatment of mental health issues and addiction.
"Don't do it, but if you do; do it as safe as possible. If you get into trouble; get help." is imo the only sensible drug strategy.
It's one thing to say "drugs are bad mkay" another to actually explain what the risks are and just provide basic practical tips on how you can reduce risk if you do take drugs.
Things like not using too much of anything at once, getting drugs tested, making sure you do it in a safe environment, not mixing drugs, clean needles (although really don't do those types of drugs), etc etc.
Also make sure people know the difference between weed and for example heroin, meth and fentanyl. Not all drugs are equal, weed is relatively harmless.
Lastly testing; It should be facilitated. Here it's quite common to get your pills and powders tested. It's free and facilitated. It saves lives as you make sure people don't OD on pills that contain fentanyl instead of whatever the user expected it to be. Same for legal weed btw, I believe in the US the quality is much better because of legalization. These things work, they literally save lives.
You can prevent so much pain and suffering by simply accepting the fact that people will use drugs and adjust your policies based on that fact.
In me, it's partially a coping mechanisms, and a method to to silence the brain demons. It's interesting that you brought up food, because I'm an emotional eater too.
I've had them under control for a while now, but the emotional eating is a struggle sometimes. I need to trick myself into not doing it.
For weed it's less of a struggle because I genuinely notice the "persistent" effects (no more than a few days in me), which effect my mental performance and emotional state.
Also, after quitting the binge I had withdrawal (I'm told for weed it's very mild, but it's horrendous nonetheless). More details to this in this video https://youtu.be/7u_cm5b1s7Y
I now smoke weed when I plan/want to for fun, and it's very occasionally...
That's interesting! I never heard of caffeine withdrawal before, but it makes sense when I think about it. I know a lot of people who say they that can't function with caffeine.
I'm not a big coffee drinker (and usually mix it with decaf, because too much makes me feel weird). So I'd probably be okay on that front.
How much coffee do you drink daily? I drink maybe one cup, and that's mostly for the taste (hence the decaf).
Tolerance builds quickly. At one point I could down a Red bull (about the same amount of caffeine as a strong cup of coffee) half an hour before bed and go straight to sleep.
Caffeine withdrawal is very very unpleasant. If it's a daily habit and you abruptly cease consumption (aka "cold turkey") you're going to be in hell for at least a day. Usually more.
Occasionally you'll hear people talk about quitting this way with zero withdrawal. They may or may not be telling the truth. But I suppose outliers always exist. Definitely not the norm though.
I know a lot of people who say they that can't function with caffeine
Yeah, because of the withdrawal. They could function fine without it, once they got past the withdrawal.
Of course, there's really no need to suffer painful withdrawal. It's pretty easy (at least physically) to just taper it down to 0mg per day over the course of ~5-7 days.
the problem with caffeine is, that once you are clean of it, you quickly get hooked on it again (due to socializing).
Every meeting revolves around drinking coffee or tea or cola.
Interesting to hear that experience. I've never really felt like there was social pressure to drink caffeinated drinks whatsoever. Seems like there's always more people not drinking caffeinated drinks. Particularly executive types. Just my experience.
Caffeine withdrawal is very individual and affected heavily by how much tolerance you've built up and dose, but worst case it's a week long hell of headaches, cold sweats and diahorrea.
For my part I tend to get maybe 200mg or so a day.
I used to drink a litre of brewed coffee a day, when I worked at home. I drank it from 9AM to 4PM. When I resumed office work, that fell to about 3 shots a day (espresso equivalent), all by itself. No withdrawal.
Now I'm retired. I drink one strong coffee in the morning, with occassionally a shot later, on te rare occassions when I pass my fave coffee shop.
None of these changes required any effort, or even any intention; they just happened. There were never withdrawal symptoms. By comparison, I have withdrawn from both alcohol and nicotine; nicotine calls loudly, but alcohol withdrawal is really horrible (and dangerous).
> unchecked use, might put a whole society in danger.
So you mean that if, for example, over 50% of the population was using a known mind-altering drug, society might go to shit?
Do prescription psychiatry medicines count?
You might want to take a look at what % of the western world has such a prescription. Between opiods, amphetamine, and anti-depressants, I think the US passed the 50% mark some time ago.
Absolutely. What ever I have read or heard about those drugs (most of it from peoples experiences on reddit and all), it is clear to me that they don't actually solve any issue, and simply make the mind numb. In some cases, perhaps that is required.
But why is it that the worlds richest country need to keep 50% of its population on drugs?
That is a societal flaw, and worryingly a self sustaining one at that.
I also attribute it to the hyper-velocity lifestyles, lack of stable marriages, excessive consumption of media in general and social media in particular. And most importantly, a materialistic point of view where the whole purpose of life is for pleasure, partying and enjoyment.
That’s a very reactionary attitude… you’re simply blaming all the “unknown” “new stuff” for everything negative in life.
I bet people blamed excessive reading of books, or “a materialistic point of view” during the Romans, the Middle Ages… modernity… hey, who coined the phrase “o tempora! O mores!”
If we agree that there is a mental health crisis (I'm on the fence on that honestly, but if), then it becomes natural to consider the causes of it. And where else would we find the causes than in the "new stuff"? A useful question may be what "new stuff" is more and less likely to be the cause? Trying to think of something new that is definitely not the cause might be interesting.
> But why is it that the worlds richest country need to keep 50% of its population on drugs?
100% of humans on earth are on drugs. Everything we consume is mind-altering. Sugars are just as addictive as drugs if not moreso. This is not an exaggeration, it's a change in perspective; wrestling back control of our subjective experiences from those who would outlaw what they don't understand (or for more nefarious reasons...). We have to start looking at food especially food consumed for non nutritive purposes in this new lens too. Heck even singing and dancing have been used the world over to illicit an altered state.
We also need to stop pining for a perfect self that is drug free. What does one gain by keeping oneself "pure"? It's not even possible but many limit the scope of what they consider mind-altering until the goal post matches their current state.
Once you accept that and embrace the idea that our minds are simply faucets of sensory experience that we subconsciously keep at a slow trickle of manageable info, you can start enjoying the turning of the spigot. You can start to appreciate the different subjective experiences that all things provide.
As an added bonus, we can all collectively change our tendency to look down upon those who've used and this energy can integrate others and prevent abuse. You don't have to look hard to find stories of reduced or eliminated drug enforcement bettering society.
The fact that this research starts by calling it "impairment" tells you that they have come prepared with their rose-tinted glasses. I don't want to belittle their work but I fear they've already aligned themselves with the classic anti-drug ethos.
When my wife and I were dealing with our daughter spending 9 months in the NICU at the childrens hospital, any time my wife would cry the nurses would “tattle” on her and the psychiatrist would contact her trying to give her antidepressants. She’d be extremely irritated each time. “My child is very ill and could die, the way I’m reacting is precisely the correct response and I wouldn’t want to blunt it or negate it in any way”. It just felt like we lived in the land of the Lotus Eaters or something.
"Natural" in an ambiguous that is impossible to define properly, yet it casts some morality on behaviour.
Anyway, the need for intoxicating itself seems to arise in more animals that have high developed cognitive abilities, Dolphins get high on passing around poisonous fishes, monkeys rub centipedes over their body and there are many more examples.
Mushrooms, smoking, fermented fruits and grains have been part of human lives for hundreds of thousands of years.
It seems that animals with high cognitive abilities feel the need to turn it off at times.
> except for the extremely strong willed, [...] addicting
Addiction isn't about willpower so much as psychopathology and genetics. It's a coping mechanism.
> getting used to a serene state of mind is [...] kind of counter productive
What is suspect about serenity? Is religion equally problematic as a source? How is it counterproductive?
> such substances are not natural and
A naturalist argument is usually invalid. We can't expand upon the rules of the universe. Plastics are just as natural as anything else. Cannabis also doesn't induce any foreign states in our brains.
Even using the narrow definition of "can't be found in the wild": cannabis is a plant, so it very much does exist in the wild. So do alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, psilocybin ("magic mushrooms") or ergotamine (LSD).
When applied to brain chemistry: to my knowledge, drugs don't do novel things to our brains. They promote infrequent states, but that doesn't make them unnatural. Especially not if you consider how alien dream states, meditative and transcendental experiences feel.
> with unchecked use, might put a whole society in danger
Adding a slippery slope to it doesn't improve your line of reasoning. It does tend to whip the masses into a frenzy, like its cousins "Won't somebody think of the children" and "Why should we help those who won't help themselves?".
It also doesn't conform to reality. Have California or Colorado collapsed because weed was legalised? Have the Netherlands?
> I am ambivalent about the whole movement to legalize it
Decriminalisation seems obvious to me as a solution, if coupled with a sorely needed investment in mental healthcare (across the West). The latter is necessary regardless of how we consider drugs - see homelessness, domestic violence, suicide, burnouts, etc. Decriminalisation works (cf Portugal's results), dries up income sources for the cartels, allows quality controls to be put in place, reduces stigmatisation for users, lowers the threshold for seeking therapy, keeps people out of prison for victimless crimes, creates a revenue source for the government through sales and other taxes...
The alternative to decriminalisation is telling the population "we know best". Looking at the so-called war on drugs globally, it's also an endeavour that's bound to fail, strengthen drug cartels, escalate violence and cause more damage than it prevents.
You can’t just throw out the word “human nature” and expect anyone to accept it. “Human nature” just means “this thing we all know about how the world and people work, come on… now don’t be difficult”. It means nothing.
We are biological beings and our biology determines our diets, neurology, endocrinology, and multiple other factors about our lives. Whether people like it or not, we do have a biological human nature that shapes many aspects of our behaviour and culture.
A persistent high can be achieved by living mindfully with kindness and regular meditation (speaking from direct experience). Hence, I'm not surprised that any high induced with a substance instead, impairs the brain as brain starts depending on the induced experience, without having developed its own mechanism to have such an experience.
Many people, especially the young, can not find a peaceful time or place for meditation. The demands placed on them by western society take up too much of their energy.
For them, drugs are a must because otherwise they will grow up without any spiritual life at all.
Them, not me. I gladly meditate about 2 hours per day since I have the peace, the time and the place to do so. But it took me many years to get all three of these ingredients for my spiritual fire.
Wow, impairment is not my intention at all. But, to not impair myself takes careful moderation and preparation.
For cognitive benefits or "virtuous pot smoking", I need to have exercise, sleep, right intentions, a clean room and music. If I do it right, I have transformational ideas. If I don't write them down, they are gone.
The first hour is often a wash. I expect little. I often combine with coffee. Then, after an hour, I can work for 6 hours with true inspiration. It makes me care so much. Music is key. It's basically a spiritual work experience. Less is more-- if I smoke too much or too often (3+ times per week) I'm just stoned.
I've been working on moderate, prepared, virtuous pot smoking for years. It is still a challenge, but I know i'm not the only high functioning cannabis user.
Just curious, have you tried doing everything except smoking? Or maybe a conventional cigarette/something else you like. I just wonder when you have so much other 'theatre' (I don't say that putting it down) around it, how much can actually be ascribed to the cannabis.
Also, just listened to a few tracks from that, wow no way I could get anything done, I'd just drift off to sleep! (I've never used cannabis, but I imagine that would only make that more likely if anything, not less?)
I listen to much more 'up-beat' music while working sometimes; with lyrics but mostly that I don't understand. Ironically I started the playlist partly out of trying to learn the language (Hindi), but mostly it's too fast/advanced/niche for me to pick up much, so for this purpose it's roughly equivalent to not having lyrics I suppose. Except that I might mouth-along to particularly catchy bits even though I don't know what I'm saying usually.
Not parent, but if I could alter my state to be like-high without smoking weed, via sheer mental willpower or focus, I'd have probably started a cult by now.
If it was a teachable practice, I'm sure I'd have plenty of followers to boot.
No one starts cults any more. The lack of drug cults is proof! I'd love to go to some chill temple environment on the weekends and connect to ultimate reality.
I've been tossing around the idea of a primarily web-based cult for a few days, I'll let you know if we get any traction.
It's still in the ideation stage, and we don't have anything other than a few 'what-ifs', but this is tech, so it's not like we need to be fully implemented before we start taking members.
this is exactly the kind of sweet spot of weed consumption that i’ve been trying to hit lately.
a couple of years ago, in my first year of university, i had developed an unfortunate weed addiction (it really is quite convenient for those who want to escape painful lives into fantasy), but after a couple years of cold turkey, i found myself missing the refreshing change of perspective that weed can genuinely provide when used responsibly.
these days, i try not to smoke more than once a week, and when i do so i try to make sure it doesn’t bleed into the rest of my life in all the same ways you do. clean room, coffee, music, notepad.
i am wary of relying on psychoactive substances to be creative, but whenever i’ve hit a dead end with a project, weed has a way of inspiring me to find new ways to solve a problem — be that aesthetic or technical design.
music is godly when high, and i have had many genuinely transformative moments listening to new albums under the substance.
for those wanting to “microdose” weed (as opposed to smoking blunt after blunt to get blitzed), i can highly recommend the DynaVap, an analogue weed vaporiser. the extraction of THC is significantly more efficient than combustion, and because the chamber is relatively small, it promotes consuming the substance responsibly.
(semi-tangent, but microdosing LSD has also been life changing, and i think delivers similar benefits to “microdosing” weed but with less brain fog, more clarity and more reliability)
For me: Do it alone. Do the first 5% of the task to get the momentum. Vape it slowly while doing the task. Combine w caffeine. Psych youself up by saying "what if...". Use low temp vape so co2 and physical symptoms don't interfere. Use it to let your curiosity propel you. Use the smallest amount you can to achieve the effect. Try different strains and keep track. Sometimes a body strain can put you in touch with your body, pushing you to stretch/lengthen and that makes you more productive. Sometimes heady strains are too weird, but this varies greatly w indiv. Also exercising on weed can be very effective esp in nature... just dont push yourself past limits and stretch and roll after.
I drink a lot of water and never eat until I want to come down. When I eat, I become mortal again. Really, if you can just avoid eating, it is a completely different high.
I definitely agree with doing it alone. I also use a fake cigarette "one hitter," as it is a minimal amount. It is always enough to work.
Also, yoga. Going to a Yoga class after a puff is just so healthy. Building health habits into drug use is a very good harmony of interests. Helps convince my wife that I'm not just getting stoned-- if I smoke, do work, work out, generate, etc—its hard to judge. (She also likes the sex—which Carl Sagan also talked about-- search for Mr x).
I believe Cannabis has a sort of state dependent memory. If you make an effort to fill cannabis experiences with lots of positive, productive, aesthetic events, it kind of "comes out" other times when you smoke. So, it takes practice! So, smoke before going to a museum, a concert or upon reaching the top of a mountain-- positive recreational use is another way to prepare for applied work-oriented use.
Never use it to escape. Use it to sensitize. And if you need it to solve your problems, that's a good sign that you might want to take a break.
Minimum Viable Dose is how I look at it. I like blasting off to the moon once in a while, but a 1-gram dispensary preroll is often enough to knock me out and put me to sleep if I'm not careful.
I keep a weed vape, as well as different sized pipes. The big, fancy one is great for extended/shared sessions, but the smallest one (called a bat, I think. It looks like a straight glass tube, with a small 'pinch' near one end) is my idea of a perfect single serving. It takes a bit of practice, but gives me between 3 to 5 light hits.
Have you ever tried going on a hike in a forest during one of the experiences? It’s there you can realize we are living at the bottom of a sea of air. The trees are like coral and everything feels so alive. It’s like exploring the planet for the first time.
This is fairly similar to my work day. I paint 5+ hours a day and use very small amounts of THC in liquid form with headphones. I get into a flow state where time either slows down or speeds up but I'm rarely "impaired" unless it's accidental. What's maybe a little different than some people is the music I listen to is anything but chill. Death metal, hip-hop, classical, IDM, etc.
I originally started doing this because I've got chronic pain and it helps replace the pain signal. The flow state is an added benefit.
>It is still a challenge, but I know i'm not the only high functioning cannabis user.
There are plenty of people that are highly functioning and regular smokers of pot that don't go through this level of ceremony about their usage, and I am somewhat skeptical this level of preparation is even particularly helpful in making someone a high functioning cannabis user in general.
Not saying it doesn't work for you, but this sort of story is something of a shibboleth on HN where someone claims that they do X process with Y substance or even just mental attitude and produce Z results.
I don't disagree that set and setting will impact things, but this isn't really being presented as a "If I do these things I am more likely to enjoy the experience", but rather as "I have to do all of these challenging things to make the experience one that meaningful and otherwise it's just a stoner getting a stoned, but this challenge is what makes me a high functioning user of marijuana"
To me, it's the distinction between "being stoned" and "virtuous pot smoking" and the connection being made between the latter being something that "high functioning cannabis users" do.
Lots of people just get stoned. That isn't what makes them high functioning or not - it's whether that impacts their ability to have a productive and fulfilling life. For me, and the many people I know that are regular users, the answer is not really. I imagine there are likely some trade offs, but I and the people I know have good careers, fulfilling personal lives, and do it because we enjoy it, the same way I partake in other hobbies I enjoy.
I recently started infusing my own oils to then use sublingually for similar reasons and it's been a revelation!
You can know pretty much exactly how much THC you're getting and adjust / repeat as necessary. I haven't smoked in years but I've been vaping (with a Pax) for the past couple of years and attempted to "microdose" but it was very unpredictable and sometimes I would get higher than I wanted which is not good when using it for "work" purposes (programming, music, video editing, etc).
I've also recently come to the conclusion that for me, Cannabis definitely falls into the "less is more" category, and I limit regular doses (ie vaping to get high) to once a week. I can use the oils multiple times (at doses of roughly 5mg) to get into the zone without negative consequences.
When I overdo it with vaping I have the usual issues with forgetfulness (struggle to find words etc) and my motivation definitely takes a hit. Also I've found that tolerance grows very fast the more you use it and it becomes quite unpredictable.
Oh and for me it helps to mix it with a bit of caffeine as well. Slightly off topic but as someone sensitive to caffeine, the perfect "delivery mechanism" for me is a small shot of espresso in the morning and then a whole bunch of Sencha the rest of the day. Calm focus and good mood and still able to fall asleep :)
Hah fair enough. Whole bunch is usually is 2 pots of 4 grams, 3 infusions each. But some people (like my wife) can guzzle filter coffee (much more total caffeine than my single shot) all day and have no trouble getting to sleep. Which makes me jealous. It’s all relative I guess
Sounds similar to me! Cannabis makes me think in a significantly different way, often going down rabbit holes. When something in my life isn't ideal (overweight, disorganized, sleep deprived, etc.), my high mind will go down negative rabbit holes. But if everything's going well, my high mind will come up with fantastic solutions to work problems or give me insight into how I can be a better person.
That's crazy. I have a playlist I've been adding to slowly since I was a kid of songs I cannot listen to because the emotional response is too much, it makes my skin physically crawl all over my body and I can't contain my emotions.
What about a good scene in a movie that speaks to you personally, I had a friend who had a go to movie that left him sobbing that he would watch to remind him he’s human, because he didn’t react to music and was pretty muted emotionally in general. I thought that was a cool trick for him.
Not really. Really no. My wife will be crying during parts of movies and looks over and ask me why I am not crying. She doesn't like my usual response, "This is a movie. None of this is real. They are actors." Also, I don't like watching movies more than once (too much to do, too much to see, too much to read in our short lifetimes to do any of it more than once).
I'm a mathematician. Back in the day, cannabis was a source of impairment. Now, a minimum effective dose of Indica from a vape pen helps me sleep. Except when it doesn't.
We value disruption in tech industries but our normative language for concentration, "focus" is lethal to creative thought. Reading math or daydreaming about research, one wants discursive ideas to intrude. This tool could be used for that... One wants to see with a generality not found in the source material, not be a good little "Simon Says" player.
Daytime consciousness is cognitive impairment. I wish the middle of the night could last forever.
There's the old trope that cannabis simply makes us believe we're being fantastically creative. So what? We're creatures who need affirmation. Interest, not raw technical reasoning ability, is the primary driver for creative research. Cannabis in moderation enhances interest.
Are there specific "strains" or formats/consumption methods that work best for you? I find it to be quite impairing or sedating...and sometimes even confounding.
I can see how music can induce creativity. But even so I often find myself unable to get into the same intentional creative state that even green tea and natural motivation provides.
I've seen some people using Cannabis in the way you describe over longer periods of time. In the short term there is no difference. Over the longer time (say a decade) the effect is noticeable to the point that they were no longer able to function in a job that they held down with ease beforehand.
These are pretty heavy users though. I don't have any heavy user in my surroundings that was not affected like that, but the sample size is small enough that this could easily be coincidence.
Personally, I have been a heavy user for well over a decade and I'm attaining not only promotions including greater responsibility at work in tech but high educational achievements as well so YMMV
Nearly all my friends who smoked it didn’t have any major issues until about 20 years in. YMMV also. Do not assume that short term trends apply in the long term.
People can be quite different neurologically. Some may see issues while others see benefits. I'm not neurotypical and I actually get a great degree of benefit from my cannabinoid use.
Best way to look at this is to wait until you’re at least 50 and compare with your peers who used it regularly for the last 30 years or so if you didn’t. There’s a 100% correlation on what you suggest.
The people I'm talking about are in positions where being smart isn't optional. One poster here provides a nice datapoint to the contrary, and there are probably others. But the interesting thing to me about the people that I know is that they themselves are not aware of it. They attribute their changes to a host of other factors but never to their Cannabis use.
Well there’s smart and there’s smart. It seems to drive obsessive and paranoid tendencies in people which can be a positive impact on work and a negative impact on social behaviour at the same time.
I have seen the same lack of association before as well. A friend’s relationship has broken down due to his paranoia but that according to him doesn’t come from the 25 years of smoking cannabis but her behaviour. She doesn’t smoke and is perfectly normal in any way and I feel really sorry for the poor woman.
Anecdotal, but as a lifelong stoner I would say it takes about a week after sustained heavy use for the cognitive impairment to fully go away. I always quit for a little while when I have something important I need to do in my life.
I use it as a sleep aid via CBD pills with an equal amount of THC. THC just knocks me out. Dosage is consistent and there’s no smell. I don’t enjoy the high from THC vs alcohol, so I just sleep through it. THC’s high feels like my brain is being “underclocked” which isn’t a pleasant experience for me personally.
I’ve tried living without it during the lockdowns since working from home saves hours. From eight months of not using it, I’ve found that I lose about 2-3 hours of sleep per day which drastically affects my performance. I’ve tried melatonin and I consistently workout every week, but nothing is as good as a sleep aid for me as THC
Melatonin to put me deep under and keep me from waking up 5 hours in and not being able to fall back asleep.
Best sleep of my life. Wish I'd found the combo years ago. Had trouble falling asleep since I was a little kid. Prescription sleep aids I've tried (or, god forbid, alcohol) don't work as well and make me feel shitty in the morning. That combo? Feel like a million bucks. It's great.
I worry about the long-term effects, but they'd have to be pretty bad to be worse than years and years of chronic bad sleep.
I guess it depends on your goals... for me, it's more about pain management without nausea... just being able to sleep through the night. As I'm now no longer working for a banking institution or govt contractor, it's an option that I prefer.
How long do they persist? 1 day, 1 week, a year, ten years?
I used to be a daily smoker and was horribly addicted. Now, at least ten years after I quit, I find myself having trouble remembering things. I lose my train of thought a lot too, really annoying. I don't know if that was attributed to my cannabis use, or just my brain in general.
That sucks, I empathise. If it’s any help the same thing happens to me and I smoked and drank very rarely. There could be a link between substance use and cognitive impairment but part of it could just be getting older.
Agree. Most people our senior (boomers, silent generation) never smoked or smoked briefly and what they smoked was very weak by modern standards. Yet many from those generations also suffered with cognitive decline despit little to no marijuana use.
I was going to say as well, just the act of getting older means some things will be forgotten. The brain does not have an infinite store. And as you get older, there are many more things that you are responsible for, and therefore some things get sacrificed from your memory. That’s just fact.
It's just really sucks that of the things that can't be remembered is the important stuff, yet I can still remember the opening bit of the Canterbury Tales that was commited to memory in school some couple of decades ago. yes, I know there's a difference in memory types, but come on!
It isn't physically addictive but it is mentally addictive and in this regard it will affect different people differently. I personally found it quite difficult to stop, it took over 5 years. Regardless I support its legalisation.
As a continuous overthinker, I switched from admonishing myself for losing my train of thought to feeling relief for a brief moment of thoughtlessness.
In terms of evolutionary biology, all forms of life develop memory first. Only once sufficiently resilient, an organism can begin to learn to forget things. Forgetting is an incredibly valuable tool. Don't diss it. Embrace the train of thought going off the rails every now and then.
If it was important, it'll come back. If not, congratulations, you've just made space in your brain for new memories!
> In terms of evolutionary biology, all forms of life develop memory first. Only once sufficiently resilient, an organism can begin to learn to forget things.
I've found that a daily regimen of lion's mane plus bacopa and for just one month did wonders at restoring my memory and clarity after quitting weed a while back. This was before I was officially diagnosed as ADHD, I had tried for the longest to avoid getting on stimulants, but at a certain point, my career and my life was falling apart due to my inability to control my impulses.
Now that I am in my forties, simply having a bad night of sleep can have me forgetting names of colleagues and messing up the names between the dogs and my daughters. Lack of sleep is one of the most debilitating thing and it certainly wasn't like that 10-15 years ago. Ageing sucks!
I didn't see anything in the full text on the dosage amounts.
I feel like with anything in life, the amount matters. 1-2 drinks a week does not give noticeable long-term effects. 20+ yeah that might be an issue.
Maybe I didn't find the right info in the full text?
I get a kick out of the new weed addiction ads and billboards
I would like to know more about it but I just can’t find anything objective
I am very skeptical of my friends that make weed use their whole identity, Its not fun when they’re not doing it “recreationally” like the rest of us, but they seem decently functioning even though they use the term “microdose” quite liberally and abstractly. Not judging yet, I just know I wont consume weed that often. They all are suppressing anxiety or depression, from unrelated things theyve told me.
Somewhat of a hot take but I think about this every now and then - simply put, Marijuana is a drug that makes people lazy. It tanks personal productivity. So we extrapolate where large swaths of populations in various states where Marijuana is legalized, wouldn’t that have a huge negative impact on the GDP? Literally neutering people’s productivity. It’s not just careers but I’ve seen addicted people (including myself) that have had serious negative impact on life and fulfilling responsibilities.
If people were less career obsessed, it would vastly reduce the amount of evil in the world tbh. Most large scale evil is done by career obsessed freaks.
I heard a talk show host once speculate that one reason weed has been illegal for so long is it would make the various motivational sticks and carrots the ruling class uses with white collar workers less effective in aggregate.
It depends on what the incentives are for a career obsessed person. Someone that puts their career above basically everything else will short term optimize at the expense of e.g. public wellbeing to get in the good graces of powerful people. Profits are made off of vile decisions. That's capitalism.
There ought to be a name for this paradox. Maybe this is out of left field but I've called it the "stimpack & herion" problem.
If I was playing a game, and I was the general of an army, and I could tell my marines to "use stimpack", which would make them move faster and be more focused, or "use herion", which would make them move slower and be less focused. A general would never order "use herion", and plenty would order "use stimpack" daily.
But the human race is not an army, and you are not a general, or a king. You're looking at the world as an engineer looks at a problem with a set of objects. This is super common on this site - we're programmers, we love re-ordering complex systems.
Not only are people far, far, far more complex than inanimate objects, but it might turn out that issuing any orders, or banning any activity has a catastrophically different and more negative effect than you can possibly calculate. Who knows how much of our culture wouldn't exist if people weren't free to drown in their sorrows, or if people spent their lives resenting you for limiting them.
I'm not an absolutist, we should ban plenty of substances, but be very careful when considering society as a system to be optimized.
Interesting analogy. Yeah, I tend to combine narrow observations and extrapolate them to see what happens on a societal scale. Speaking of Generals, I can imagine China/Russia drumming up pro-Marijuana narrative in US to cripple it from within. When 20% of the population is addicted to Marijuana with memory loss and obesity (munchies! hello), it is a good strategy. I mean, isn't that the reason China is banning video games - so teenagers don't waste time and contribute to the vision China has?
I am being a little frivolous but this is literally the kind of stuff I think about.
In some ways you're not wrong, but this was the mentality of East Germany as well. Why waste time with Jazz and jeans? Much more efficient to be reading didactics or working in a factory.
Maybe China is the best anyone has ever been at social engineering and maybe this time they'll get it just right. I'm not so sure.
> Why waste time with Jazz and jeans? Much more efficient to be reading didactics or working in a factory.
Considering the level of social infrastructure in the former DDR exceeded that in the BRD at the time of reunification, they might have had a point there. More public hospitals, more research facilities, better public transportation, more affordable housing. Sure, none of it had the flashy elements of Western capitalism, but it mostly worked.
Note that I'm not endorsing the Stasi or the many other things the DDR did to keep its population oppressed. But real life is full of grey areas.
Oh absolutely and I hope my tone captured that it’s not clear if the bets work out. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Vienna spending all its economic output on art and science sure didn’t help against a country who spent its entire output on tanks.
The Soviet space program comes to mind as well - the state can do plenty!
Call me crazy but you may be onto something. I don't think it's necessarily foreign actors that would take advantage of it though, moreso multinational corporations who need a sated and pliable workforce who don't think too much about their poor living conditions, lack of societal progress, lack of upward mobility, etc.
I do find it interesting that as cigarettes have waned in popularity and weed has gotten more popular, we're finding that people are less creative and innovative than ever before and there seems to be a persistent monoculture throughout the West that's extraordinarily drab. Might it have something to do with nicotine's cognitive-enhancing ability versus cannabis diminishing cognitive function? Probably not, and there's likely no way to do a cohort study on this subject, but it's an interesting question to pose regardless.
Or might this mono-culture simply be a side effect of the internet?
Much like how the Roman empire led to a linguistic "mono-culture", and how railways (and later airplanes) increased global homogeneity, it seems more likely to me that as humans are more and more in contact with their far away cousins, they all start to blend more.
Well, in Russia it's the other way around - repeated pushes to legalize mj in Russia are seen as a way for USA to cripple Russian youngsters , making them disinterested in pursuing casual life goals - education, career and family. Go figure
From my recollection of his biography, Jobs quit weed after his teenage years. He did do a bunch of acid whilst in college, but LSD doesn't really have any detrimental cognitive effects.
labor is a requirement for survival. it is demand-induced, not supply-driven. Most can't choose to get high instead of go into work. high people still get the jobs done.
most people aren't incapable of realizing their full potential because of their personal mindspace, but because they are confined to a specific economic survival role.
didn't they ban psychedelics like LSD for a similar reason people just became way more loving and peaceful so less and less would sing up for the military?
> A systematic review published today in the scientific journal Addiction has found that cannabis use leads to acute cognitive impairments that may continue beyond the period of intoxication.
Hm,
> "may continue beyond the period of intoxication"
that's a very different fact then "persistent cognitive impairments"
Like I think anyone can agree that cannabis during the time of consumption leads to cognitive impairment.
It's also not a secret that canabis can have residual effects if consumed too much. Which as far as I know decrease over time if you stop consuming it, i.e. "residual effects" not something I would call "persistent" effects.
What I can't tell is if the study fund long term effects besides this, or if it want to make it look like it found such.
I used to wish to be a professional drummer. When I was 14 I attended a drum camp for a week to meet and learn from some of the world’s best drummers, along with other children and adults from around the UK with similar ambitions.
I became friends with one kid who was exceptionally talented as a musician, but also had a chronic marijuana habit. He was a better drummer than me at the time, but the drum camp was held every year. I attended the following year, and to my surprise, so did he.
As I am a huge nerd, I spent the entire year obsessively practicing. My friend spent the whole year smoking marijuana and being complacent. We were excited to see each other and catch up, but it wasn’t long before we started showing off our skills on the drum sets. His heart sank when he realised how dramatically my skills had surpassed his. I think he had a bit of an identity crisis, and likely as a consequence of the frequent substance abuse he developed a deep and blatant paranoia. He tried to commit suicide in his room the following day, and had to be removed from the camp.
I didn’t speak to him much after that — kids weren’t quite as connected as they are today back in 2005 — but to my surprise he did manage to contact me a couple of years ago. I asked him how he was, and he said he was doing better now after rehabilitation, but that life got much worse for him since we last met, explaining that he had been addicted to heroin.
I recognise that this is an extreme case, but I grew up with a lot of kids like this, and marijuana is scary as shit to me, despite some nerds today being adamant that it’s excellent and certainly better than alcohol.
I'm not sure how a suicidal heroin junkie fucking up their life with hard drugs is relevant in a thread about cannabis. The whole "gateway drug" nonsense was debunked decades ago.
I don't know if the "gateway" concept is true or not but this fact (if true) doesn't dispute it. If you imagine hard drug use as a funnel with an optional step at the top - marijuana, with a very low conversation rate, the fact the conversation rate is low doesn't mean it's not the top of the funnel.
All of which would equally apply to alcohol or tobacco. And the data to support such a link for alcohol or tobacco is apparently just as strong, if not stronger.
But this whole line is a canard. The question is, would prohibiting any or all of those help anyone? Does prohibition help or not?
Because prohibition is the one part of the equation that a debate could actually have any affect on.
But I think it is quite clear why so much time, energy, and dubious argumentation is spent avoiding that question.
> The "gateway drug" argument is that any amount of cannabis is sufficient for becoming a skin-popping fentanyl junkie
That's an extreme, and not representative of what most people mean when they say "gateway drug".
My understanding of the gateway drug argument is this: someone who starts with a seemingly-innocuous mind-altering substance is more likely to end up wanting more and going for harder stuff than someone who has never used any drugs at all. By normalizing the light drug, some percentage of the new users will end up addicted to hard drugs that wouldn't have otherwise.
I'm not familiar enough with the evidence to have an opinion on the accuracy of this argument, but it's not helpful to take the most idiotic framing of it and attack it, even if it is the framing with the greatest meme value.
The correlation is that those who use "hard" drugs have often also previously used other drugs, including alcohol and prescription medication. Flipping that around to say the using cannabis leads to injecting heroin is the classic post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy.
Perhaps the correlation is a result of cannabis being illegal in your country: if you break one law (cannabis use), the barriers are down and you may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb and explore stronger remedies for your troubles.
So the questions that need to be investigated are these. Is there in fact any kind of correlation? If there is a correlation, is it causative? Of course, no true believer needs these questions answered, which is why the research into these things in not legal in countries where prohibition enforcement and punishment is big industry.
Is caffeine also at the top of the funnel? How about melatonin?
The fact that most heroin users have used caffeine previously does not mean that caffeine is a gateway drug to heroin, or at all correlated with hard drug use. The same applies to cannabis.
yup. It's an interesting story, but the article is about generalizable impacts of cannabis, and this person in the story is certainly not an example of that. Granted, it was acknowledged that this was an extreme case.
Why is it that everytime a bad story about MJ is mentioned, there are always so many people in comments doubting authenticity and relevancy? It is almost like an agenda or something
People are skeptical on any side about purely anecdotal experiences. I've posted pro-marijuana anecdotal experiences in here, but I don't expect people to take it as gospel, and frequently specifically call it out as a personal anecdote. In the past, have seen the exact sort of response your replying to directed towards me.
And that's fine, because anecdotes aren't data!
But it's just hard to separate correlation from causation here. Not all people who drink or smoke or do other drugs are depressed, but plenty of depressed people will drink or do drugs.
Plenty of people that have natural talent or skill, or who worked long enough to get to "the top of their game" get complacent even if they do not regularly engage in any of the vices we're talking about here. Arrogance and complacency are hardly unique to drinkers and smokers.
Even from an anecdotal perspective, assuming that marijuana was a contributor to the person becoming complacent, it seems unlikely that the marijuana was a strong causative factor in the suicide attempt. There are a lot of people that smoke pot regularly, and by definition, most of them are not the best person at their hobbies or professions, and they're not committing suicide. There's obviously some deeper issues in play here. (And I think it might be totally reasonable to say that people that have those deeper issues should avoid mind-altering substances)
Most positive anecdotes are not nearly as extreme as this one, but there's certainly skepticism for even mild positive statements.
You can look in the comment section for this very article for multiple examples - I replied to someone who indicated that another person must have "depressing" nights because they stated that they sometimes enjoy having a night with friends listening to music while high, for example. Subjective opinions of how to enjoy an evening are greeted with being told they're wrong - a bit beyond even skepticism, even!
If us potheads start posting anecdotes about how smoking took us from being unsuccessful and contemplating suicide to successful and having wonderful personal happiness and contentment - basically the reverse of the original post in this thread - I'm sure we'd see similar levels of skepticism. As it is, the positive anecdotes are basically "It's fun and helps me relax", "I feel more creative while high", "It sometimes helps me approach things from a different perspective" and similar.
I've had the same reaction from sharing a story about bad experiences with mushrooms. It wasn't in the context of evidence either, but still got people saying it sounded like anti-drug propaganda.
I think it's just the result of a cultural perception shift swinging hard the other way from the decades that drugs were demonized to now people looking at many drugs (mdma, marijuana and psilocybin especially) as miraculous substances that will solve all our issues. This happens with most shifts - it starts on one end of the extreme, then gets a reaction which swings the pendulum to the other extreme. In a decade I'm sure it will even out and we can have open conversations without reactions being so dogmatic.
I wouldn't call it a 'bad story', rather a story giving false impression of the general situation, even if from your perspective its how it looks like. But things are almost always more complex than first glance makes them look like, as in this case. Why - MJ being a gateway drug is mostly about being one of the most accessible and 'light' drug for people desperately wanting to escape/avoid reality of their lives.
Kids growing up in dysfunctional families (who might actually look OK from outside), or with some mental issues often desperately seek any kind of escape in whatever comes around. For many Alcohol, cigarettes and MJ are most accessible but sooner or later they find these substances don't work as they thought, the ugly reality is still there. So they move up the ladder for stronger escape.
Its false to paint MJ as cause of this, taking perfectly fine and balanced young individuals and bending them on path of addiction. Yet this is how it has been sold to public for past 60 years all around the world.
I think its the fact that a story about a 14 year old using drugs is not an example of what 99.9% of the "nerds who think weed is excellent" have in mind when they talk about using cannabis
Ok. An anecdote about cannabis use producing persistent cognitive impairment seemed to me to be relevant to an article describing cannabis use producing persistent cognitive impairment.
Did the anecdote provide any evidence or argument linking cannabis use to presistent cognitive impairment? I must have missed it. Can you quote the relevant parts?
Did you miss the part where the kid became a heroin addict? Heroin will certainly provide long term impairment in the form of a lifelong addiction. Hard to find the effect of MJ in that long shadow.
Because that doesn't seem to be factoring into your analysis of the source of the impairment.
If I told a story about a kid who showed back up at band camp and had become 50 pounds heavier and hadn't progressed as a drummer, then went on to become a heroin addict etc. you wouldn't be blaming cookies. You'd stop and wonder what the hell was going on in his life.
I wasn't aware that cookies cause paranoid delusions.
Marijuana on the other hand…[0]
As I mentioned, I grew up with several kids like this. Most didn't attempt suicide (as far as I'm aware, anyway), but the possibility of confirmation bias aside, I certainly feel as though I recognised a pattern of paranoid delusion among young stoners that I knew.
I grew up in a super poor neighborhood, and I knew maybe 10-15 kids who started smoking MJ before age 16. The only ones who had any kind of extreme cognitive fallout were the ones that dabbled in more extreme stuff (like PCP). Even in those cases though, it's hard to point at the drug as opposed to the reason they were using. (In the PCP case it was three brother with a mentally ill single mother)
I'm not discounting the possibility that MJ can cause such things, but even the studies put the risk fairly low, and it's hard to separate environmental and genetic risks in the population they have available to study.
> after he smoked his ambition to be a goos drummer away.
This is the part that doesn't follow. We have no actual indication that smoking pot had anything to do with his lack/loss of ambition.
I could give plenty of anecdotal studies where people became complacent because they got a promotion, or made it to a certain landmark, or realized that they were the smartest person in the room at the time, or a million other things. Complacency is not something that requires smoking pot to feel.
Like, I don't want to denigrate the person in the anecdote - but if your sense of identity is so tied up in being the best drummer among a certain peer group that when you lose that title you are going to attempt suicide, you have more fundamental psychological problems to deal with.
If pot was causing people to want to kill themselves because they weren't the best at something, we'd have a lot more suicides in the world. It's a massive claim, and one that requires proof beyond an anecdote.
When someone who retreats from their hobbies, tries to kill themself, and engages in risky behavior like heroine use and drug use, I think its reasonable to suspect that person has some problems in their life beyond smoking marijuana.
This is an interesting story, but you have to wonder what led to this kid starting to smoke weed in the first place. It sounds to me like he may have had bigger underlying mental health issues that caused him to start smoking, rather than the weed being the cause of his subsequent suïcideer attempt and heroin addiction.
14 year olds don't get access to weed without someone either giving it to them or giving them the money to do it. I doubt you showing him up had much to do with the suicide attempt, so don't worry.
I started my drug usage in my mid-20s (including alcohol) and I highly recommend it. My brain was done cooking and I had enough self-confidence + self-awareness to not make dangerous decisions.
If you begin a habit from an unhealthy place -- then yeah, it can be the beginning of a negative feedback loop. Sounds like this kid started from a bad place, and I'm not sure that a 14 year old could possibly begin a weed habit from a healthy place. Hell, even 20 seems a bit early.
nerds today being adamant that it’s excellent
Well, it's certainly a tool. Tools can help you or hurt you. I think a lot of people have success with it. But, people hurt themselves with it too.
I really wince when people talk about weed as some kind of magic cure.
> Cannabis is the third most consumed psychoactive substance in the world (after alcohol and nicotine) and adolescents as well as young adults have the highest rates of cannabis use.
I've known many people in silicon valley who smoke cannabis regularly (several times a week if not daily). They all seemed to be cognitively normal. Some of them function on a level I only wish I could attain.
I think regular cannabis use attracts a certain type of person. That type of person can vary in their ability and intelligence, just like any type of person. This is also true of say, hardcore fans of fantasy fiction. They all have certain things in common, but you couldn't paint all of them as "creative" or any other trait.
I'm hesitant when hearing about long term effects, even on developing brains. Both Barack Obama and Carl Sagan smoked a ton of cannabis when they were younger. And they and others really turned out fine.
This paper seems to be a meta study that combines the results from other studies. Since there were multiple methodologies it's hard to get a sense of exactly what questions they were answering.
It's really no different to people using caffeine (aside to the legality). They are both drugs, the main difference being I bet more folks suffer from the effects of caffeine (anxiety, loss of sleep, stress), than the do cannabis.
Nicotine and caffeine are both mild stimulants and have nootropic effects. Weed hasn't done anything for me besides give me bad panic attacks and making me feel like I'm detached from reality. It does not have the same kind of nootropic and cognitive-enhancing effects of caffeine, not at all.
Like David Lynch, I'll stick to the coffee and cigarettes (even if the latter will probably kill me eventually, at least I can think straight)
I also have anxiety and panic attacks triggered. Though when it's over and I can think calmly, I ALWAYS see those panic attacks are my subconscious' way of telling something wrong with my life/where I'm going etc. and I need to fix things. When everything's on track I never have panic attacks regardless of the amount of substance.
In that sense it's actually telling me, in a brutal yet true way, to fix my life, by facing me feelings or thoughts that I've been subconsciously running away from.
Might not be the same case with you, surely, but this is my 2 cents.
A big difference is that caffeine is a stimulant, or "upper". Stimulants have a very different role socially. They are little good as excuses: No one is going to claim the reason they hit on the boss' wife at the Christmas party was because they got too high on coffee, or that the reason they got low grades in college was that they spent all day in their room drinking red bull.
Caffeine is one of the few stimulants that seems to be beneficial to the human health. Moderate use is linked to a lower likelihood of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, liver and endometrial cancers, Parkinson’s disease... Certainly more beneficial than smoking cannabis (in most cases together with tobacco). Damage to the lungs is one of the first thing that comes to my mind.
Most of the beneficial effects are because of the complex chemistry of roasted coffee and not solely because of Caffeine.
AFAIK cannabis has also a multitude of complex phytochemical elements that are beneficial to human health.
Smoke is different from vapor. When you vape cannabis, you're not actually combusting anything, just heating the plant matter enough that some of the particles on the flower are converted to vapor and inhaled.
I am a dire pothead who only uses their Pax2, but please don't frame accepting "plant vapor" into your lungs as a totally harmless thing. It's still heated organic material that your lungs arn't made to accept.
It's better than smoking, but we need to be responsible and admit that it's not exactly without risk or harm.
The person you're responding to never said it was without risk, just that vaping isn't the same as smoking- and the scientific literature backs this statement up.
> Conclusions: Single-dose inhalation of vaporized cannabis had no clinically meaningful positive or negative effect on airway function, exertional breathlessness, and exercise endurance in adults with advanced COPD. Clinical trial registered with www.clinicaltrials.gov (NCT03060993).
> The majority of studies suggest that vapourizers adequately reduce risk of pulmonary symptoms (5,14–16), although complete safety may require a regulated source of plant material, rather than ‘street’ samples, which produce ammonia (17).
> The findings suggest that vapourization reduces the delivery of toxic byproducts associated with the use of smoked cannabis. A subsequent experiment addressed exhaled carbon monoxide (CO) (14). The researchers found a statistically significant difference between the increase in CO exhaled following smoking cannabis versus vapourization. The amount of exhaled CO showed little to no increase following vapourization compared with large increases following smoking, which would be expected for inhalation of a combustion product. These findings give further evidence that vapourization reduces exposure to gaseous combustion toxins.
This isn't to say there is no risk, but if someone is going to consume cannabis it is amazingly clear that vaporizing it is safer than smoking it.
Yes, this is a big difference between North America and Europe. I've never understood why (and consider it to be a big mistake), but for some reason most potheads in Europe mix their weed and hash with tobacco.
When I drink a lot of coffee I can still function 100% normally (and because of ADHD, even better than my usual) and I am in no way impaired. That cannot be said about cannabis. They are not the same.
Your subjective experience as a caffeine addict is not really applicable. Caffeine definitely impairs me. I can't sleep, can't sit still, can't poop, can't focus on anything. Weed, on the other hand, keeps my thoughts focused and doesn't interfere with sleeping or bowel movements. See? Our personal experience is irrelevant to the discussion.
You are not using the same meaning of "addiction". I'm most definitely an addict, of various substances. Can easily put them down for months or years, that's not proof that I'm not an addict. The addiction is the part where I keep coming back even though I can quit.
They are both drugs, but the side effects of caffeine are a lot less bad per usage compared to weed per usage. Perhaps I should phrase that a bit better, but I hope you see what I'm getting at.
Caffeine can have pretty "bad" effects - issues with sleep, headaches, panic attacks, and all sorts of cardiovascular issues (increased heart rate, sweating, etc).
E.g. if someone in college does poorly because they got high all the time, maybe the reason they got high all the time was that they felt (rightly or not) that they would have done poorly anyway, and now they have the drug to blame. And maybe those who smoke a bit and still do well, do it sort of to have the excuse in reserve.
I've not much experience with cannabis, it's far less popular where I live than the US, but I can certainly see that alcohol is used as this sort of "flexible excuse", both short term and long term.
The people that I see doing it are doing it because of anxiety reasons. I think there are a variety of people with a variety of reasons for smoking weed.
while i agree with you there are many reasons for drug use. its likely the wikipedia article linked also applies subconsciously, so while they tellyou/think they do it for anxiety they may do it for a host of other reasons without fully knowing themselves. We all do this with many aspects of life, just pointing it out.
Yea fair point, it's indeed a lot easier to look at surface level reasons and take them at face value, while instead we should be critical of that. Good point.
Self-handicapping is a huge effect, I’m surprised we don’t see it more frequently discussed in tech. This effect is really about creating a narrative and identity for ourselves. People attempt things and fail all of the time. If we put too much of our ego into the attempt it can be emotionally devastating when failure happens. So we protect ourselves by crafting alternative narratives. “If I succeed then great, but if I fail it’s because i choose to […]”. You are more likely to accomplish your goal if you put yourself fully into it, and the more you feed alternative narratives the less successful you’ll be. The way to live is to be fully committed and focused on your goals, and to have good skills on knowing how to recover from failure when that occurs.
[some definitional text]
The purpose of self handicapping is to protect your self identity. “I could have x, but I didn’t because of y” is the narrative story. I could have gotten an A on the exam but I didn’t because I partied instead of studied is a classic example. For it to be true self-handicapping y needs to be a choice.
> I think regular cannabis use attracts a certain type of person. That type of person can vary in their ability and intelligence, just like any type of person.
This matches my personal experience as well. I’m good friends with someone that holds a high-level FAANG position and consumes weed every day. While working. Attending meetings, coding, managing large teams, the whole she-bang. It’s unbelievable. They say it “calms their thoughts” and allows them to focus.
If I tried to code while high, I would end up wasting 3 hours just fiddling with the text colors in the IDE or just space out in a wormhole of deep introspection.
I used to do this and in fact getting really high was the way I could marathon code. Sativa dabs would keep me up as long as I wanted and I could just keep going and going until about seven years into this habit, I sort of hit this wall where getting high no longer motivated me to keep going, instead I just wanted to play video games. Then I was prescribed medication for ADHD and it basically removed the desire to get high and helps me better than getting high used to because it doesn't impair my memory and gives me the ability to choose what I am motivated to do.
Disclaimer: I'm an almost daily smoker of cannabis.
There is definitely some impairment long term. I think we can assume that even without this huge study. I don't think knowing that matters unless we have some scale that tells us how dramatic that impairment is.
If I compare someone who smoked all the time, but also had a rich and engaging social life with a lifelong abstainer who live a mostly isolated existence, who is going to be more cognitively capable?
There are so many inputs that feed into who we are and what we are capable of that, in all likelihood, cannabis use is likely only incidental to much larger factors like isolation, media preferences, home life, etc.
As an anecdote, the worse thing I think I've ever done for my brain, the thing that I immediately felt dumber after doing, was reading "Shadow Wolves" (Steven Segal's book). I had trouble communicating thoughts effectively for weeks after finishing it. It was like it had sucked vocabulary out of my brain. Maybe that's how cannabis leads to long term impairment. It makes you read "Shadow Wolves".
Edit: Since people are voting this, I want to add an extra warning that I was not joking about "Shadow Wolves". If you read it, you will feel dumber, and it will take time to heal the damage done. Seriously.
You should assume any disturbance of your brains chemical equilibrium is bad long term. Those drugs included. Absent fixing a specific deficiency that is.
If a study comes back and says, with a high confidence, that isn't the case for this or that, great, but I think it's a safe assumption for most chemicals.
Edit: Just to be clear, I'm saying it's not enough to show something is bad, as pretty much everything is bad. It has to be bad enough to matter.
Totally agree. However, I highly doubt such a study will be possible for the same reasons we still argue about salt and sugar: what's the control?
Unless we're able to find twins that live largely the same lives absent the one factor, we are really only capable of sussing out the especially harmful things with long term lifestyle studies. If cannabis is as bad as sugar, then we have 40 years of back and forth to look forward to, and the answer will ultimately be: A little bit is bad, but not bad enough to matter more than how many steps you took today, or how sad or angry you were, or how late you ate dinner.
I don’t think assumption is the correct stance, but a healthy skepticism sounds in order.
Alcohol is clearly capable of long term impairment, the debate seems to be about dose response. Nicotine is more questionable, but clearly leaves long term changes in the mind. People abstaining after long term nicotine usage will spend the rest of their lives experiencing cravings. Hell, it seems plausible long term consumption of food types has long term cognitive effects.
Oh goodness. Thank you for introducing me to Shadow Wolves. It sounds positively dreadful. I want to read it but I don't want to pay for it. Either monetarily or cognitively.
You really really don't though. It's not one of those 'so bad it's good' kind of things where there is some novelty to be had. It's boring. It's written with a 4th grade vocabulary. There's no character development outside shallow tropes. Random right wing conspiracies are mixed in without any grounding in the story. The main character is a cartoon of cartoon of a human in a cartoon world with cartoon side kicks. It's awful in every way a book can be awful. And to top it all off it will literally curse your brain.
Haha. Fair. I've got this morbid curiosity about right wing authoritarian conspiracy fiction. Apparently Ben Shapiro has several novels in the same vein. Genuinely curious... why'd you read it in the first place? Are you part of the worst book club in history or something?
A friend gave it to me for Christmas as a gag gift, and as part of the joke escalation cycle I decided I would read it so I could bring it up sometime later. Bad idea :(
I can confirm, I have known some people who smoked Cannabis basically the whole day long for several years. They lost certain cognitive abilities, e.g. they were not really able to do calculations in their head anymore.
They also got severe problems with their biorhythm by the way.
I stopped cold turkey smoking weed daily after 25 years, i can tell you from personal experience this does not apply to everybody.
It also seems rather strange to take one property of their lives and use it to explain their in your eyes loss of abilities. Not doing something for a long time also has this effect, so perhaps they for many years didnt need to do calculations in their head, or use their high school french and so on.
If you said you knew a twin, and one of them smoked weed daily and they had identical lives, and one of them lost cognitive abilities and the other didnt, i would be more likely to give your reply any credit.
Sounds reasonable. Most adults stop doing many calculations in their head unless they need it at their jobs and thus get worse at it. Same goes for me, btw. And I never smoked weed in my life.
It would be interesting if the people the OP talks about tried to simply retrain their abilities, which I'm sure most adults that are not used to doing these calculations anymore could.
Ok, let me give you some more details. The first guy I knew was a friend when I was studying. He studied Electrotechnical engineering at university level, a highly mathematical study and when he started he was quite good with it.
However at the same time when he started the study he also started using Cannabis a lot more, up to the point that he was smoking all day long.
I used to play games with him like poker and backgammon, both games where you can use both your intuition and your rational brain. Over time he basically gave up trying to calculate or reason things, he just relied on his intuition, which didn't improve his game. At the same time his study results started to crash as well. This all didn't happen at once, it took several years.
The second guy I knew was a guy I met when I was playing backgammon in a café. I tried to explain him some things about the game that involved some very basic probability calculations but he stopped me and told that he had been smoking weed for 20 years and had lost capability to do calculations in his head.
> I tried to explain him some things about the game that involved some very basic probability calculations but he stopped me and told that he had been smoking weed for 20 years and had lost capability to do calculations in his head.
exactly.. great point. I smoke weed for 20+ years and have no issues with it.. i work in IT (cloud tech) and gotta learn lot of things every week. Weed helps to stress less, but i'm sure that if i was unemployed and smoking, it would make lazy dumb idiot that can't remember much.
If someone said they got mental problems from regular alcohol/amphetamine/antidepressants/benzodiazepines consumption nobody would question them.
But when they share a negative experience with cannabis, suddenly a bunch of stoners appear and try to discredit their story! Your friend got schizophrenia from smoking weed? Nah bro, he was already predisposed, and by chance it activated after smoking weed. You have memory problems after years of smoking? Nah, you might be just getting old, we may never know!
Don't be so insecure about your drug habits. Cannabis can be harmful, so what? Billions of people smoke tobacco, drink alcohol, eat sugary treats, all while fully aware that it can be harmful (but it might cause no harm to them!). You smoke cannabis because you enjoy getting stoned, even though it might be harmful. You're an adult who weighed the pros and cons, and came to the conclusion that the risks are acceptable for you.
But please, don't try to discredit other people's experiences!
I merely tried to remind the comment poster of the option that there could easily be other causes for his observations of the people has has known. And i can't see why you would instantly label this is discrediting.
Dear friend of mine, who i used to smoke with developed psychosis. So i know consuming cannabis can have negative effects. Cannabis has many compounds, and many studies show some of them have good properties others maybe bad properties. Some science says they cause mental issues other science and study show the opposite.
Again i just find the 'cant do math in head again' a weird statement or things to directly relate to smoking weed. There are plenty of people i know that have never smoked weed and can't do head math as well as they could when they were in high school.
Anything can be harmful, if you use/eat/drink/smoke it enough. And surely not everybody just smokes weed because they 'like being stoned' as you write. Sure does not count for me.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 432 ms ] threadEmphasis on youth.
Tl;dr clickbait headline, don’t let your kids smoke a lot of pot, if that wasn’t already obvious.
Early use of cannabis was correlated with worse outcomes, but those who started later in life were still associated with deficits in the studies surveyed.
> To conclude, meta-analytical data on the acute effects of cannabis use on neurocognitive function have shown that cannabis intoxication leads to small to moderate deficits in numerous cognitive domains, most notably executive functions, verbal learning and memory and processing speed. These acute impairments are in accordance with the residual effects that have been documented in several meta-analyses suggesting that the detrimental effects of cannabis persist beyond the period of acute intake.
and
> Additionally, as youths remain particularly susceptible to the effects
Are both in their conclusion and paint a more complete tl;dr.
> making decisions,
> suppressing inappropriate responses,
> learning through reading and listening,
> the ability to remember what one reads or hears, and
> the time needed to complete a mental task.
I've no first hand experience here, but I can imagine there being tradeoffs. For example, I think creativity is somewhat negatively correlated with memory. Or, I'm often more productive when I'm tired because it's easier to focus. So going into an altered state of consciousness might still be beneficial or preferred even if it has tradeoffs.
Specifically, cannabis-induced creativity for me, while tons of fun, tends to be very myopic. I focus more on minutiae and more immediately rewarding things like satisfying textures than on a overall composition and development. How appropriate that is for any given creative task and whether it’s worth the downside described in this paper (which are pretty obvious and also very real) are difficult questions if you enjoy it.
Personally, the output of cannabis-induced creativity often ends up being less rewarding for me in the long run.
Other times I find myself in a "stoner revelation" moment, which is not some groundbreaking breakthrough into the underlying fundamentals of how the world works, but instead where I will have something that I know, and is generally well known, but because it's so well known, not something I ever give much thought. The impaired state I'm in will force me to think about it at a more-than surface level, and sometimes those things that I normally take for granted get that surface stripped away and I'll end up with a useful thought. I've definitely had some successful changes to both my personal relationships and work organizational processes that have come about because smoking pot put me in the right state of mind. And, obviously, pot was never a requirement for those thoughts to be possible - they just didn't occur to me in my normal mode of operation.
And, of course, I've had plenty of "stoner revelations" that upon further inspection while sober, were completely stupid.
For example performance on learning through reading could be a local maximum for that function but part of a local minimum for some type of larger scale thinking like creativity or imagination.
On the other hand, I know people also gainfully employed at top companies who code while high and claim to have no issues. Your mileage may vary, I guess. Maybe they’re a lot smarter than me and can afford the slack, or maybe we react to it differently.
All that said, I think it is a good thing to not make anything that affects(increase or decrease) cognitive performance a habit.
No. Especially at bedtime, I want to be cognitively stopped. The fact that the cognitive is keeping me awake even though I'm physically exhausted sucks.
I'm over 40 and have worked crap jobs most of my life. It isn't like my increasing my cognitive abilities being "best" - whatever the heck that actually means - is going to make a huge difference in my life. To tell you the truth, I'm much more worried about cognitive decline as a side effect of MS than I am the effects of getting high.
It isn't like it makes me stupid. I simply think differently and that isn't all bad. Cleaning house and other mundane chores are less bothersome, and my life is full of this mundane crap. It also isn't like being drunk and I can still participate in society (I personally don't drive and just use public transport, sober or not)
Few of the ideas are later dismissed as unrealistic or overly optimistic, but most of the best long term decisions in my life have been 'found' in Inception movie style while high, and expanded later. The perspective is really different, and I literally get a second, different opinion on my life and all the choices/duties.
I've handled tough breakups with this - the emotions were not suppressed or ignored or twisted to get out easily, rather I've got full exposure to all their sides which allowed me to process them remarkably quickly. The result was I got over it all and properly closed things for good in a rather speedy way.
The thing is, that's me - the next person might get a very different effect, sometimes rather negative and not helpful. Drugs don't work uniformly on everybody, even on alcohol some get cozy and some aggressive.
Its not about dumbing down at all - that's alcohol domain. Just shifting mindset to something alternative, in more than one way my mind is expanded. The next morning I am dumbed down, but in 1000x more pleasant manner than after alcohol, rather too-laid-back for some stressful annoying tasks.
smoking sativa strains increase work performance for me and i know a lot of other dev how performing well while smoking cannabis in the office!
- sorry they smoked at the rooftop terrace not in the office
“No. Resistance training is good for me long term.”
Exactly.
For all you know, GP is Einstein and he's working in the patent office, but with no chance of being recognized. Does he really have to be deprived of even one small joy in life so he can be at peak cognitive performance for shuffling patent applications around tomorrow? Who is he supposed to be performing for?
Totally off topic but this sentence of yours perfectly sums up my mental state currently. Being a technologist, I believed tech could solve everything and thing and dedicated my life to it. This was when I was a teenager teaching myself to code 10-12 years ago. Back then tech wasn’t mainstream and geeks weren’t cool.
But now, tech is the new wallstreet and a tsunami of people are hitting its shores every year. I’m not sure what I can bring to the table. I’ve learnt a lot of computer science just for the fun of it. I don’t think I’ll ever use most of that knowledge.
I’m in this weird state where I know how amazing technology can be but at the same time I don’t really have much to contribute to it. Sure, I could set myself up for some big moonshots. But for what? I haven’t found happiness or satisfaction in all this while. I’m not sure if it’ll ever come. I can certainly distract myself with a lot of challenges to keep me from contemplating suicide. Or I could smoke weed. No difference really. No reason to squeeze out all you’ve got just to hit some random performance metrics or criteria.
Sober, I’d be coding and a notification would pop up on my phone, taking great attention away from the work. My child would be crying in the next room over and my brain would be formulating thoughts to discern what the fuss is all about.
My washer is leaking and now I have to set up an appointment for someone to come look at it and due to my busy schedule, I’d have to find time.
Distractions takes away the drive and motivations to code.
On Cannabis, the answers are there in my head and what to do.
Phone notification? Not important, ignore it.
Child crying? She has her mom.
Washer broke? Handle it after work.
Easily said but I think like many on here has stated, any stress reducing solution can make a difference.
Ymmv.
Good lord no, I want my cognitive best to be when I'm getting shit done. When I'm doing non-cognitive tasks I want my cognitive best to get back in its box and shut up for a bit so I can enjoy life without constantly over-analysing everything. I'm certainly in that category, though I suspect something like a meditation practice would probably be more useful as a long-term strategy than having a drink after work.
Some occasional drug use reminds me that my body doesn't exist solely to hurt me, that I can still experience pleasure, and that it's still worth trying to find things I might like/be able to enjoy since many of my previous physical pleasures aren't possible or are less enjoyable than they used to be. Without them, my physical existence is only pain, and that's depressing. Being depressed is way worse on my cognitive abilities than doing drugs once in a while.
This is true for most people who use regularly: The drugs are a harm-reduction measure. If weed fucks you up (-10 cognitive ability) but also gets rid of your anxiety (-20 cognitive ability), it's still a net win.
I sometimes feel I code better when I'm slightly mentally impaired, because my mind stops getting in the way of getting things done and over analyzing problems.
But then I'm very rarely mentally impaired, as I normally neither drink nor consume cannabis or anything like that, so idk.
EDIT: Oh, just realized the answer is probably simple => less stress.
"I code better when I'm high" is something that can only be judged by those around you. If somebody else judges your code to be better, fine. But your self assessment is fundamentally flawed.
Doing a bit of inebriated coding that you verify later might be just fine. I'm almost certain that the resulting code won't be better, but there may be situations where a clear head would have produced no code at all due to mental blocks.
Debugging while inebriated is another thing altogether, that's no fun at all.
If those drunk drivers had to constantly re-live and review telemetry data for their trips they would change their tune?
There are things that make you faster, caffeine, prescription meds, Red Bull, blow, fast paced techno.
And things that make you slower, green tea, marry Jane, booze, different prescription meds, brainfm, chill beats.
I’m beginning to find slower and quieter is better for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIklKPzND20
Speaking of Californians Speaking:
Q: How many Northern Californians does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Hella!!!
Q: How many Southern Californians does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Totally!!!
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6492j904
http://people.duke.edu/~eec10/hellanorcal.pdf
Hella Nor Cal or Totally So Cal?: The Perceptual Dialectology of California
Mary Bucholtz, Nancy Bermudez, Victor Fung, Lisa Edwards and Rosalva Vargas. Journal of English Linguistics 2007; 35; 325. DOI: 10.1177/0075424207307780
>Abstract
>This study provides the first detailed account of perceptual dialectology within California (as well as one of the first accounts of perceptual dialectology within any single state). Quantitative analysis of a map-labeling task carried out in Southern California reveals that California’s most salient linguistic boundary is between the northern and southern regions of the state. Whereas studies of the perceptual dialectology of the United States as a whole have focused almost exclusively on regional dialect differences, respondents associated particular regions of California less with distinctive dialects than with differences in language (English versus Spanish), slang use, and social groups. The diverse socio linguistic situation of California is reflected in the emphasis both on highly salient social groups thought to be stereotypical of California by residents and nonresidents alike (e.g., surfers) and on groups that, though prominent in the cultural landscape of the state, remain largely unrecognized by outsiders (e.g., hicks).
Extra credit question:
Can you locate the isogloss designating the "101" / "The 101" line?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isogloss
I typed this in jest but instead of closing the tab I realize that yes, this is a good alternative, perhaps the best, if you can do it. Not everyone can, and typically it’s not their fault if they can’t.
Go to bed/wake up at the same time everyday: might be easy
Learn to cook: might sound more difficult, learn to make 3-4 healthy but easy "cant go wrong" dishes (pulled chicken and broccoli eg.) You'll love eating your own food soon enough.
Exercise: hardest for me as I hate exercise. No silver bullets, just gotta stick with it.
What that is will be different for different people: if you're a social person, you might try dancing(think salsa or other pair dances), or if you're the competitive kind, try some competitive sport that doesn't rely solely on physical fitness: anything where technique is as or more important as physical form will help you forget you're exercising and just focus on having fun/winning the game.
The perfect exercise is the one where you don't realize you've been exercising until you stop and smell the sweat!
It is though isn't it?
[Insert free will debate here]
For some of us, the way to deal with numbing stuff means changing our lives so there is less numbing needed.
Marijuana alters your state of consciousness. It enhances certain senses (taste being famous) but also allows for socializing and empathy. As a person who’s extremely narcissistic, it has helped me gain a lot of empathy by allowing me to “step aside” and observe my actions and those of others around me. And if you’re high with your partner, you can have a very fulfilling bonding experience (emotionally as well as sexually).
The only thing I’ve experienced come close is meditation. But that takes a lot of time and effort.
but it's because alcohol and weed give me panic attacks, and interact with my meds. my body is slowly degenerating so I'm in constant pain and my exercise routine consists of rehab.
I feel like the pain and constant mental strife is aging me faster than weed would. heck, it'd be medical in my case.
To tell you the truth, I'm more likely to exercise and eat healthily if I'm stoned.
Taking a walk while stoned is pretty wonderful, and more taxing exercise aren't as bothersome. I think this is why pot is popular among some bodybuilders: Get stoned, lift weights and enjoy life. (I worked with a competitive bodybuilder, and this routine was pretty popular with non-steroid users). Food tastes really good while stoned, too, and this includes healthy stuff.
In my experience, the main reason to not eat healthy or exercise is because doing those things takes time, easily a LOT of time (e.g. cooking and cleanup easily account for 2-3 extra hrs/day and the numbers are similar for exercise [both active (dedicating time to it) and passive (walking around everywhere)]).
In the same vein, use of psychoactive substances is probably also a tradeoff between taking time to properly conduct mental maintenance v.s. a quick and dirty solution.
The cooking itself is not difficult, but you have surrounding activities that take significant time like prep, cleanup (dishes, cookware, table etc.), and extra time for grocery shopping (want fresh vegetables? you're probably going to have to shop every 3 days if not everyday. want diverse meals, you're going to need to spend time planning)
I have timed myself and the extra time cost here is definitely significant. I still cook my own meals because I think the trade off is worth it but I'm completely aware how much time (even the "invisible" time) I'm investing to do that.
> You can also just meal prep and cook for a whole week in lne session.
There's several points here: 1) prepping ahead of time doesn't suddenly make it cost no time... you're just shifting the time (likely into weekends, where a lot of people would probably want to spend that time doing other things!) and 2) pre-prepping means you either limit what type of food you can have (decreasing in quality the further it is from prep day) or it means you need to freeze, seal or can stuff, which negates a lot of the health benefits to begin with, potentially produces waste (sealing) and costs extra time!
Instead they waste the time that would've made them healthier and happier on bullshit.
If one has sorrows that need drowning, then the first step should be dealing with those issues and seek help if needed -- not trying cliché things that sound like they came from some mindfulness channel on Youtube.
God, I can't hear that stupid saying anymore. Tell that the MD of a psychiatric hospital. He will have a good laugh.
Keep in mind that a psychiatric hospital is working on actual psychiatric disorders, i.e. super serious medical problems (where your brain is rewired in "interesting" new ways, possibly forever). We're not discussing about a psychologist here, who's working on what are comparatively mild conditions.
My friends who are addicts (those that have survived) are using serious drugs and most of them have complex issues to deal with.
But lighter drugs, whether analgesics or pot/alcohol aren’t of any use for serious illness. And those kinds of drugs are the ones under discussion.
I’ll take a hike in some beautiful nature anyday over depressing night in smoking weed. You have no idea how positive an effect being outside in nature has on you.
The differences between us is what makes life worth living.
Your outlook has you on a bad road mon ami.
How do you think I’ve never been outside in similar nature? The reality is I’ve experienced both countless times so I literally do know exactly how much of an effect that has while the same can’t be said vice versa. I’ve been to many national parks, forests, beaches, campgrounds, ski resorts, mountains all over the western US for decades. Yes it’s more wholesome and serene, but it’s sadly not a comparison for the sheer euphoria experienced imbibing recreational drugs in a variety of social settings. Why do you think EDC, Woodstock, and other major concerts are so huge?
And while I tend to not imbibe much of anything while out in nature - largely because I'm already clumsy enough - I also know hikers, including thru-hikers, who smoke every night on the trail, and talk about how wonderful that experience is. Not so much on the drinking side of things, for the thru-hikers, but I expect that is more about weight than anything.
Obviously, everything we do has some sort of impact on our bodies, and I suppose you can make an argument about the objective relative health impact of any of them.
But to try and argue that someone's subjective experience is an objectively worse one? That's silly. People can enjoy different things than you, and that doesn't make them "depressing"
It isn't like being outside is lost on folks smoking weed. Do you have any clue how much smoking takes place while camping, on nature walks, in rustic cabins, and so on? You just do it sober.
You're inserting your own disdain for weed here. That's fine if you don't like it, but it's not like he gave any of the gory details for you to actually make this assumption. If you said "I love eating salmon" it would be poor form for me to say "Your description of your eating habits sound horrible".
I do jest only somewhat. As a personal anecdote I find sparing to be a tremendously positive tool to get my mind off of work and daily troubles.
I would say probably the safest sport, and my current favorite, is Olympic weightlifting, although climbing is in many ways similar to jiu-jitsu, and much safer.
I’ve been finding it interesting how many more communities Ive found that abstain from alcohol and all the white powder drugs, but are cool with all psychadelics (with more than a few people only liking thc and shrooms because theyre “naturally occurring” compared to molecules “made in a lab”).
I wasnt looking for these communities but its predictable now.
I see the merit in it. I just drink other places.
But it does make me wonder if I will be a person that declines a drink and confuses someone’s entire worldview who expects an explanation or tries to push a drink on me. So far with active groups this big and easy to find it just seems like its not hard to go a long time without a drink without needing to consciously try.
(also I endorse sibling's comment of exercise + healthy diet)
Fitter, healthier and more productive
A pig
In a cage
On antibiotics
… by realizing there’s no way to zero risks and that trying to do so leads to a life perhaps not worth living
Who cares if a drink isn’t risk free or a joint makes your a little slower, live a little.
Healthy habits
Emotional growth
Challenging hobbies
Fulfilling romances
Exercise and using your body
Seeing yourself as a whole, not "othering" others
Making time for family
Telling those you love, that you love them
Spiritual practices
Getting lost in a book
Learning to cook
Volunteering and activism
etc,etc
You know, everything that's wonderful about life before capitalism, or at least the most popular implementations of it, told us we don't have time for such things anymore, that both partners need to work 40+ hours a week each, and we've been finding shortcuts to fulfillment and stress relief since. Worse, the status quo has co-opted a lot of good things and turned them into tools for further capitalist oppression. See "learn meditation to be a better employee to help with stress" narratives pushed at so many companies instead of narratives about "why is our work so stressful and what can we do about it?"
I feel like I can't talk to a coder before the conversation turns into "So what drugs are you abusing to remain competitive in the workplace?" We're in such a sea of workplace oppression, its practically water fish swim in, and its often difficult to point and say "Look, the abuses of low-regulatory capitalism is the water here, do you see it?" Instead we just go back to talking about doubling up on ADHD medicine, microdosing exotic chemicals, getting high to 'get by,' low-key drinking problems, caffeine usage thats out of control, etc.
This stuff, if not real, would be unbelievable in a dystopian sci-fi novel just a couple decades ago, but here we are. We're becoming Mentats from Dune addicted to sapho juice to please our paymasters.
I'll bounce back but man does it suck going through the repair process. Nothing is enjoyable, life just feels dull and flat, and it's hard to get anything done.
A bit like using painkillers to avoid having knee surgery. A crutch, not a solution.
Knew r/trees but didn't know r/leaves.
Thanks.
They also reported the "bounce backs" as you do, but those were never permanent.
You have no reason to take this advice from someone random on the Internet, but I strongly recommend that you get yourself evaluated for depression or something related.
Hard disagree. Cannabis isn’t actually an anti-depressant in the same way that alcohol and other euphoric drugs aren’t antidepressants. Chronic cannabis use has also been correlated with increased depression scores over time.
But that’s beside the point: Cannabis withdrawal and rebound is a very real phenomenon. It’s another myth that you can’t get addicted to THC or that it’s okay because it’s not a “physical” addiction. The withdrawal effects described above are consistent with cannabis withdrawal syndrome and are well documented.
There are many caveats that go into posting a Google Scholar link - the quality of the research is unknown, there is the reproducibility crisis to worry about, etc. etc; However, the presence of this ample research means that "Cannabis isn't actually an anti-depressant" is far from settled, and you shouldn't be stating that with such confidence.
Edit: Also, I happen to agree with you that cannabis withdrawal and rebound are real, and I agree with you that it is possible to get addicted to THC, and, sure the effects described above are consistent with cannabis withdrawal. None of that contradicts what I wrote.
However, those effects are also consistent with anti-depressant self-medication, and, as I mentioned, I've known people who went on prescribed anti-depressants, stopped having those effects and have had a marked improvement in their quality of life. (Some continued using cannabis, some stopped; it didn't seem to matter afterwards). I thought it was important to share that anecdata. I was very careful in my message to not say "you don't have cannabis withdrawal"; I was trying to communicate that I knew people that sounded like basq and it turned out they were diagnosed with clinical depression. Basq could have either outcome.
So, yea, sorry - hard disagree with your level of confidence.
Your link doesn’t even begin to support your claims.
"Antidepressant-like effect of Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol and other cannabinoids isolated from Cannabis sativa L."
And yes, the majority of the claims are that CBD is the anti-depressant; self-administration of CBD comes primarily from smoking/vaping/ingesting cannabis, so I don't even understand what "cannabidiol, not cannabis" means.
I don't really get the impression that you are arguing in good faith here, especially the "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." part of HN guidelines, so I'm just gonna drop this thread now.
As someone diagnosed with depression long before ever partaking in cannabis, this doesn’t surprise me at all. People with depression seek relief, and cannabis can provide that to an extent.
Anecdata, but for big smokers they'll notice more cognitive decline for a couple of months if they quit abruptly.
Alcohol is even worse for teenager cognitive abilities, I don't believe weed is as harmful that it would produce as much neuronal damage.
Taking drugs doesn't affect anyone else. Getting cancer doesn't affect anyone else. Receiving cancer treatment doesn't affect anyone else. Using public funds to pay for that cancer treatment, that affects other people.
Those things should not be conflated, or treated as identical.
You are smudging cancer and substance abuse together but in many cases complete abstinence in an individual due to awareness of a pre existing familial susceptibility can help that person to never become addicted because they are aware of the danger and biological weakness in themselves. 12 step programs etc can help people abstain if they become addicted although it is a huge and heroic struggle back to the surface.
Sadly this is not the case with cancer.
Every single person who end up in EC/ER due to drugs/alcohol/jumping off roofs, are a drain on society. Yes it great that we can fix those people up when they hurt themselves, but where is the line when people get reckless etc? Someone is paying to get your broken leg fixed. We all need to acknowledge that and appreciate one another. Every hour that I work, someone in my country gets fed by a government grant, all I ask is that the person take care of themselves and not waste my money.
Having rights to one's own physical body has nothing to do with America.
If we don't have ultimate physical control over our own physical body, to do with it as we please, we can't really be said to have any meaningful rights at all. All other basic rights as an existing entity stem from the fact that we are ourselves, and others are not.
It's absolutely not individualism to say that every adult human being should have unrestricted rights over their own person-as-object, to enrich or damage as one sees fit. That seems plain as day to me. How can you even have the concept of a society of people if the societal group claims ownership rights over the bodies of the people that supersede those of the people themselves?
(If you think society shouldn't be spending money to repair damage caused by individual choices because it's unfair, we're in agreement there, but your broken leg case is a bad example, because you end up illustrating a point which I don't think you meant to make: that healthcare costs, something extremely variable based on individual choices, probably shouldn't be borne by society as a whole but by individuals themselves.)
Uh... how can you have the concept of a body of cells if the body claims ownership over the entirety of each one of it's cells?
Did you stub your toe? Well it's not actually, your toe, it's an independent living organism, and you need to respect it's God given right to run into hard objects every now and then.
Really though, I think if you explore the wide variety of human cultures that have existed over time, you'll find that historically speaking, the default level of organization has been the tribe, not the individual. Indeed, individualism as we know it is only possible in highly organized societies, with super-powerful governments that create a monetary system, common language, infrastructure, legal and judicial system to enforce contracts, and other things that enable one to live "independently" like Ebenezer Scrooge.
For a right-wing take on this, please see "The Rational Optimist" by Matt Ridley. If you prefer a more moderate view, I recommend "Better Angels of our Nature" by Steven Pinker. Finally, the book "Debt, the first 5000 years" by David Graeber touches on more than a few of these topics.
Granted, I may be misunderstanding your argument, so please clarify if this is the case. :)
First off, medications used to treat medical disorders aren't a crutch. Knock that off.
Second, this simply isn't true. "If it works well, it must be destructive" is the sort of zero-sum folk wisdom nonsense you find in backwaters. Stick to the facts.
Any thread about commonly used psychoactive drugs brings out all of these thinly-veiled attempts at moralization over others. :(
> My concern with modern (incredibly strong) Cannabis/THC is that some regular users seem to struggle with withdrawal if they don't smoke their bowls regularly, run short on weed etc.
That said, this is a very legitimate concern I have as well. It doesn't help that a lot of stoners seem like they're in denial over the fact that they gasp have a dependence on this substance like an alcoholic or smoker does.
> Scientists postulate that this syndrome [Alcohol Withdrawal] represents the hyperactivity of neural adaptive mechanisms no longer balanced by the inhibitory effects of alcohol
> Increased NMDA receptor activity significantly increases the amount of calcium that enters nerve cells. Although calcium is essential for nerve cell function, an excess of this substance within neurons has been reported to produce cell toxicity or death
https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh21-2/144.pdf
I've quit cold turkey multiple times for a variety of reasons, sometimes for 6+ months at a time. I've never noticed any withdrawal symptoms, thankfully. Or cravings on days/weekends/whatever where I don't smoke.
It's anecdotal experience, obviously, but it leads me to believe that there's not some near-universal withdrawal process that pot smokers go through that you would see with someone who is going through opiate withdrawal or similar.
If you're enjoying and it just becomes a (not super healthy-but not my point here) everyday habit, sure, you probably won't have withdrawal symptoms.
If you're using something to get away from some reality in life that is too unbearable, and that unbearable thing is still a matter when you want to quit, then it'll be hard. But it's not actually the substance (excluding hard/chemically super addicting class of substances like heroin or sugar) but the fact of facing the problems.
Overall this makes sense to me as an individually who personally enjoys it. The whole point of getting high is to be impaired (for me). So it's not really telling me anything new. Like drinking, I can't expect myself to be 100% functioning the next day so plan accordingly.
The question is how long is that persistence and how much does it affect? Permanent? Doesn't really seem to be answered in a way that I was hoping.
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/downloadSupplement?do...
Funnily enough I started to deal with ADD/ADHD in my family recently and learned from the doctor that this kind of behavior is symptomatic in adults.
Recently doc even shared this with me: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32489193/
Not directing this at you particularly but starting treatment helped with my family life so hoping it can nudge someone to their own benefit.
Like the parent, I don't find the reported results especially surprising - the part that would have been most interesting would have been how long after intoxication the observed effects last. Also, unfortunately, it's also clear that not everyone is as prudent with their cannabis consume as them, taking their performance even on the day after into account. I respect that sense of responsibility.
The health benefits of the social contact almost certainly outweigh the negative health impacts of a tiny amount of alcohol.
Thomas Szasz has some books about drug history and the paths that turns a substance from legal to illegal. It only takes a high level guy to find the usage, made up some "facts", and illegalize it. Sadly, society is quick to buy those lies. E.g. someone claimed that some guys on LSD stared the sun for too long and got blind. It was a hoax, but so many media repeated the story that it got ingrained in the society that LSD is highly dangerous.
These are the people who claim "psychs" killed Kurt Cobain
Examples: The virus "wants" to infect more people so it can spread. This article was written by a "professional" writer. Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin.
__Stress is most likely super linear__
Not a doctor, but from what I know, the biggest negative effects of alcohol occur with binge drinking. From a logical perspective it makes sense that the negative effects are super linear, because that is the case with many forms of stress. When it comes to stress, there is always some threshhold value that you need to reach. When it is just over that threshhold value, you hurt, but you hurt a lot more if you reach 1.5threshhold value because there is 0.5threshhold value to wreak full havoc on your body while 1*threshhold value is being occupied with your body. Obviously, this way of thinking is simplified, but I think that's the intuition as to why many (but not all) forms of stress are super linear.
__Effects of alcohol in small and large quantities__
I think I've learned this particular fact about alcohol in my psych classes though, I can't fully remember so I can't cite sources (!). Another thing that I have learned is that alcohol is an upper at low quantities (1 to 2 standard glasses of beer), it gets your heart rate up, etc. It is a downer at larger quantities (e.g. drunk people at 10 standard glasses of beer). If you don't drink much alcohol, then you are most likely experiencing it as an upper, it doesn't continue that way.
I like to drink 1 to 2 glasses as well because of what you said, but also because it's an upper. When I was in my drug experimentation phase a few years ago, I've noticed I like uppers more.
__How to create upper effects without alcohol__
You don't have to drink alcohol to create an upper effect, when you go to a party, try this the next time: exercise beforehand, like a 3 to 6 mile run (if you have the stamina for that otherwise build it up). That will also produce a mild upper effect like alcohol. Another trick you can do is to present yourself as a hugger at the party (well maybe not with corona) and hug everyone you meet, that will also produce an upper effect. Also, dancing at parties will produce an upper effect (any aerobic exercise really).
My workshop on partying is open again in the summer, applications are open :P I guess I miss that time of my life. Partying sober is something to get used to, but it's possible (before I started experimenting with drugs, I started experimenting with partying sober, I've seen both sides).
This advice is not very productive for people who drink because they have social anxiety at parties though :-)
> I like to drink 1 to 2 glasses as well because of what you said, but also because it's an upper.
This part of your comment reminded me of a very relevant and topical sketch from That Mitchell & Webb Look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTSCppeFzX4
More importantly, it's definitely not the case that that organization is real, it's merely fiction. And I definitely am not trying to thwart it by inticing people to drink one to TWO glasses.
However, if it were to be real, then one could say that my plan might be diabolical indeed.
It's OK everyone. You don't have to endlessly add superlatives to your ideas to make them sound more exciting. Just say linear. It's SUPER effective!
super = above
supra = under
I looked for a source, here it is: https://grammarist.com/words/super-vs-supra/
Normally people say exponential, but I think that's a silly term as it is quite a specific term since it means that the exponent is a variable (e.g. 2^x, 3^x, for every n, so n^x). For example, x^2 is super linear, but it isn't exponential. Yet, I'm fairly sure that I've heard people say that something is "exploding exponentially" but what they meant is that it's super linear since they got the faintest clue how much faster their projections are going compared to a linear projection.
Unfortunately, a lot of research is focused on children and and not a lot of things are being tested (due to safety of children research I presume), however this start to change and more adult-based reasearch is being made. While there is no golden bullet most of the proposed changes are non-intrusive.
What we're doing is changing our diet foremost. More Omega-3 acids, shifting toward protein diet and supplementing magnesium and vitamin D. We put a bowl with a lot of nuts (and small bits of chocolate) and it's disappearing astoundingly fast (we were eating nuts before, but by making it more accessible it's just "the stack" and because there are like 8 varietes in the bowls + chocolate chips no one complains about it being bland). ADD/ADHD has a lot of comorbidity with gut issues, so fibre is important too.
And there is more and more and more. Making sure that physical activity is present (as it's great dopamine booster), keeping track of sleep patterns (sleep deprivation is common as many ADD/ADHD are light sleepers), recognizing activities with hypnosis like effects, so to not get too drawn in and so on.
But in the end there's a lot of knowledge that is power itself. ADD/ADHD has ~70% (lately I heard 76% figure from one doctor) transmissibility, and thus being able to work with it better makes for better family life and parenthood. Family member had a burst of anger this year during Christmas like pretty much every year prior. Few years back? Everyone were scared of escalation and sat in silence for 2 days. This year - everyone shrugged it off as a brain explosion and we went on with holiday celebrations.
I would really recommend getting tested if you just as suspect that you or those close to you might be affected by ADHD. ADD/ADHD in adults (and women!) is somewhat new discipline so it might be hard to check oneself out (especially since in some countries it's trivialized by general practitioners as a simple gateway towards stimulants). Worst case you spend some money but the best case you get a portal to a wealth of self knowledge.
Perhaps, addictive is not the right word. But it seems to me (purely from a human nature perspective) its similar to obesity (Eating food is not "addictive", but there is a definite element of "craving" and inability to overcome that craving).
All in all, such substances are not natural and, with unchecked use, might put a whole society in danger. This is the reason I am ambivalent about the whole movement to legalize it.
Also, from the things we surround ourselves with. It's probably the most natural.
Or maybe my drug-addled brain is just seeing pink elephants everywhere ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sure, there are biological inventions we can copy and refine for possibly even better inventions - but those are useful not because they originated from nature but because evolution found a locally optimal solution to a problem.
Your comment reads to me as if the concept of logical fallacies is only useful or valid within the framework of rhetorical competitions – or alternatively that logically invalid reasoning is useful if you're only interested in making a decision, rather than making a correct or well-informed one.
“It grows from the earth”
Yeah so does hemlock.
I don't find it far-fetched to assume that an affinity to fire was selected for over the last millennia. Why, we even have a mutation that makes us less susceptible to carcinogens in smoke compared to other mammals. That would make smoking, and smoking indoors, an activity that replaces the open fires we're accustomed to.
Standard disclaimer for evolutionary theories: They are ill-suited to determine social policy.
In other words, it is a dishonest strategem which relies on the other party making the logical fallacy that the natural state of affairs must be good, or that a burden of proof lies with them, instead of recognizing this as the sleight-of-hand that it is.
So I think GP was just being polite by calling it a logical fallacy :)
But they are natural, aren't they? No less natural than the watermelon we are all eating (it might be cultivated), and I don't see anyone wanting to criminalize eating watermelon. Weed, tobacco, alcohol, coca leaves, poppy, they are all natural.
Also, even if it's natural, it has nothing to do with its dangerousness, so I don't follow your argument.
With regards to legalizing it, I'm on the side that if alcohol and tobacco are legal, weed should be legal, too. They are all bad for you in some sense, but we need to balance that with freedom and individual choice, and to me, they are pretty similar.
https://news.berkeley.edu/2014/07/01/drunken-monkeys-and-our...
A staple food is something that makes up a dominant portion of one's diet; it's beyond a mere common or everyday food.
I would certainly agree with you that alcohol is not a very safe choice for a staple food!Well Sapiens likely consumed naturally fermented fruits even 200.000 years ago, after all we evolved to produce certain enzymes to digest ethanol.
Alcohol have shaped human cultures for thousand years, hardly unnatural.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/alcohol-...
By what you say, if whole of humanity consumed only naturally fermented fruit, I would half-heartedly agree.
Humans also don't "naturally" need to be writing fictions, or draw pictures or make movies. And conversely, murder is pretty natural - take a look at how often it happens in nature!
Whether something is "natural" or not is a bit irrelevant - the big question is whether the action should be acceptable for humans to do. Drinking alcohol affects the person drinking it, but it gives them some comfort, or happiness. As long as they don't drink so much that it harms another person, i say they can do what they wish!
Same with pot and other recreational drugs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_beer
Alcohol and tobacco are extremely dangerous and detrimental to any society.
What blows my mind is young teens, barely out of education, harping and celebrating the ability to drink. To me, that's insane. Why does a young person need to drink alcohol? When studies after studies have show how it affects human life in general. From health issue to societal problems to relationship issues.
In my view, alcohol should be shunned and should never be glorified.
When you bombard a child with images, videos, movies and acts of drinking day in and day out, you normalize it. And that is terrible.
I think there is a cultural aspect. As a kid in Italy (>10yo), it was "ok" to have a glass of something like beer+sprite or wine+sprite during a meal. Maybe 1-2% of alcohol, it was cool and would obviously not get you drunk nor tipsy.
Having a glass of wine during a family meal, or a beer with your pizza with friends, was likewise pretty common and done mostly because of basic gastronomic pleasure.
This is _very far_ from the binge drinking/getting wasted culture which has been prevalent in the anglosphere for a while, and that has sadly expanded to a large part of the world since.
It's not drinking that should be shunned, but getting drunk.
Getting drunk though, used to be very not appreciated and shameful. Actually it is not very "macho" to be drunk because then you look vulnerable; out of control. The contrary of the cultural form of macho. This goes to the point that there used to be a thing where people who got drunk knew they should either quietly leave or just be very quiet. Hell even I still follow that. The downside of that is that alcoholism in Portugal is a very private matter and often not properly treated. Families break apart, but nobody from the outside sees it. When drunk, leave or shut up.
One thing I have a bit of a difficulty in Poland is that generally people have a very fast drinking rhythm that I know will lead me to drunkenness pretty fast and i come out as a wuss or not a jolly guy, because I reject such rhythm. On the other hand people look at me sideways when if I drink regularly a glass of wine or beer at meals. One of the things that got me a bit sad was losing the ability to drink a beer(20-0.33cl) beer at work break lunch as this is illegal here and very frowned upon. Another thing is the drinking and driving. In Portugal and quite a lot of countries in Europe(Germany for example) the blood-alcohol limit is 0.5, which allows for a single glass of wine or a 20cl beer, but in Poland it is 0.2 which means one is effectively banned from drinking at all if driving. Truth be told I believe the 0 drink and driving is the way to go. I know of too many situations where people start with good intentions and get carried away. Nowadays when i go to Portugal I feel be guilty if i even touch a drink at a meal and drive afterwards(very common due to the restaurant culture).
In Portugal, nowadays there is a normalization of the drunkenness in younger people as a way to signal one is having fun, but it feels an imported thing. Binge drinking is also on the rise, with day to day drinking falling.
People will use it legal or not. If it’s legal you can charge taxes and spend that money on addiction prevention and treatment. Help people with addiction problems instead of putting them in jail.
Addiction is often a symptom of underlying mental health problems, you don’t solve those with punishment.
And that’s even disregarding the amount of crime and violence illegality creates.
Time and again I see so many stories of young people fucking up their lives, and wasting so much of their lives trying to correct mistakes. Something which should have been guided by elders and well-wishers. But US society is neck deep into "individuality" at their own detriment.
A society that is taught from day one to be "independent" will discover that generations after generations will keep making the same mistakes. Same debt traps, same drug problems, same unhealthy choices.
It sounds like you've identified the thing that should be illegal. Unfettered capitalisation on any product that can harm the population is generally a terrible idea, and the product frequently has nothing to do with it.
I do agree though that general change is needed.
Imo it comes down to education on drugs, facilitating safe use, and treatment of mental health issues and addiction.
"Don't do it, but if you do; do it as safe as possible. If you get into trouble; get help." is imo the only sensible drug strategy.
It's one thing to say "drugs are bad mkay" another to actually explain what the risks are and just provide basic practical tips on how you can reduce risk if you do take drugs.
Things like not using too much of anything at once, getting drugs tested, making sure you do it in a safe environment, not mixing drugs, clean needles (although really don't do those types of drugs), etc etc.
Also make sure people know the difference between weed and for example heroin, meth and fentanyl. Not all drugs are equal, weed is relatively harmless.
Lastly testing; It should be facilitated. Here it's quite common to get your pills and powders tested. It's free and facilitated. It saves lives as you make sure people don't OD on pills that contain fentanyl instead of whatever the user expected it to be. Same for legal weed btw, I believe in the US the quality is much better because of legalization. These things work, they literally save lives.
You can prevent so much pain and suffering by simply accepting the fact that people will use drugs and adjust your policies based on that fact.
Maybe where you live...
I've had them under control for a while now, but the emotional eating is a struggle sometimes. I need to trick myself into not doing it.
For weed it's less of a struggle because I genuinely notice the "persistent" effects (no more than a few days in me), which effect my mental performance and emotional state.
Also, after quitting the binge I had withdrawal (I'm told for weed it's very mild, but it's horrendous nonetheless). More details to this in this video https://youtu.be/7u_cm5b1s7Y
I now smoke weed when I plan/want to for fun, and it's very occasionally...
The most horrific withdrawal ensues (at least for me).
I'm not a big coffee drinker (and usually mix it with decaf, because too much makes me feel weird). So I'd probably be okay on that front.
How much coffee do you drink daily? I drink maybe one cup, and that's mostly for the taste (hence the decaf).
The withdrawal journey that is published in the lying internet is not true (at least for me).
I get all sorts of diffuse pain in the legs and lower back area. Not to speak of the killing headache and depressed mood.
I drink coffee up to 2130. And I sleep like a baby from 0000.
Occasionally you'll hear people talk about quitting this way with zero withdrawal. They may or may not be telling the truth. But I suppose outliers always exist. Definitely not the norm though.
Yeah, because of the withdrawal. They could function fine without it, once they got past the withdrawal.Of course, there's really no need to suffer painful withdrawal. It's pretty easy (at least physically) to just taper it down to 0mg per day over the course of ~5-7 days.
For my part I tend to get maybe 200mg or so a day.
Now I'm retired. I drink one strong coffee in the morning, with occassionally a shot later, on te rare occassions when I pass my fave coffee shop.
None of these changes required any effort, or even any intention; they just happened. There were never withdrawal symptoms. By comparison, I have withdrawn from both alcohol and nicotine; nicotine calls loudly, but alcohol withdrawal is really horrible (and dangerous).
So you mean that if, for example, over 50% of the population was using a known mind-altering drug, society might go to shit?
Do prescription psychiatry medicines count?
You might want to take a look at what % of the western world has such a prescription. Between opiods, amphetamine, and anti-depressants, I think the US passed the 50% mark some time ago.
But why is it that the worlds richest country need to keep 50% of its population on drugs?
That is a societal flaw, and worryingly a self sustaining one at that.
I also attribute it to the hyper-velocity lifestyles, lack of stable marriages, excessive consumption of media in general and social media in particular. And most importantly, a materialistic point of view where the whole purpose of life is for pleasure, partying and enjoyment.
I bet people blamed excessive reading of books, or “a materialistic point of view” during the Romans, the Middle Ages… modernity… hey, who coined the phrase “o tempora! O mores!”
100% of humans on earth are on drugs. Everything we consume is mind-altering. Sugars are just as addictive as drugs if not moreso. This is not an exaggeration, it's a change in perspective; wrestling back control of our subjective experiences from those who would outlaw what they don't understand (or for more nefarious reasons...). We have to start looking at food especially food consumed for non nutritive purposes in this new lens too. Heck even singing and dancing have been used the world over to illicit an altered state.
We also need to stop pining for a perfect self that is drug free. What does one gain by keeping oneself "pure"? It's not even possible but many limit the scope of what they consider mind-altering until the goal post matches their current state.
Once you accept that and embrace the idea that our minds are simply faucets of sensory experience that we subconsciously keep at a slow trickle of manageable info, you can start enjoying the turning of the spigot. You can start to appreciate the different subjective experiences that all things provide.
As an added bonus, we can all collectively change our tendency to look down upon those who've used and this energy can integrate others and prevent abuse. You don't have to look hard to find stories of reduced or eliminated drug enforcement bettering society.
The fact that this research starts by calling it "impairment" tells you that they have come prepared with their rose-tinted glasses. I don't want to belittle their work but I fear they've already aligned themselves with the classic anti-drug ethos.
You mean like caffeine? (Or chocolate? Or even refined sugar?)
I have adhs and I see my weed more like glasses.
Ever thought about that not every brain model/mode is as balanced as the other?
If I can't sleep properly for years, I get depressed. And yes of course I tried everything.
Anyway, the need for intoxicating itself seems to arise in more animals that have high developed cognitive abilities, Dolphins get high on passing around poisonous fishes, monkeys rub centipedes over their body and there are many more examples.
Mushrooms, smoking, fermented fruits and grains have been part of human lives for hundreds of thousands of years.
It seems that animals with high cognitive abilities feel the need to turn it off at times.
Addiction isn't about willpower so much as psychopathology and genetics. It's a coping mechanism.
> getting used to a serene state of mind is [...] kind of counter productive
What is suspect about serenity? Is religion equally problematic as a source? How is it counterproductive?
> such substances are not natural and
A naturalist argument is usually invalid. We can't expand upon the rules of the universe. Plastics are just as natural as anything else. Cannabis also doesn't induce any foreign states in our brains.
Even using the narrow definition of "can't be found in the wild": cannabis is a plant, so it very much does exist in the wild. So do alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, psilocybin ("magic mushrooms") or ergotamine (LSD).
When applied to brain chemistry: to my knowledge, drugs don't do novel things to our brains. They promote infrequent states, but that doesn't make them unnatural. Especially not if you consider how alien dream states, meditative and transcendental experiences feel.
> with unchecked use, might put a whole society in danger
Adding a slippery slope to it doesn't improve your line of reasoning. It does tend to whip the masses into a frenzy, like its cousins "Won't somebody think of the children" and "Why should we help those who won't help themselves?".
It also doesn't conform to reality. Have California or Colorado collapsed because weed was legalised? Have the Netherlands?
> I am ambivalent about the whole movement to legalize it
Decriminalisation seems obvious to me as a solution, if coupled with a sorely needed investment in mental healthcare (across the West). The latter is necessary regardless of how we consider drugs - see homelessness, domestic violence, suicide, burnouts, etc. Decriminalisation works (cf Portugal's results), dries up income sources for the cartels, allows quality controls to be put in place, reduces stigmatisation for users, lowers the threshold for seeking therapy, keeps people out of prison for victimless crimes, creates a revenue source for the government through sales and other taxes...
The alternative to decriminalisation is telling the population "we know best". Looking at the so-called war on drugs globally, it's also an endeavour that's bound to fail, strengthen drug cartels, escalate violence and cause more damage than it prevents.
Also, unlike other addictions, you get bombarded with billboards and television ads for the thing you're trying to moderate.
For them, drugs are a must because otherwise they will grow up without any spiritual life at all.
For cognitive benefits or "virtuous pot smoking", I need to have exercise, sleep, right intentions, a clean room and music. If I do it right, I have transformational ideas. If I don't write them down, they are gone.
The first hour is often a wash. I expect little. I often combine with coffee. Then, after an hour, I can work for 6 hours with true inspiration. It makes me care so much. Music is key. It's basically a spiritual work experience. Less is more-- if I smoke too much or too often (3+ times per week) I'm just stoned.
I've been working on moderate, prepared, virtuous pot smoking for years. It is still a challenge, but I know i'm not the only high functioning cannabis user.
Anything without lyrics.
Also, just listened to a few tracks from that, wow no way I could get anything done, I'd just drift off to sleep! (I've never used cannabis, but I imagine that would only make that more likely if anything, not less?)
I listen to much more 'up-beat' music while working sometimes; with lyrics but mostly that I don't understand. Ironically I started the playlist partly out of trying to learn the language (Hindi), but mostly it's too fast/advanced/niche for me to pick up much, so for this purpose it's roughly equivalent to not having lyrics I suppose. Except that I might mouth-along to particularly catchy bits even though I don't know what I'm saying usually.
If it was a teachable practice, I'm sure I'd have plenty of followers to boot.
It's still in the ideation stage, and we don't have anything other than a few 'what-ifs', but this is tech, so it's not like we need to be fully implemented before we start taking members.
Um...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Church_of_Cann...
https://www.thedivineassembly.org/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santo_Daime
a couple of years ago, in my first year of university, i had developed an unfortunate weed addiction (it really is quite convenient for those who want to escape painful lives into fantasy), but after a couple years of cold turkey, i found myself missing the refreshing change of perspective that weed can genuinely provide when used responsibly.
these days, i try not to smoke more than once a week, and when i do so i try to make sure it doesn’t bleed into the rest of my life in all the same ways you do. clean room, coffee, music, notepad.
i am wary of relying on psychoactive substances to be creative, but whenever i’ve hit a dead end with a project, weed has a way of inspiring me to find new ways to solve a problem — be that aesthetic or technical design.
music is godly when high, and i have had many genuinely transformative moments listening to new albums under the substance.
for those wanting to “microdose” weed (as opposed to smoking blunt after blunt to get blitzed), i can highly recommend the DynaVap, an analogue weed vaporiser. the extraction of THC is significantly more efficient than combustion, and because the chamber is relatively small, it promotes consuming the substance responsibly.
(semi-tangent, but microdosing LSD has also been life changing, and i think delivers similar benefits to “microdosing” weed but with less brain fog, more clarity and more reliability)
what tips do you have?
I'd only add to make sure you're drinking enough water and have some quality snacks nearby.
I definitely agree with doing it alone. I also use a fake cigarette "one hitter," as it is a minimal amount. It is always enough to work.
Also, yoga. Going to a Yoga class after a puff is just so healthy. Building health habits into drug use is a very good harmony of interests. Helps convince my wife that I'm not just getting stoned-- if I smoke, do work, work out, generate, etc—its hard to judge. (She also likes the sex—which Carl Sagan also talked about-- search for Mr x).
I believe Cannabis has a sort of state dependent memory. If you make an effort to fill cannabis experiences with lots of positive, productive, aesthetic events, it kind of "comes out" other times when you smoke. So, it takes practice! So, smoke before going to a museum, a concert or upon reaching the top of a mountain-- positive recreational use is another way to prepare for applied work-oriented use.
Never use it to escape. Use it to sensitize. And if you need it to solve your problems, that's a good sign that you might want to take a break.
I think your brain has a state dependent memory
I keep a weed vape, as well as different sized pipes. The big, fancy one is great for extended/shared sessions, but the smallest one (called a bat, I think. It looks like a straight glass tube, with a small 'pinch' near one end) is my idea of a perfect single serving. It takes a bit of practice, but gives me between 3 to 5 light hits.
I originally started doing this because I've got chronic pain and it helps replace the pain signal. The flow state is an added benefit.
There are plenty of people that are highly functioning and regular smokers of pot that don't go through this level of ceremony about their usage, and I am somewhat skeptical this level of preparation is even particularly helpful in making someone a high functioning cannabis user in general.
Not saying it doesn't work for you, but this sort of story is something of a shibboleth on HN where someone claims that they do X process with Y substance or even just mental attitude and produce Z results.
Preparation is usually important to have a good time.
e.g. I clean up my apartment, buy groceries, do anything that needs to be done.
This is sort of what gets me high already. It's a success and smoking after having everything done is a blast.
My head is empty and I have nothing on my mind. The perfect mix to really enjoy it (for me).
To me, it's the distinction between "being stoned" and "virtuous pot smoking" and the connection being made between the latter being something that "high functioning cannabis users" do.
Lots of people just get stoned. That isn't what makes them high functioning or not - it's whether that impacts their ability to have a productive and fulfilling life. For me, and the many people I know that are regular users, the answer is not really. I imagine there are likely some trade offs, but I and the people I know have good careers, fulfilling personal lives, and do it because we enjoy it, the same way I partake in other hobbies I enjoy.
You can know pretty much exactly how much THC you're getting and adjust / repeat as necessary. I haven't smoked in years but I've been vaping (with a Pax) for the past couple of years and attempted to "microdose" but it was very unpredictable and sometimes I would get higher than I wanted which is not good when using it for "work" purposes (programming, music, video editing, etc).
I've also recently come to the conclusion that for me, Cannabis definitely falls into the "less is more" category, and I limit regular doses (ie vaping to get high) to once a week. I can use the oils multiple times (at doses of roughly 5mg) to get into the zone without negative consequences.
When I overdo it with vaping I have the usual issues with forgetfulness (struggle to find words etc) and my motivation definitely takes a hit. Also I've found that tolerance grows very fast the more you use it and it becomes quite unpredictable.
Oh and for me it helps to mix it with a bit of caffeine as well. Slightly off topic but as someone sensitive to caffeine, the perfect "delivery mechanism" for me is a small shot of espresso in the morning and then a whole bunch of Sencha the rest of the day. Calm focus and good mood and still able to fall asleep :)
espresso + a whole bunch of sencha = calm + still able to fall asleep ==/==> "sensitive to caffeine", at least to my eyes!
We value disruption in tech industries but our normative language for concentration, "focus" is lethal to creative thought. Reading math or daydreaming about research, one wants discursive ideas to intrude. This tool could be used for that... One wants to see with a generality not found in the source material, not be a good little "Simon Says" player.
Daytime consciousness is cognitive impairment. I wish the middle of the night could last forever.
There's the old trope that cannabis simply makes us believe we're being fantastically creative. So what? We're creatures who need affirmation. Interest, not raw technical reasoning ability, is the primary driver for creative research. Cannabis in moderation enhances interest.
I can see how music can induce creativity. But even so I often find myself unable to get into the same intentional creative state that even green tea and natural motivation provides.
These are pretty heavy users though. I don't have any heavy user in my surroundings that was not affected like that, but the sample size is small enough that this could easily be coincidence.
I’m glad I didn’t bother with it at this point.
I have seen the same lack of association before as well. A friend’s relationship has broken down due to his paranoia but that according to him doesn’t come from the 25 years of smoking cannabis but her behaviour. She doesn’t smoke and is perfectly normal in any way and I feel really sorry for the poor woman.
I’ve tried living without it during the lockdowns since working from home saves hours. From eight months of not using it, I’ve found that I lose about 2-3 hours of sleep per day which drastically affects my performance. I’ve tried melatonin and I consistently workout every week, but nothing is as good as a sleep aid for me as THC
Melatonin to put me deep under and keep me from waking up 5 hours in and not being able to fall back asleep.
Best sleep of my life. Wish I'd found the combo years ago. Had trouble falling asleep since I was a little kid. Prescription sleep aids I've tried (or, god forbid, alcohol) don't work as well and make me feel shitty in the morning. That combo? Feel like a million bucks. It's great.
I worry about the long-term effects, but they'd have to be pretty bad to be worse than years and years of chronic bad sleep.
I used to be a daily smoker and was horribly addicted. Now, at least ten years after I quit, I find myself having trouble remembering things. I lose my train of thought a lot too, really annoying. I don't know if that was attributed to my cannabis use, or just my brain in general.
That said, my friend, 10 years of life make you forgetful sometimes.
That's just called living.
In terms of evolutionary biology, all forms of life develop memory first. Only once sufficiently resilient, an organism can begin to learn to forget things. Forgetting is an incredibly valuable tool. Don't diss it. Embrace the train of thought going off the rails every now and then.
If it was important, it'll come back. If not, congratulations, you've just made space in your brain for new memories!
Interesting, can you link to more info on this?
I would like to know more about it but I just can’t find anything objective
I am very skeptical of my friends that make weed use their whole identity, Its not fun when they’re not doing it “recreationally” like the rest of us, but they seem decently functioning even though they use the term “microdose” quite liberally and abstractly. Not judging yet, I just know I wont consume weed that often. They all are suppressing anxiety or depression, from unrelated things theyve told me.
Where am I going wrong with this?
I heard a talk show host once speculate that one reason weed has been illegal for so long is it would make the various motivational sticks and carrots the ruling class uses with white collar workers less effective in aggregate.
Here is some context, I commented elsewhere on my work ethic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29895639
He didn't say that most career-obsessed freaks are doing large scale evil.
If I was playing a game, and I was the general of an army, and I could tell my marines to "use stimpack", which would make them move faster and be more focused, or "use herion", which would make them move slower and be less focused. A general would never order "use herion", and plenty would order "use stimpack" daily.
But the human race is not an army, and you are not a general, or a king. You're looking at the world as an engineer looks at a problem with a set of objects. This is super common on this site - we're programmers, we love re-ordering complex systems.
Not only are people far, far, far more complex than inanimate objects, but it might turn out that issuing any orders, or banning any activity has a catastrophically different and more negative effect than you can possibly calculate. Who knows how much of our culture wouldn't exist if people weren't free to drown in their sorrows, or if people spent their lives resenting you for limiting them.
I'm not an absolutist, we should ban plenty of substances, but be very careful when considering society as a system to be optimized.
I am being a little frivolous but this is literally the kind of stuff I think about.
Maybe China is the best anyone has ever been at social engineering and maybe this time they'll get it just right. I'm not so sure.
Considering the level of social infrastructure in the former DDR exceeded that in the BRD at the time of reunification, they might have had a point there. More public hospitals, more research facilities, better public transportation, more affordable housing. Sure, none of it had the flashy elements of Western capitalism, but it mostly worked.
Note that I'm not endorsing the Stasi or the many other things the DDR did to keep its population oppressed. But real life is full of grey areas.
The Soviet space program comes to mind as well - the state can do plenty!
I do find it interesting that as cigarettes have waned in popularity and weed has gotten more popular, we're finding that people are less creative and innovative than ever before and there seems to be a persistent monoculture throughout the West that's extraordinarily drab. Might it have something to do with nicotine's cognitive-enhancing ability versus cannabis diminishing cognitive function? Probably not, and there's likely no way to do a cohort study on this subject, but it's an interesting question to pose regardless.
most people aren't incapable of realizing their full potential because of their personal mindspace, but because they are confined to a specific economic survival role.
Not necesssarily true. On the right Sativa strain it makes me incredibly productive.
Some of my acquaintances have the paradoxical effect - they become less lazy.
Maybe similar to how amphetamines are used to treat ADHD - which seems perverse.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/add.15764
Hm,
> "may continue beyond the period of intoxication"
that's a very different fact then "persistent cognitive impairments"
Like I think anyone can agree that cannabis during the time of consumption leads to cognitive impairment.
It's also not a secret that canabis can have residual effects if consumed too much. Which as far as I know decrease over time if you stop consuming it, i.e. "residual effects" not something I would call "persistent" effects.
What I can't tell is if the study fund long term effects besides this, or if it want to make it look like it found such.
Then it's a matter of probability, much in the same way long-term effects of Corona is discussed.
Perhaps the probability is mentioned in the actual paper, but i tend to lose interest whenever the wording include the word "may".
I became friends with one kid who was exceptionally talented as a musician, but also had a chronic marijuana habit. He was a better drummer than me at the time, but the drum camp was held every year. I attended the following year, and to my surprise, so did he.
As I am a huge nerd, I spent the entire year obsessively practicing. My friend spent the whole year smoking marijuana and being complacent. We were excited to see each other and catch up, but it wasn’t long before we started showing off our skills on the drum sets. His heart sank when he realised how dramatically my skills had surpassed his. I think he had a bit of an identity crisis, and likely as a consequence of the frequent substance abuse he developed a deep and blatant paranoia. He tried to commit suicide in his room the following day, and had to be removed from the camp.
I didn’t speak to him much after that — kids weren’t quite as connected as they are today back in 2005 — but to my surprise he did manage to contact me a couple of years ago. I asked him how he was, and he said he was doing better now after rehabilitation, but that life got much worse for him since we last met, explaining that he had been addicted to heroin.
I recognise that this is an extreme case, but I grew up with a lot of kids like this, and marijuana is scary as shit to me, despite some nerds today being adamant that it’s excellent and certainly better than alcohol.
But this whole line is a canard. The question is, would prohibiting any or all of those help anyone? Does prohibition help or not?
Because prohibition is the one part of the equation that a debate could actually have any affect on.
But I think it is quite clear why so much time, energy, and dubious argumentation is spent avoiding that question.
My point, as I wrote, is that it may or may not be true that marijuana is a gateway drug even if few marijuana users actually go through that gateway.
The "gateway drug" argument is that any amount of cannabis is sufficient for becoming a skin-popping fentanyl junkie, but it is not necessary.
That's an extreme, and not representative of what most people mean when they say "gateway drug".
My understanding of the gateway drug argument is this: someone who starts with a seemingly-innocuous mind-altering substance is more likely to end up wanting more and going for harder stuff than someone who has never used any drugs at all. By normalizing the light drug, some percentage of the new users will end up addicted to hard drugs that wouldn't have otherwise.
I'm not familiar enough with the evidence to have an opinion on the accuracy of this argument, but it's not helpful to take the most idiotic framing of it and attack it, even if it is the framing with the greatest meme value.
Perhaps the correlation is a result of cannabis being illegal in your country: if you break one law (cannabis use), the barriers are down and you may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb and explore stronger remedies for your troubles.
So the questions that need to be investigated are these. Is there in fact any kind of correlation? If there is a correlation, is it causative? Of course, no true believer needs these questions answered, which is why the research into these things in not legal in countries where prohibition enforcement and punishment is big industry.
The fact that most heroin users have used caffeine previously does not mean that caffeine is a gateway drug to heroin, or at all correlated with hard drug use. The same applies to cannabis.
And that's fine, because anecdotes aren't data!
But it's just hard to separate correlation from causation here. Not all people who drink or smoke or do other drugs are depressed, but plenty of depressed people will drink or do drugs.
Plenty of people that have natural talent or skill, or who worked long enough to get to "the top of their game" get complacent even if they do not regularly engage in any of the vices we're talking about here. Arrogance and complacency are hardly unique to drinkers and smokers.
Even from an anecdotal perspective, assuming that marijuana was a contributor to the person becoming complacent, it seems unlikely that the marijuana was a strong causative factor in the suicide attempt. There are a lot of people that smoke pot regularly, and by definition, most of them are not the best person at their hobbies or professions, and they're not committing suicide. There's obviously some deeper issues in play here. (And I think it might be totally reasonable to say that people that have those deeper issues should avoid mind-altering substances)
You can look in the comment section for this very article for multiple examples - I replied to someone who indicated that another person must have "depressing" nights because they stated that they sometimes enjoy having a night with friends listening to music while high, for example. Subjective opinions of how to enjoy an evening are greeted with being told they're wrong - a bit beyond even skepticism, even!
If us potheads start posting anecdotes about how smoking took us from being unsuccessful and contemplating suicide to successful and having wonderful personal happiness and contentment - basically the reverse of the original post in this thread - I'm sure we'd see similar levels of skepticism. As it is, the positive anecdotes are basically "It's fun and helps me relax", "I feel more creative while high", "It sometimes helps me approach things from a different perspective" and similar.
I think it's just the result of a cultural perception shift swinging hard the other way from the decades that drugs were demonized to now people looking at many drugs (mdma, marijuana and psilocybin especially) as miraculous substances that will solve all our issues. This happens with most shifts - it starts on one end of the extreme, then gets a reaction which swings the pendulum to the other extreme. In a decade I'm sure it will even out and we can have open conversations without reactions being so dogmatic.
Kids growing up in dysfunctional families (who might actually look OK from outside), or with some mental issues often desperately seek any kind of escape in whatever comes around. For many Alcohol, cigarettes and MJ are most accessible but sooner or later they find these substances don't work as they thought, the ugly reality is still there. So they move up the ladder for stronger escape.
Its false to paint MJ as cause of this, taking perfectly fine and balanced young individuals and bending them on path of addiction. Yet this is how it has been sold to public for past 60 years all around the world.
If I told a story about a kid who showed back up at band camp and had become 50 pounds heavier and hadn't progressed as a drummer, then went on to become a heroin addict etc. you wouldn't be blaming cookies. You'd stop and wonder what the hell was going on in his life.
Marijuana on the other hand…[0]
As I mentioned, I grew up with several kids like this. Most didn't attempt suicide (as far as I'm aware, anyway), but the possibility of confirmation bias aside, I certainly feel as though I recognised a pattern of paranoid delusion among young stoners that I knew.
[0]: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2014-07-16-how-cannabis-causes-par....
I'm not discounting the possibility that MJ can cause such things, but even the studies put the risk fairly low, and it's hard to separate environmental and genetic risks in the population they have available to study.
This is the part that doesn't follow. We have no actual indication that smoking pot had anything to do with his lack/loss of ambition.
I could give plenty of anecdotal studies where people became complacent because they got a promotion, or made it to a certain landmark, or realized that they were the smartest person in the room at the time, or a million other things. Complacency is not something that requires smoking pot to feel.
Like, I don't want to denigrate the person in the anecdote - but if your sense of identity is so tied up in being the best drummer among a certain peer group that when you lose that title you are going to attempt suicide, you have more fundamental psychological problems to deal with.
If pot was causing people to want to kill themselves because they weren't the best at something, we'd have a lot more suicides in the world. It's a massive claim, and one that requires proof beyond an anecdote.
This is what follows, or at least strongly implied, from OP’s post;
“ My friend spent the whole year smoking marijuana and being complacent”
We can only argue from what is in the story. Not what is not in it or what we’d rather wasn’t.
The OP shared a story, admitting its anecdotal.
I have similar experiences with losing friends in a similar fashion. It is a sad thing.
It’s a drug like alcohol. Addiction can have consequences.
I started my drug usage in my mid-20s (including alcohol) and I highly recommend it. My brain was done cooking and I had enough self-confidence + self-awareness to not make dangerous decisions.
I really wince when people talk about weed as some kind of magic cure.
I'd view the problems with marijuana (and heroin) as symptoms of mental health issues; not the cause.
More than caffeine? Really?!
I think regular cannabis use attracts a certain type of person. That type of person can vary in their ability and intelligence, just like any type of person. This is also true of say, hardcore fans of fantasy fiction. They all have certain things in common, but you couldn't paint all of them as "creative" or any other trait.
I'm hesitant when hearing about long term effects, even on developing brains. Both Barack Obama and Carl Sagan smoked a ton of cannabis when they were younger. And they and others really turned out fine.
This paper seems to be a meta study that combines the results from other studies. Since there were multiple methodologies it's hard to get a sense of exactly what questions they were answering.
Like David Lynch, I'll stick to the coffee and cigarettes (even if the latter will probably kill me eventually, at least I can think straight)
I also have anxiety and panic attacks triggered. Though when it's over and I can think calmly, I ALWAYS see those panic attacks are my subconscious' way of telling something wrong with my life/where I'm going etc. and I need to fix things. When everything's on track I never have panic attacks regardless of the amount of substance.
In that sense it's actually telling me, in a brutal yet true way, to fix my life, by facing me feelings or thoughts that I've been subconsciously running away from.
Might not be the same case with you, surely, but this is my 2 cents.
It's better than smoking, but we need to be responsible and admit that it's not exactly without risk or harm.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30049223/
> Conclusions: Single-dose inhalation of vaporized cannabis had no clinically meaningful positive or negative effect on airway function, exertional breathlessness, and exercise endurance in adults with advanced COPD. Clinical trial registered with www.clinicaltrials.gov (NCT03060993).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4456813/
> The majority of studies suggest that vapourizers adequately reduce risk of pulmonary symptoms (5,14–16), although complete safety may require a regulated source of plant material, rather than ‘street’ samples, which produce ammonia (17).
> The findings suggest that vapourization reduces the delivery of toxic byproducts associated with the use of smoked cannabis. A subsequent experiment addressed exhaled carbon monoxide (CO) (14). The researchers found a statistically significant difference between the increase in CO exhaled following smoking cannabis versus vapourization. The amount of exhaled CO showed little to no increase following vapourization compared with large increases following smoking, which would be expected for inhalation of a combustion product. These findings give further evidence that vapourization reduces exposure to gaseous combustion toxins.
This isn't to say there is no risk, but if someone is going to consume cannabis it is amazingly clear that vaporizing it is safer than smoking it.
In most cases? Where in the world? In Canada at least, frequent cannabis smokers and frequent cigarette smokers are nearly disjoint groups.
No one laughed out their brains after drinking a pot of coffee.
Pun intended.
Caffeine can have pretty "bad" effects - issues with sleep, headaches, panic attacks, and all sorts of cardiovascular issues (increased heart rate, sweating, etc).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-handicapping
E.g. if someone in college does poorly because they got high all the time, maybe the reason they got high all the time was that they felt (rightly or not) that they would have done poorly anyway, and now they have the drug to blame. And maybe those who smoke a bit and still do well, do it sort of to have the excuse in reserve.
I've not much experience with cannabis, it's far less popular where I live than the US, but I can certainly see that alcohol is used as this sort of "flexible excuse", both short term and long term.
[some definitional text] The purpose of self handicapping is to protect your self identity. “I could have x, but I didn’t because of y” is the narrative story. I could have gotten an A on the exam but I didn’t because I partied instead of studied is a classic example. For it to be true self-handicapping y needs to be a choice.
This matches my personal experience as well. I’m good friends with someone that holds a high-level FAANG position and consumes weed every day. While working. Attending meetings, coding, managing large teams, the whole she-bang. It’s unbelievable. They say it “calms their thoughts” and allows them to focus.
If I tried to code while high, I would end up wasting 3 hours just fiddling with the text colors in the IDE or just space out in a wormhole of deep introspection.
Marijuana really affects people differently.
Brains are weird.
There is definitely some impairment long term. I think we can assume that even without this huge study. I don't think knowing that matters unless we have some scale that tells us how dramatic that impairment is.
If I compare someone who smoked all the time, but also had a rich and engaging social life with a lifelong abstainer who live a mostly isolated existence, who is going to be more cognitively capable?
There are so many inputs that feed into who we are and what we are capable of that, in all likelihood, cannabis use is likely only incidental to much larger factors like isolation, media preferences, home life, etc.
As an anecdote, the worse thing I think I've ever done for my brain, the thing that I immediately felt dumber after doing, was reading "Shadow Wolves" (Steven Segal's book). I had trouble communicating thoughts effectively for weeks after finishing it. It was like it had sucked vocabulary out of my brain. Maybe that's how cannabis leads to long term impairment. It makes you read "Shadow Wolves".
Edit: Since people are voting this, I want to add an extra warning that I was not joking about "Shadow Wolves". If you read it, you will feel dumber, and it will take time to heal the damage done. Seriously.
That is, we should assume they cause long term impairment without the need for any kind of study?
If a study comes back and says, with a high confidence, that isn't the case for this or that, great, but I think it's a safe assumption for most chemicals.
Edit: Just to be clear, I'm saying it's not enough to show something is bad, as pretty much everything is bad. It has to be bad enough to matter.
I think we are mostly in agreement - that any substance entering the body will have some effect.
The question is what effect, how much of an effect, and wether it is permanent/long lasting. Questions which require a study to answer.
Unless we're able to find twins that live largely the same lives absent the one factor, we are really only capable of sussing out the especially harmful things with long term lifestyle studies. If cannabis is as bad as sugar, then we have 40 years of back and forth to look forward to, and the answer will ultimately be: A little bit is bad, but not bad enough to matter more than how many steps you took today, or how sad or angry you were, or how late you ate dinner.
Alcohol is clearly capable of long term impairment, the debate seems to be about dose response. Nicotine is more questionable, but clearly leaves long term changes in the mind. People abstaining after long term nicotine usage will spend the rest of their lives experiencing cravings. Hell, it seems plausible long term consumption of food types has long term cognitive effects.
Yeah, that's what we use it for. Can't stand being so clever all the time...
It also seems rather strange to take one property of their lives and use it to explain their in your eyes loss of abilities. Not doing something for a long time also has this effect, so perhaps they for many years didnt need to do calculations in their head, or use their high school french and so on.
If you said you knew a twin, and one of them smoked weed daily and they had identical lives, and one of them lost cognitive abilities and the other didnt, i would be more likely to give your reply any credit.
It would be interesting if the people the OP talks about tried to simply retrain their abilities, which I'm sure most adults that are not used to doing these calculations anymore could.
The second guy I knew was a guy I met when I was playing backgammon in a café. I tried to explain him some things about the game that involved some very basic probability calculations but he stopped me and told that he had been smoking weed for 20 years and had lost capability to do calculations in his head.
Maybe he just wanted you to leave him alone.
But when they share a negative experience with cannabis, suddenly a bunch of stoners appear and try to discredit their story! Your friend got schizophrenia from smoking weed? Nah bro, he was already predisposed, and by chance it activated after smoking weed. You have memory problems after years of smoking? Nah, you might be just getting old, we may never know!
Don't be so insecure about your drug habits. Cannabis can be harmful, so what? Billions of people smoke tobacco, drink alcohol, eat sugary treats, all while fully aware that it can be harmful (but it might cause no harm to them!). You smoke cannabis because you enjoy getting stoned, even though it might be harmful. You're an adult who weighed the pros and cons, and came to the conclusion that the risks are acceptable for you.
But please, don't try to discredit other people's experiences!
Dear friend of mine, who i used to smoke with developed psychosis. So i know consuming cannabis can have negative effects. Cannabis has many compounds, and many studies show some of them have good properties others maybe bad properties. Some science says they cause mental issues other science and study show the opposite.
Again i just find the 'cant do math in head again' a weird statement or things to directly relate to smoking weed. There are plenty of people i know that have never smoked weed and can't do head math as well as they could when they were in high school.
Also to refer to your statement about weed & schizofrenia, there is plenty of research done, but nothing conclusive. e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32839678/
Anything can be harmful, if you use/eat/drink/smoke it enough. And surely not everybody just smokes weed because they 'like being stoned' as you write. Sure does not count for me.
Where did caffeine go?