One major issue has been over-emphasis on the fact that it’s not physically addictive in the ways that some drugs are. I think this leads to the mistaken belief that it’s not habit forming, and that there are no side effects of stopping after extended use.
While it’s not “withdrawal” in the traditional sense, it can be quite unpleasant. And the thing that sounds most helpful in that moment is…smoking a bowl.
What comes next is a lot of emotion management. Doable. Hard. Help is good.
I think legalization was good. Cannabis has mostly been a good thing in my life. At times, it hasn’t been. I worry about the crazy high THC strains everywhere now, and the misperception that these are completely harmless plants.
I still partake and find it worthwhile for creative endeavors, but had to make drastic changes to my usage habits with a promise to quit permanently if I found myself back in a similar cycle.
A lot of addiction-related messaging has definitely not focused on the mental component of addiction. People who use opiates medically are so much less likely to get addicted than recreational users that I would assume that it's actually the main component of an addiction, while the physical symptoms are less impactful.
I think a big thing that's overlooked is the difference between psychological and physiological dependency, as well as the stigma or popular idea of addiction. Weed doesn't feel addictive in the classic sense, especially in comparison to things that are much more addictive, like nicotine and alcohol.
I used to live basically next door to a dispensary, and would smoke multiple times a day. If I didn't smoke, I'd sometimes find it hard to get to sleep the first night or so, but it wasn't as bad as going without a cigarette, missing adderall, or what I've seen people go through on opiates.
Given that many recreational users are into other stuff, too (especially before legal dispensaries that looked like Apple stores came along), along with the pro-cannabis propaganda, it's easy to see how people don't take it seriously.
Any escape from reality or avoidance of it is addictive. And weed is way to normalized for self-medicating, if you said "im anxious im going to smoke" people are way more okay with hearing that than if you said you where getting a beer.
Ever since it became legal I have friends who spend majority of their day high. Of course, when confronted, they say it's not addictive and they dont have a problem. As we know this is the first sign of a very serious addiction.
It's a comparison problem. It won't kill you like alcohol withdrawals will or make you agitated like nicotine will. So then it must be okay right? These same potheads will quote studies and news articles talking about the benefits or just how risk free it is.
Its very similar to the way a functional alcoholic will justify their drinking. They even use avoidance language. 20 years ago we called it weed, now we call it "cannabis". Oh, you're not addicted to weed you're just using cannabis every hour of every day. I think legalization didn't help, nor hurt, but the re-branding of weed as "cannabis" while biologically correct gave these type of people a get out of jail free card. If you don't believe me, say to yourself "I smoke weed 8 times a day" versus "I use cannabis 8 times a day". One of them makes you sound like a degenerate, one of them makes you sound like you take a medication. That difference is very important in justifying addiction in the mind of an addict.
> My eyes are rolling so hard. You convicted them on evidence of their denial?
The behavior of an addict doesn't need a degree to see. If you are in a perpetual haze, need it to get up in the morning, and say you do not have a problem you do have a problem.
> These strawmen are transparent and juvenile, while substance dependency of every kind is a complicated and common problem that requires far more nuance.
This is not worth addressing because it seems like you're just mad.
> Whatever axe you're grinding, it's basically unhinged and socially degenerate in and of itself.
I've noticed people who like the word "cannabis" take issue with it being called avoidance language. It's the same thing seen in vapes, different variations of alcohol, designer drugs, etc. In fact, vapes follow almost the same model as the "cannabis industry" and do quite a bit to dance around the fact it's a drug. Vape stores in particular will sell to 50mg salt nic as a new user. A weed store will sell you medical grade 80% THC hydro as a first time user. Drugs are drugs. If you use them responsibly you probably aren't smoking/drinking/injecting it to feel normal. The path to profitability is to create addicts. You do this by feeding them more of the addicting substance they they realize.
I'm not sure what you're on about but maybe you forgot to toke up before posting.
I don't care what people do. I'm not a "karen". I'm reflecting the OP's post. Addiction is addiction and we are talking about it. I'm sorry my opinion is not to continue to let people who have a problem have that problem. As someone who has been an addict I am intimately familiar with both the pipeline to addiction and the behavior of a functional addict.
You're the one who engaged in childish name calling. Maybe back off and get some context.
> As we know this is the first sign of a very serious addiction.
Isn't denying an addiction when told one has an addiction also the first sign of not having an addiction? "Methinks the lady doth protest too much" works well and good for a play, but doesn't really meet the traditional standards for evidence.
Yeah, this sounds like a Catch-22 of substance use: If you deny you have a problem, that proves the problem exists. If you affirm you have a problem, that's also proof the problem exists.
> There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to, he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
-- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Or if you prefer the Monty Python version [0]:
> "Will you please listen!? I am not the Messiah, do you understand? HONESTLY!"
Of course (well, there's some arguments to be made here with regard to prescribed drugs, but let's leave them aside for the minute). The only gripe I was addressing here was the idea that denial = guilt.
That’s not quite how I read it. My guess is that the OP meant something closer to “constant consumption paired with the denial that it could perhaps be unhealthy is a strong predictor of addiction.”
Going by that charitable interpretation, I think his point stands.
I don't think the denial relates to the guilt so much as it relates to the probability the person will be able to ditch this habit when they need to. Given that someone has an addiction problem, they're far more likely to overcome it if they acknowledge it is a problem. If they don't currently acknowledge, then things will probably get worse before they can get better. So perhaps OPs statement should be framed moreso as "realization is the first step to recovery", but I get where they are coming from.
I'd think their specific behavior is the sign of the problem.
Is this a non sequential fallacy? I think the worst offender of this argument that I see on the internet is, "if this offends you, it proves that I'm right".
Most of us who drink coffee or tea are in the same boat. We do it every day, sometimes multiple times a day. There is withdrawal. There is tolerance. The half-life is so long that even if we stop in the morning, we are spending the majority of the day high.
Just to add a little more complexity to the equation. Note that there is a weird level of approval for some substances ( coffee, uppers, whatever NY brokers and med students use ), because they help some corporate goals, while those that do not increase bottom line and are even detrimental to it ( alchohol, pot and so on ) are frowned upon, because they lead to downtime.
And if you pay attention to how you actually respond to caffeine, it actually has a HUGE effect on your state of mind and how you react to things. Not always in a bad way, but it easily can affect you as much as weed.
After going off caffeine for a day or two, drinking a strong cup of coffee or tea on an empty stomach will give me a fair bit of a buzz, to the extent that it feels like my head is floating. Two cups and work can become difficult and I can't sit still. If I drink three cups by mid-afternoon, I begin to feel anxious and slightly paranoid, as if I'm forgetting something important. It also impairs my sleep.
If you're a habitual user, you may not even realize how it effects you, and you'll need more dosage to get effects.
I'm a very long way from the folks on r/decaf, most of whom I think need some serious help, but it's much more impactful than you may realize.
Hearing a friend describe how he reacted to caffeine made me realize that some people have wildly different responses than I do.
Caffeine doesn't make me feel particularly great, and I feel almost no compulsion to have more than one cup, but it made him feel amazing, and he felt compelled to drink more.
I can stop drinking coffee for a week without any annoyance, but if he tries to pull back or stop drinking caffeine, he experiences 2 weeks of crippling headaches.
My takeaway: work your way into any drugs tentatively, and don't listen to people who tell you how much "everyone" responds to it.
For me, caffeine induces a wonderful sense of euphoria (as well as increased energy, increased focus, increased ability to sleep soundly, and decreased appetite), yet I simultaneously feel no impulse to consume it and usually don't.
I have to actively remind myself to consume my caffeine when I really need the boost in focus. The euphoria is a pleasing side effect, but not something I think about when I'm not experiencing it. It's common for me to go weeks at a time without having any, just because I didn't think to.
I think there could be a genetic factor here. Addiction (to alcohol, cigarettes, caffeine, etc.) seems to be fully absent in my family history.
I have an espresso superautomatic, beer in my fridge, and prescribed stimulants, and I often go months without partaking in any of that because it has to be a conscious decision and sometimes it never crosses my mind. I'm uncomfortable leaving my baseline.
It's like wearing fancy clothes. It's enjoyable for a few hours, but I wouldn't want to wear them frequently.
> Of course, when confronted, they say it's not addictive and they dont have a problem. As we know this is the first sign of a very serious addiction.
The first sign of an addiction (at least, the first which is visible to an outside observer) is that it interferes with your life and you won't stop.
Until about a week ago, I was a heavy daily cannabis user for a very long time (more than ten years). If you had asked me if I had an addiction, I would have said no.
Recently I came to believe I had Cannaboid Hyperemesis Syndrome, a disease for which the only cure is to quit cannabis. So I quit - immediately. I have a gigantic pile of weed in the house (I had just bought more when I started having symptoms), and I pass by it everyday. I just shake my head and go, "darn, wish I could smoke that," and go about my day.
That's not a story you're going to hear from an addict.
That's not to minimize the experience of people who do experience a cannabis addiction. I have known people I suspect have a problem. But no, cannabis and alcohol continue not to be comparable as far as their harm and addictive potential.
(And I have absolutely no regrets about my consumption, it was an incredible medication for my anxiety.)
Okay. I'm having a fairly high rate of anxious thoughts but it's bearable. So far they're of the type that can be shaken off easily. I'm sure if I leave it untreated for a few months I'll have some form of breakdown, but while I haven't tried any alternatives yet, I'm looking for a psychiatrist & intend to find a different medication.
As a fellow anxiety-sufferer, I strongly encourage you to pursue sleep hygiene to the utmost. It doesn't fix everything for me, but it makes things way more manageable
Any feedback on CBD oil? Dosing? Type? I've never used cannabis at all, but I intend to try CBD.
[ES: Personal experience. I am not a doctor or qualified to give medical advice.]
I appreciate the advice.
I'm honestly a terrible person to ask, I preferred THC strains and never tried CBD products, and I mostly bought the most potent stuff which was on sale. It's also hard for me to judge dosage because I have developed a really high tolerance.
When I first started smoking it had a completely different effect on me, including visual hallucinations. Over time & with heavy use (which I don't necessarily recommend) the effects mellowed out a lot. So take things with a grain of salt, my experience may not be indicative of what your experience with CBD products would be.
I would say to make sure you're purchasing from a reputable dispensary, start with the smallest dosage (I've noticed people sometimes even cut up their gummies to get a smaller dose than is commercially available, for example.), and experiment. I know that's very generic advice, but the older I get and the more I learn, the less confident I am that I can understand how cannabis will effect other people. If I had to recommend a starting dose to someone, knowing very little about them, I'd probably say 5mg. But again I have low confidence in my ability to recommend a dose.
For me it had two primary benefits:
1.) As a "rescue inhaler," it could terminate panic attacks and sometimes shorten depressive episodes by helping me escape repetitive cycles of thought. I cannot promise it will work this way for everyone, for some people it could make them paranoid and ruminative.
2.) Reducing the incidence of repetitive anxious thoughts like, "I should have worded that email differently, they're going to think X of me, this is just like that time you did something embarrassing in high school." Again, cannot promise anything.
I agree with most of what you're saying here about this being a comparison problem.
The one area of major disagreement is regarding the "cannabis" designation. For me, this term is associated with the opposite connotation. When I started taking its effects more seriously, I started using the cannabis word because I feel it lends more respect to the plant. This wasn't originally my idea, and so I'm not alone in this.
This respect was part of my own mindset shift on usage away from habitual use. A way to remind myself to take it seriously, and to partake intentionally if/when I do.
Most people I know are pretty aware of their "problem" but have no intention of changing it. Calling it one thing over another might be a form of self deception for a few, but self deception will always find some answer.
> It won't kill you like alcohol withdrawals will or make you agitated like nicotine will. So then it must be okay right? These same potheads will quote studies and news articles talking about the benefits or just how risk free it is.
I do think we have major issues with how we paint these different groups. When someone is an alcoholic, they gain sympathy and support from society proportional to their maladaptive behaviors and/or willingness to address the issue.
"Potheads" is almost always derogatory, and I don't think people who struggle with this are seen in the same light as people who struggle with other drugs of abuse, and it's not surprising considering the pretty clear misconceptions the public has about cannabis as a whole.
And I think this is important to note, because one of the #1 emotional factors that leads to continued maladaptive substance use is shame. Society has progressed quite a bit towards supporting and celebrating people who struggle with drugs/alcohol. I don't think society has done the same with cannabis. Attitudes are closer to "they're just lazy and it's not even addictive so what's their problem?".
The status quo is "drugs are bad, m'kay?" and "drinking is fine, everybody does it, just don't drive when drunk".
The way forward should be understanding the following:
* Let's use the word "drug" for any compound that alters your state of mind for recreational purposes.
* Some of these drugs have medical value, but in this context it is about recreational use.
* Everybody is different in how they respond to a drug
* Most drugs are dangerous when consumed to excess
* Most drugs can impair your thinking and should not be used in unsafe conditions
* Some drugs can be dangerous due to adulterants (e.g., fentanyl)
* One should be mindful in how they consume drugs (not under peer pressure, not appropriate time/place, etc)
* If you are going to use a drug, treat it as dessert rather than a meal
* Addiction is possible/likely when one consumes a drug frequently in a short amount of time, or by consistent use of it
* Addiction can be overcome but it requires serious effort and can be *very* discomforting
* The first high is often the "best", and trying to capture that again can lead to addiction
* If you think you have a problem with drugs, you probably do, and should seek help in addressing your problem
* If you are an addict and you break your addiction you cannot return even once to using again
I'm sure there's room for improvement there, but it's a start.
I think this is a great list. I would point this out.
> * Let's use the word "drug" for any compound that alters your state of mind.
> * If you are going to use a drug, treat it as dessert rather than a meal
Consider that your definition rightly includes things like antidepressants, but people for whom antidepressants are working should take them regularly (which I assume is the distinction you're drawing with dessert versus meal).
The cultural roots of drinking are deep, and while I agree that alcohol enjoys a seemingly protected status, I don't know that blanket labeling everything "drugs" is a step forward.
I think this kind of abstraction is what gets people into risky situations. I'd rather we raised awareness across the board about the benefits and repercussions of the popular substances of choice. Some general rules of thumb are good, but less compelling than direct information about the ways things can go wrong, and ultimately not useful in the moment of choosing "do I partake?".
I think most people understand that some drugs are dangerous and some are not. But the drug conversation has been so dishonest for so long, that people struggle to assess what is real/true, or what to take seriously. I don't think people will take seriously anything that collapses mind altering substances under that single umbrella.
I think there are strong arguments to be made that psychedelics - especially psilocybin - deserve to remain in a category of their own. To associate them with "drugs" broadly seems counterproductive at a time when we're finally seeing research dollars pour into the field, and the effects of these compounds doesn't seem comparable with other recreational drugs. And no one gets addicted to psilocybin, but there are some very real risks that users need to know about.
I could have done better on the initial definition -- the key context is "recreational" use.
It's incredibly important that we collectively recognize that alcohol is a drug. More so, recent research shows that it has zero health benefits. We need to understand the extensive damage it does to society -- not to demonize or prohibit it, but to give context to when pearl clutching happens about other drugs.
Likewise, people should understand the history of the War on Drugs and be aware of the real reason they came about (spoiler: to oppress their users).
It is true that psychedelics can have incredible therapeutic value, but they can also be a lot of fun (I certainly consumed them in that context when I was much younger). Cannabis can be added to that list, as well as others.
So yes, let's be entirely honest about the subject (which I'm trying to do). We can't wish them away, so let's deal with it like rational adults and minimize the risks of harm.
I'm not arguing for prohibition. The point was more that despite its ills, society does not treat people who consume alcohol as harshly as society treats people who consume other substances that are arguably no worse, or possibly less harmful.
Not a value judgement, just an observation about current attitudes around mind altering substances.
"Potheads", "get-out-of-jail-free", "degenerate", etc.
"Ever since it became legal I have friends who spend majority of their day high. Of course, when confronted"
Maybe you should quit interrogating your friends to prop up your own puritanical moralities. All I see when I read your post is how much you hate people who use weed.
"Hey man have you tried going a couple days without smoking weed?" is not interrogation. It's concern.
I don't understand this attitude. Do you not care about the people around you? I'm not smashing my friend's joints or tossing their bongs. I'm asking because I am concerned about their health.
What I enjoy about the comments to my comment is it demonstrates how deeply ingrained this righteous indignation is in the "cannabis community". I don't understand your insults. "Puritan", etc. For some reason having concern for friends is now puritanical...what a world. Your focus on dissecting my use of idiom as some sort of in-built hatred for weed smokers is honestly so on point for the HN commenter community its actually almost funny.
"Hey man have you tried going a couple days without smoking weed?" is not interrogation. It's concern."
Or maybe it is both?
Your friends are probably old enough to no want to be controlled by you. Tell them your opinion, it might do them good, but maybe don't tell them what to do. They should figure that out on their own.
A question of "Have you tried..." might be the precursor to an offered opinion. Maybe their friends have been successful at that exact thing and the opinion is moot. But if the answer is no, perhaps that's the point at which it might be suggested to try.
There's no controlling that is necessarily suggested by their comments. Certainly such questions can be asked in bad faith but it might be assumed that OP isn't doing that.
Well, it is also about intention yes, but my point was just that people do not like to be treated as children (especially when they are acting as such). To reach them, I first have to respect their choices.
This is a reasonable position, which is not something that can be said about the "war on drugs" type of person that I've encountered. That person is much less likely to be critical about why they question the use and, in my experience, will often assume that "use" is "abuse" regardless of the actual effect it has on the user.
The comment rightly calls out that it is a personal take about your friends but that is also something which might be done by someone with more pointed and less honest intentions. Certainly assumptions can be more charitable, however. I don't mean to justify these complaints of your comment but hopefully they're more understandable.
"For some reason having concern for friends is now puritanical" -- it's difficult for me to reconcile your claim to have concern for your friends while also vilifying them for being "potheads" or "degenerates"?
Not really trying to insult you, that wasn't my intent, but in an era in society where personal autonomy and agency is becoming paramount to societal influence it makes damn near no sense that you're so worked up over someone else's personal choices.
Notice I don't disagree with the presented findings, how cannabis addiction isn't a boogeyman or false flag, it's can become a chemical dependency, but I do disagree with your stance of wanting to police the behavior of others to fit your own perspective, despite calling it 'concern' or 'caring about the people around me'.
If you were my friend, I'd tell you to mind your own business then eventually lose your number. I'm an adult, I take my own calculated risks and understand the consequences of my actions.
Visibly worse versions of themselves, according to whose standards? Apparently the standards of someone who doesn’t use cannabis on any level, so thereby doesn’t really have the authority to determine whether his friends who are high are better off or worse off. I just can’t see anything other than someone making value judgements of their “friends”.
Apologies in advance if I'm taking your comment wrong. Anecdotal here, but I've had two friends in particular who at one point completely blew their lives up because of their inability to stop using THC. At the right time I would bring it up to both of them, and made it clear I would support them and be there for them no matter what. At this time one has been THC free for over two years, while the other is still in over their head. Both have always been appreciative of what I had to say, and I'm still great friends with them.
If a friend is becoming unhealthier and squandering opportunities because of a plant, substance, or whatever, it is completely okay to bring it up to them in a tactful way. The kind of friend who is unwilling to tell you the truth when you may need it most is the kind who's number you need to be throwing in the dumpster.
> Your focus on dissecting my use of idiom as some sort of in-built hatred for weed smokers is honestly so on point for the HN commenter community its actually almost funny.
I don’t know about that, I swear that ever since the Reddit drama the temperature has been dialed way up in the comment section if HN. More downvotes, more pithy comments, more line by line comment dissections.
> "Hey man have you tried going a couple days without smoking weed?" is not interrogation. It's concern.
It's still telling them what YOU think they should do, no matter how nicely and concerned you phrase it. At some point you have to walk away; they're full adults, they're not your responsibility, they're able to make their own choices, and unless they affect you directly it's ultimately not your job to fix them.
Friends are people you can show concern for. If you only ever have softball easy conversations with then they're probably not a friend, they're an acquaintance. Sometimes hard conversations are necessary.
> Of course, when confronted, they say it's not addictive and they dont have a problem. As we know this is the first sign of a very serious addiction.
this has to be more nuanced, because according to this logic 100% of all humans have this addiction. If you confront a non-addict, they too will tell you that they don't have a problem.
They weren't talking about a smiling addiction (whatever that means) or any other random addiction. Denying that you have a cannabis addiction says nothing at all about any other addictions you may or may not have.
They were talking specifically about cannabis addiction, and suggesting that denial that you have a cannabis addiction is a sign of having a cannabis addiction. (However, this doesn't really make sense because people who are not addicted to cannabis will equally claim to not be addicted to cannabis.)
Re-read the full context. He said they spend "the majority of their day high". That's a "very serious" addiction, because their dependence of the drug is erecting defenses in the conscious mind to the denial of the reality that they probably can't stop. On the contrary, if for example I need to take an SSRI to keep depression at bay, I would be perfectly content to tell you that I had a major depressive disorder, and that the drug helps me stay functional - I'm diagnosed, treated, and aware of the fact. Also contrarily, if I smoke a joint every Friday night with my wife after the kids go to bed because we want to relax, but if we can get a baby sitter we'll jump at the chance to go out for a night on the town without weed, then I'm not addicted - I just use the drug situationally because it's my preferred option.
Would you say the same thing if we're talking about caffeine? I know many productive members of society that spend all day drinking coffee. They would even suffer actual withdrawal symptoms if they tried to stop.
People do weed to combat major depressive disorder to stay functional. Your comment and the original are filled with assumptions and give way too much credit to the pharmaceutical industry to not be screwing us over with these psychiatric meds. I don’t push my anti-psychiatric meds personal feelings on any one except people who are super judgmental about weed. I haven’t looked studies up for any of this stuff but I have enough personal experience to understand what works well enough for me.
A relative drinks tea all day. They tried to compare another relatives cigarette smoking and their tea drinking to my weed usage. Both of those people can’t go a day without their substance. That seems to be an addiction.
Do they have a good reason not to get high? Alcohol is different because it’s much less healthy, more expensive, and causes hangovers. I can’t think of any side effects of non-smoked cannabis that last beyond the evening except for the stuff that matters in 30 years
> Ever since it became legal I have friends who spend majority of their day high. Of course, when confronted, they say it's not addictive and they dont have a problem. As we know this is the first sign of a very serious addiction.
Before it became legal, I'm willing to bet those friends spent a majority of their day doing something equally unproductive. Be it playing video games, or watching tv, whatever $couch_potato_activity. And they're probably just doing the same stupid thing while high, because it's even more fun that way.
It's easy to villify a drug for what would happen either way, you're not proving a causal relationship. Pot and being a lazy slob dovetail quite nicely, just like pizza and beer. Nobody blames pizza and beer for the fat stained-shirt slob who never gets off their ass.
Reading just this comment, I'm inclined to think your friend is likely correct. You very clearly have a dangerous bias against THC and it's clear in your rhetoric, for example:
> while biologically correct gave these type of people a get out of jail free card.
Yikes.
I think part of the problem is ever since legalization weed became more mainstream (potentially dangerous) but weed-conservatism (i.e. exaggerating real risks of THC) also became much more common to encounter (also potentially dangerous). The reality is somewhere in between. I do not use THC, but as someone who used it previously and it tremendously helped me, my current mental model and set of anecdotes say you're likely wrong and exaggerating the real risk your friend is under.
Because THC is shown to be an effective care for many mental and physical problems. THC itself can be dangerous or even very dangerous (psychosis risk etc) but this doesn't warrant being so overly cautious that we miss the forest for the trees. Facts show THC can be a very effective palliative tool, and it's unclear how much damage you can do with short-term regular use.
> You very clearly have a dangerous bias against THC and it's clear in your rhetoric
On the topic of biases, I wonder why you consider theirs to be "dangerous".
Regardless, their biases to seem to stem from a certain personal experience with marijuana, particularly their friends' habits with it. It's possible this person's "friends who spend majority of their day high" have a substance abuse problem even if not everybody who uses the substance abuses it.
> Because THC is shown to be an effective care for many mental and physical problems. THC itself can be dangerous or even very dangerous (psychosis risk etc) but this doesn't warrant being so overly cautious that we miss the forest for the trees. Facts show THC can be a very effective palliative tool, and it's unclear how much damage you can do with short-term regular use.
To add, it also leads to apologism of (or apathy for) locking people up for consuming THC.
> Of course, when confronted, they say it's not addictive and they dont have a problem. As we know this is the first sign of a very serious addiction.
No, saying you don’t have an addiction may be a common thing addicts (and non-addicts!) do, but its not even close to the first sign of addiction. Or even a recognized symptom. Or even a recognized danger sign that would call for more intense screening. Its not a useful indicator of addiction at all.
> 20 years ago we called it weed, now we call it "cannabis".
“Weed”/“pot"/“ganja”/etc. are sonewhat vague slang. “Marijuana” and “hemp” are legal categories. “Cannabis” is a correct, precise term that encompasses both hemp and marijuana.
> Of course, when confronted, they say it's not addictive and they dont have a problem. As we know this is the first sign of a very serious addiction.
We don't know anything of the sort.
It's common for addicts to think they aren't addicted. But it's also common for non-addicts to think they aren't addicted, because, you know, they aren't.
It's just difficult in many cases to tell whether someone is addicted, and your confidence that you know isn't warranted, nor does it make you particularly helpful to addicts.
From a practicality perspective, a decent litmus test I think is "does the behaviour cause problems in your life?" and a follow-on to that is "do you want to stop but feel that you're unable to?"
I am addicted to tobacco. It causes me social and relationship grief. It's very hard to stop. Health-wise I don't need a lecture on the long-term harm I am doing, but in the short-term I'm generally going pretty good. Great cardio, decent blood pressure, shrug. I low-key want to stop, but it's not urgent.
I am likely addicted to caffeine as well, although suffer virtually zero obvious negative consequences from that other than needing a cup or two throughout the day to feel alert.
Someone else in this this thread mentioned losing multiple jobs because of weed. They're likely addicted to it, or suffering from some other kind of mental condition that results in them having poor impulse control/pleasure-seeking behaviour.
Clearly "weed" is the slang term and "cannabis" is the name of the plant!
> These same potheads
This seems more like branding to me :P
The ultimate denial has to be the people with ADHD, because of course the only cure for ADHD is daily meth amphetamine use. "It actually calms me down"
Maybe not an addiction in the sense that they get shakes and sweats when they quit cold turkey (or risk death), but definitely a dependence that I see in a lot of people; a dependence on weed just to be able to relax.
But the side effect of being high all the time is indifference. Things can wait.
I don't think the wording makes much of a difference, that's like saying "I drink" vs "I imbibe alcohol". Or as South Park said it, "I'm not having a glass of wine, I'm having six, it's called a tasting and it's classy".
But it does become dangerous when people think of it as medicinal, as a kind of self-medication. Some people need it, for sure, but for a lot of people it's self-medicating without dealing with the root issues.
But then there's plenty of examples of self-medicating, ranging from sugar, energy drinks, video games, alcohol, sex, work, etc.
None of this is true for me or a few other people I know.
I had a rough childhood. I didn’t get help. I tried, but I have debilitating anxiety and the system expects you to be able to manage getting help even if that’s what you need help with.
The pandemic broke my brain. The amt of complaining every one did about the lockdowns. All people were talking about was a life I was forced to subsist in because I was never given help. Last year I tried weed and it has helped a lot.
I don’t need to say I smoke weed X a day to myself. I’ll just say it to you or anyone else. Sound like a degenerate to who? You? Judgmental people?
I got tired of proving I’m not a “degenerate”. I would get off weed to prove to people around me I don’t need it, but it’s never enough. If you don’t think weed is medication then that’s on you.
Many things can be addictive as that largely has to do with how a person's habits affect their life. One can play card games without becoming addicted.
People commonly say things like this to suggest that it necessarily causes addiction which makes it a Bad Thing. It is true generally that it "can" cause addiction but only true circumstantially that it "does" cause addiction. Again, I may be reading too much into the comment but it seemed to be trying to make the "necessarily does cause addiction" point.
hilarious to see two hundred years of alcohol and tobacco medical cases, make big noises about an herb from the ground. They really have no clue?
being "friendly and creative" does not make good armies. It really does come down to that, doesnt it?
Obviously all kinds of people abuse substances daily. I saw a grown man sniff solvent glue from a bag once! How stupid is that? No one is suggesting that substance abuse is benign. The difference here is that this is a Political Newspaper pointing to "peril." The article is not the entire story, it is a partial story designed to create reactions along a story-line.
get more exercise and relate to people.. not a headliner
The Roman Empire knew about marijuana from the Scythians and some turkic people, and from South Asia. The Romans rejected those cultures and built professional armies instead. Their drug was alcohol. Christian reformers 500 years after the Fall of the Western Empire stuck with that formula, including alcohol in the Holy Sacrament, explicitly rejecting other substances. Hebrews also rejected other substances but included meat and alcohol -- which are explicitly banned in Hindu-Vedic systems with a vegetarian approach.
The coolest part of this whole discussion is that we can finally compare weed and alcohol.
Before the current weed era, weed was always compared favorably, by smokers, to alcohol with the adage: Weed is illegal, yet I've never seen a bar fight after everyone gets high.
Now we can do a real comparison of the effects of weed smoking on the general public, the same way we've done with drinking.
And my point is that this is weird and lurid, not "cool". It's like cheering that a smallpox outbreak occurred so you can study the disease progression.
The point seems to be interesting in a way which might be called "cool" if one happens to be so interested. Even if one finds it lurid they may also find it interesting or "cool".
> It's like cheering that a smallpox outbreak occurred so you can study the disease progression.
I believe I understand the point. We don't want to celebrate a negative occurrence simply because there is silver lining. However, it's hard to see past a certain false equivalence that's being made. A disease which propagates ought to be treated differently from personal choices even if the things are equally destructive to the individual.
But I'm a philosopher at heart. Let's say a person chooses to infect themselves with a disease to facilitate study of some aspect of it. Let's also say that they are able to do this in an environment that all but guarantees the disease will not propagate except possibly to other willing volunteers. Should this research be prevented? Would the results of this research definitely not be "cool", meaning "interesting"?
It's more like, suppose people are purposefully infecting themselves with smallpox, and then suddenly the common cold is legalized so people switch to that. I could consider that "cool." Possibly similar story with vaping vs. smoking but the decrease in harmfulness is less obvious there.
True story: I was talking to an academic who was doing a study, aiming to get people to fill out a big questionnaire on health and lifestyle. As an incentive, people got a voucher for a gym. "Don't you think you'd get different results if you offered 200 cigarettes or a bottle of vodka instead?" I asked, "Well that wouldn't get past the ethics board!"
When I was in my early 20s I would probably say I had a dependence on cannabis. Key for me in transitioning away from that was lower THC % products. It's was as if I wanted to enjoy a single beer after work but the only thing available was everclear. Most vape pens are billed as 85%+ THC. Now, I still enjoy cannabis, but I have a single puff of a vape pen that is around 3% THC (the rest is usually CBD) before bed. Or I take an edible that is 1.5mg THC (very low, edibles are usually sold at 5-10mg doses). It's a much different relationship. I don't feel like my mind is racing out of control, I don't build up a massive tolerance. I sleep fine without it. It's startling to think that a single puff of a 90% pen is literally 30x as much THC.
However, these products are disappointingly few and far between. When I walk into a CA dispensary, I actually have to hunt around for them, if they're even available. When I ask, staff members wonder if I'm buying it for my grandmother! It would be great to see the industry refocus on products that are designed to be consumed in moderation.
>It would be great to see the industry refocus on products that are designed to be consumed in moderation.
I feel that the legal weed industry is speedrunning the past decade of craft brewing. Craft beer focused on growing the scene while focusing on higher and higher ABV beers, but now is transitioning back towards beers that are a bit more sessionable and don’t get you blasted after 2 beers. Wouldn’t be surprised to see the weed industry start focusing on sessionable items sooner rather than later.
Very much in agreement. Cannabis as a medicine means needing other cannabinoids other than THC. The minors all contribute in ways that we're just now really starting to study for a better understanding of the why.
Underlying assumption is that moderation is the issue, however it's addiction for those that can't quit. In layman's terms, the brain's chemistry has been altered permanently. This can happen for some even after the first use THC, opioids, alcohol and you name it.
Obviously the progression doesn't happen as fast for some. However, the key being they can't quit in moderation or in excess. Some can abstain for 3 months, some for six, thinking they don't have a problem but then find themselves using even a little. There's a self-rationalization as well as self-centeredness that's part of the disease process of addiction. I would say it's not only a disease process but it is a huge factor. Cross addiction substituting one substance for another is also part of that self-rationalization.
You're talking about withdrawal which is semi-related to an underlying diagnosis of addiction. That is to say someone can go through quitting a substance without withdrawals symptoms yet still have an addiction.
I hear this claim often that your brain chemistry changes from substance use and it makes sense when you look at addicts. But with other things relating to addiction, I found claims to be hyperbole. An example is addiction is a disease no different than cancer. We don't want to tell addicts to just cut it out. But is it true? Are there scans of people before and after a while of chronic substance abuse that shows brain differences? Can we scan someone's brain and tell that they're addicts? Honest question, I don't know
I think a nuance that's lost is the difference in addiction between a pharmacological substance vs a behavior. "Brain scans" and their equivalents will do a much better job revealing the former than the latter. That doesn't make behavioral addictions any less damaging from a holistic view of the patient's health (i.e. their overall quality of life).
To me, I feel as though that behavioral addiction is completely disregarded by the medical community. If someone is lighting up every night / having a drink and want to stop, they need an alternative way of closing out the day. Otherwise of course it'll be difficult.
Well what's behavior and what's addiction? Let's go down a thought exercise. Imagine yourself in the following scenarios:
1. Imagine you're going to Walmart. You see a friend. "You say hi and raise your hand to draw attention" However, they walk right past you without even acknowledging your presence.
What is your first thought? Maybe "Jerk!", "he's busy?".
You don't have control over that first thought, but you do have control over that second thought and your actions thereafter. Addiction messes with your first thoughts and attention. Next scenario
2. A wife and a husband are driving down the road. The wife notices Kohl's is having a 50% off and the husband notices that Andy's liquor store has two six pack for the price of one.
In this case, due to addiction, the husband noticed that Andy's liquor store and that's a craving. His awareness was drawn to that sign with a subconscious cue influenced by addiction.
Therefore, someone who wishes to maintain sobriety has to be very self-aware of their thoughts and actions. They have to guard themselves from triggers, situations, people and then manage those other aspects they can't control.
It's important to acknowledge that addiction is a disease as framed in the above scenarios. However, it does require a conscience behavioral change maintaining a certain level of awareness of self to sustain sobriety.
It isn't helpful for people to view themselves as simply a character flaw when going through addiction because their brain is scarred. It doesn't mean they can't make poor choices and not choose to maintain to pursue sobriety. Their behavior matters and their disease matters.
I am not sure about other drugs, but in the case of alcohol the rewiring is certainly not hyperbolic and not even limited to the brain. Humans have a special physiological relationship to alcohol and the human body will literally rewire both its neurological and digestive system to accommodate the increasing intake of long term alcoholics. It takes months to years for these changes to be undone, if they can be undone at all.
Might be because there's a lot of people like me that only like that style of beer. I don't dislike other types of beer, but I'd rather drink something else than a lager, stout, porter, pilsner, etc. I've found that there aren't a lot of diehards for any other style, but IPA diehards are a dime a dozen.
Agreed, IPAs(west coast, hazy, etc) are pretty much the only beer I enjoy drinking(for taste). Occasionally, I'll take a lager on a hot day when I want something really "light".
I could drink a hazy pale or NEIPA anytime, it would be my desert island style for sure. Never liked the high IBU IPAs that were everywhere for a while because of the bitterness. (And I love all the Campari-adjacent cocktails)
I feel similarly about the store-bought THC products in Canada. They're like high ABV, hopped-up IPAs when really I just want a light, refreshing, repeatable beer with good flavour.
I dug the initial intense craft beers that started coming out in the late 90s/early 2ks, but got sick of it pretty quickly. A highball with American whiskey is my goto chillout drink, but when I drink beer, I like subtlety-- European pilsners, really mellow dry stouts, brown ales, and things like that. Most US craft beer fans' palates, and the commensurate offerings from craft breweries, are so jacked up that they don't even realize how distant they are from something I'm interested in drinking. The styles of the same name offered by US craft breweries are so extra compared to their namesake styles that they're totally different animals.
I'm not going to lie-- I'm also put off by some vibes in the craft beer scene has taken on in the past 10 or 15 years. When many craft beer fans see me order a classic European pilsner, with shocking frequency they a) attempt to shame me for ordering such a 'boring' beer, b) assume they need to educate me about this amazing thing called craft beer that I've clearly never encountered before, or c) assume my palate is unsophisticated. Like... listen bro... I'm a classically trained chef-- I've spent more time actively developing my palate than you've spent even thinking about it. I can tell you things you didn't know about the beer you're drinking based solely on your breath. Some very big names in craft beer were my multiple-times-per-week drinking buddies for years. I'm glad you've cultivated a passion for a locally-made food/bev product... now go be smug about your foamy bug spray juice elsewhere. lol
An old strip from the newsprint comic Zits has always stuck in my mind. In the strip, the kid takes a sip of his father's wheatgrass smoothie and describes it as licking the bottom of a lawnmower.
That is how I feel about most of the overpoweringly strong IPAs that have been all the rage for so long.
Considering that I'm responding to other people's assumption that they are superior to me based on my beer order, I don't feel the slightest bit bad about taking a dig at them.
As an aside, how often do you offer unsolicited patronizing critique of other people's beer order?
I mean, I'd definitely try such a thing if someone offered it to me. You often can't predict how multiple complex flavors will snap together and sometimes weird-sounding things are counterintuitively amazing. That said, the chance I'd drink something like that regularly is zero.
While I'm classically trained, my focus is from-scratch bar food while keeping it at the same price point as the frozen food service shit. I used white truffles, beluga caviar, and things like that when working in fine dining and in culinary school, but never once have I purchased such things for my own menu.
That's wild. Sorry people were negative to you. That sort of reaction is very alien to me. I've had thousands of beers with many hundreds of people and never really encountered that.
No need to apologize for other people's bad behavior. Craft beer doesn't have more snobs than any other group of passionate people-- certainly not more than fancy food-- but the nerdy one-upsmanship is much more prevalent. I think for some of these guys it's their equivalent to trash talking about sports or other kinds of fandom, and for others, it's a way to quell insecurity about their own knowledge level in a realm that they consider competitive.
I worked in bars and restaurants as a side gig for about 15 years and full-time for a few so the sheer number of people I've encountered naturally means I'll have encountered more dinks than most. And because of my food/bev-industry-heavy social set, I've spent quite a lot of time in the more "serious" craft beer bars, and those are magnets for that type. That said, I've also spent a ton of time in high-end restaurants and wine bars and never had anyone make snide comments about, say, ordering a more straightforward wine or a cheeseburger (but in kitchens, I've definitely heard chefs talk shit about people ordering burgers... mostly because they're frustrated more people aren't trying their more creative offerings. And then they go home and eat hot pockets for dinner.) And most sommeliers I've encountered are so worried about coming across like snobs that they almost overcompensate.
yep. I'm currently pretty fatigued with the offerings at bottle shops and taprooms....increasingly glad I committed to brewing my own a long while back. Currently sipping on a very delightful British Golden Ale - a style I haven't seen commercially available around me, but will now be a standard in my summer brewing.
Cannabis has an inverse relationship between potency and health as alcohol. Drinking a dozen beers is (marginally) less dangerous than a dozen shots, because it takes longer to process and alcohol is a toxin. THC isn't a toxin. The smaller amount you inhale, of smoke or vapor, the better. I'll take a puff of some 90+% vapor any day over having to smoke an entire joint for the same effect.
What we need is more accurate vapor delivery devices that can meter better.
Disagree. Those 12 beers contain a vast amount of carbs that will not be in the liquor.
Now, sure, if you slam 12 shots of Cuervo back to back you're going to have a bad time - 12 shots is an entire bottle if you're actually getting full pours.
But if you consumed one shot or one beer every hour... no difference in the effects.
Hah I've known a few people to sip shots at the bar. They don't get shunned for it. It just means people don't buy them a shot.
Also most people who take shots aren't trying to get wasted. Drinking a shot the normal way every half hour to an hour alongside always having a beer to sip until done for the night is fairly standard. e.g. about 6 beers and 3 shots over the course of 2 to 4 hours.
And of course there are plenty of zero-cal mixers (like seltzer water) that you can add to the liquor and make it as sippable as you want.
That's the real play... decent gin, soda water, maybe a splash of lime juice, served on ice in a pint glass (usually ordered as a double or else it's too watery).
You up with something as sippable as beer, with fewer calories and zero added sugar. (except a little from the lime, but lime doesn't have that much by fruit standards).
PS: Shot glasses are for college students. A glencairn (good luck...) or a rocks glass are far better. Much of the taste comes from smell so you really wanna get those vapors up your nose... at least if you're drinking something worth drinking, and not just trying to get plastered on the cheap.
When I was younger, I'd have about a shot an hour or so, and simply drink water or soda in between (4 drinks over the night). I'd meet with a group of people pretty regularly for Karaoke night at a local bar. Doing so, I could pretty much go the night without getting drunk (6'1", 280# at the time). In my own experience, when it's social activity, you generally won't be shunned for not drinking as long as you are participating, and aren't talking down to those that are.
All experiences differ of course, but I am going to be wasted if I drink 6 beers and 3 shots over 4 hours. The same volume over 2 hours would probably end up sending me to bed.
Are these UK shots or US shots? A shot in the US is almost twice as much as a shot in England (1.5oz or 44 mL vs the 25mL shots in England).
In California, 6 beers (typical beers averaging 6% abv) + 3 shots (5.5oz of hard alcohol) over 2-4 hours would be straight up alcoholic levels of consumption.
Inconsistency of dosing has, at least in the past, been a significant concern — especially with regard to medicinal use. Doctors for a long time preferred herb vaporizers (and may still) because it’s frankly just the best way to accurately gauge and dose.
Regulation has vastly improved the situation for edibles. You can generally get accurate dosages with precise mixtures in any form factor you desire. However different states have diferring regulation.
Except vaporizing/smoking gives wildly different results depending on the type of plant and its potency. One puff can either do not much or send you spinning, and your supposed tolerance may not even matter. The flower you smoke looks the same no matter if it has 5% THC or 35% THC, so gauging the potency of inhaled THC is practically impossible.
Edibles are very consistent, at least today they are. The problem with them is that people are stupid and don't know how to find the right dose responsibly. They take a gummy, it tastes pretty good, and then after 15 or 20 minutes they don't feel anything so they take another, because yum, it tastes like candy so why not. Then it starts to kick in after 30 or 40 minutes and it's double the dose so they feel nauseated and sick.
The best way to gauge the effects of an edible dose is to take the edible on an empty stomach, wait about 20 minutes, then eat a meal, and do not take a second dose. After eating your metabolism will get that dose into your blood stream right quick and before you're done with the meal you will definitely be feeling the full effect if you took enough. And if you don't feel much, then the dose is too low. Try again tomorrow. Don't double up the dose in the same sitting, because then you're really not getting an accurate result. Take maybe 1/3 more the next day, try again. If it's still not enough then the next day try a little more. When you find the right dose, then stick to it.
Excellent and well-outlined info correcting my outdated understanding — which is also why I noted “in the past” several times in my comment :). Sounds like regulation has allowed for greater edible consistency indeed. AND that people taking too much too quick is still a thing, regardless.
That being said, the other side of this (in a pre-legalized world) was that the plants you grew on your own tended to be within a certain potency range, which meant 1 puff roughly equaled another — as opposed to baked goods, where butter could end up spread throughout inconsistently. There’s also the swifter intake-to-feedback loop when smoking/vaping, which made “taking too much” easier to see coming and avoid. Thus my old fashioned POV.
Baked goods usually means pot brownies, but it doesn't matter what type. I fell victim to the delicious brown squares a few times. Then I learned that if I'm going to make a batch of pot brownies, that I need to make 3 batches of brownies with only 1 being "magic", or just 1 batch of pot brownies and 3 batches of chocolate chip cookies - because what do you do when you eat some pot brownies? You want to eat more pot brownies, because they're delicious and you have the munchies now.
But you're right, it's way easier to not "overdose" with inhaled THC than it is with edibles. People just need to approach the two methods differently. Inhaling is instant gratification, where as eating is delayed gratification. Not everyone is capable of delaying gratification because so many people are impatient and impulsive. Edibles are still vastly superior in terms of healthiness so long as they aren't just 95% sugar and 5% THC.
Personally, these days I use "Protabs" which contain 0 sugar, just THC and a binder (probably corn starch) and the high is extremely clean and clear and completely guilt-free. And the dosage is very reliable and repeatable. There's no guessing involved now that I know my tolerance.
> The flower you smoke looks the same no matter if it has 5% THC or 35% THC
I get what you’re saying - but this is not practically true. Weed that contains 35% THC has a lot to do with the conditions it’s grown in which affects a lot of the other physical qualities of the weed. Smell, color, size of nug, density, humidity all are very correlated with potency.
And none of that matters to 90% of people going into a dispensary these days. A lot of people who weren't "stoners" are going to legal dispensaries and buying whatever the girl at the counter is pushing. They can't tell the smell, color, size, density or anything from one strain to another. Then they smoke too much and get "the spins".
This feels like a negative summary with a lot of assumptions chained on.
Alternate take, dispensaries have enabled many people I know to get a reliable product that acts the same each time they buy it and use it, and let them dial in exactly what strain and quantity and method of ingestion works best for them. Before the commercialization one never had the diversity and reliability of product they have now.
Contrast that to the before times where people, as you put it, bought whatever the dealer was selling.
What you recently ate can have a big impact. I only bought from reputable brands that had consistent dosages, but my diet could make two doses of the same gummy feel quite different night to night.
For me it was primarily how “heavy” the meal was. Eating 1lb of brisket with some bread would result in the edible taking longer to get into my bloodstream than something like a modest salad and some fruit.
The legal status of cannabis, including edibles, varies widely across different countries and regions. In places where cannabis is illegal or tightly regulated, discussing edibles might be avoided to comply with the law or maintain a more conservative stance on the topic.
Idk about cannabis but I hear this all the time with cigarettes vs vaping and I just know it's a bunch of FUD.
I can not smoke cigarettes, never liked them, always got headaches from them. With vaping quality liquid I have no issues and I'm a heavy user. Not saying it's good for you but claiming it is worse or the same as literal smoke is just wrong
I won’t argue thar vaping is worse, but I will say that having less immediate discomfort at the time of use is not a solid basis for concluding it is not.
I'm talking about cartridges, which often throw chunks of superhot oil onto the lungs. let's wait for the research in 20 years that says it's also terrible.
Not sure how cannabis vapes work, but for the "I enjoy and/or am addicted to nicotine, but would rather not inhale CO, tars, particulates, etc" type, if you are vaping any oils, you're doing something wrong.
That sort of vape liquid is nicotine in a suspension of food/medical grade PG/VG and likely some small bit of flavoring in the same. It's essentially a tiny version of the fog machines that blast out vapor in nightclubs.
I've had a severe lung infection for 3+ months due to vaping and am still recovering.
I know its just an anecdote but people YOU ONLY GET ONE PAIR OF LUNGS and they heal differently then other parts of your body (or they don't heal at all - COPD is TERMINAL).
Agreed. Quitting smoking (THC) and vaping have been the two healthiest decisions I’ve ever made. I was also having breathing issues, though thankfully never as acute an issue as you did.
> Drinking a dozen beers is (marginally) less dangerous than a dozen shots
It's easy to drink 12 shots in succession, but it's very hard to take 12 beers in a reasonably comparable amount of time. This is not a good comparison. It's obviously much easier to poison yourself with strong alcohol.
Why would an industry that sells a addictive and harmful product do that? alcohol is more harmful and cannabis is more addictive (comparing how many say they try to quit), but apart from that they're not so different from the market perspective.
Craft beers are just a niche. I don't trust the industry to self-regulate towards less profit.
Gotta just be blunt here and let you know that yours id an awful take and those are awful reference points you're drawing from there. I'm stunned to find anyone this far removed from the release of "Reefer Madness" who believes that cannabis is more addictive than alcohol.
As a recovered addict who has spent many months in multiple rehabs and many hours at meetings -- with hundreds of other addicts, I can assure you that booze is EASILY more dangerous/unhealthy/addictive than weed. Across the board; worse by every general measure.
It seems difficult to measure this, as it's wildly varying in addictiveness depending on the wildly varying affects each human gets from the substances.
Yes, it's just one possible way to measure. But I think the number of users who say they've tried to cut down/quit and failed, is a pretty practical measure.
Dangerous/unhealth/addictive are three different things! I specifically said alcohol is more dangerous and unhealthy.
Judging from the number of users who say they would like to stop using it but can't, cannabis is more addictive, however. There are plenty of surveys of this, and I've seen even cannabis activists take them seriously, advocating offerings to cut down/quit similar to those we offer to smokers.
I don't know why, and this is just one possible measure of addictiveness, but it is what it is.
I wonder what the impact of cannabis being illegal federally has on this sort of thing.
A lot of people went from drinking beer and wine when Prohibition was first enacted in the US and moved to liquor. This happened because many of the speakeasies would rather have a given volume of liquor versus beer because they can serve more customers and there is less of a concern about your product being large and conspicuous.
With illicit drugs you often find the producers making the drugs more and more concentrated so they can move more product in a smaller volume and then step on it to make up the bulk later down the supply chain.
It would make sense to me that dispensaries would be more interested in buying and receiving higher THC product because they can either do more with less or they can have customers come in less often and serve more of them.
When you put metrics on something. You see its limits... then you push them. Every industry does that till they find sky is the limit but its actually about balance.
>Look for federally legal hemp derived delta 9 products. They usually max out at 5 or 10mg per serving
So funny that that law didn't account for how edibles work. If you have a baked good (brownie, cookie, etc.) which weighs 100 grams, and it contains 29mg delta-9 THC, thats below the 0.3% legal threshold, and still a solid dose.
I always try to explain this to people, that the Republicans actually unwittingly legalized weed in 2017, but no one ever gets it. Fact is, delta-9 THC edibles are now federally legal (and can be ordered online) in all 50 states due to the Farm Bill loophole.
Most people don't know about Delta-9 yet. It was brought to my attention when I saw a video about a business selling Delta-9 drinks in an illegal state.
Delta 9 is the long-known active ingredient in regular marijuana. You're thinking of delta 8, which is a new isolate.
This is kind of my point though. When I talk about this stuff, people assume I just mean delta 8, or CBD or whatever. Nope. Straight up delta 9 edibles are 100% federally legal now.
You could explain why it matters, instead of complaining that people don't understand. Delta-8 is also psychoactive and not well known so it's easy to mix up.
CBD has been legal for a while and is completely different than THC products so it shouldn't be compared.
Stating Delta-9 is legal, not Delta-8, is not that big of a difference. If you think it is, you should talk about why it matters because your attitude obviously hasn't worked thus far for dealing with people who just don't understand. Maybe, you're not concerned with people understanding as much as you state.
It was funny last year when Minnesota set a limit of 5mg/serving and 50mg/package. All this stuff in the news about MN legalizing edibles, but they just put a limit on potency of products that were already sold there. And now you can get cans of seltzer that have 10mg and call it 2 servings.
That's because the loophole doesn't exist. It's an obviously flawed interpretation of the 2018 Farm Bill which isn't likely to hold up in court when it's finally tested there.
The prefatory text to Schedule I(c) of the Controlled Substances Act removes all doubt: “[u]nless specifically excepted or unless listed in another schedule, any material, compound, mixture, or preparation, which contains any quantity of the following hallucinogenic substances” is a Schedule I substance.
A 12 mg THC extract infused into a 4-gram gummy consisting of non-cannabis isn’t a “hemp” gummy. It is a “material,” “mixture,” or “preparation” containing “marihuana,” which is a Schedule I controlled substance.
>which isn't likely to hold up in court when it's finally tested there.
This is the key. Who will ever bring this in front of a judge? The "anti-weed" lobby has all but ceased to exist. Which leaves basically a small handful of deep red state attorney generals that would even have the standing to be able to attempt it.
And which side do you think has the funding (and incentive) to defend it all the way to the supreme court?
The floodgates have opened, and they're never going back. There's simply too much money and momentum behind it. Even the conservatives are on board at this point now that they've seen the tax revenues.
Apparently, an accused trademark violator, in the hopes of proving that, as it was not in legal use in trade, the trademark they are accused of violating was not valid in the first place.
Who would waste their time litigating such a case when the legalization trend is so clear? A solid majority of US citizens live in states which have already decided that federal marijuana laws are irrelevant.
> That's because the loophole doesn't exist. It's an obviously flawed interpretation of the 2018 Farm Bill which isn't likely to hold up in court when it's finally tested there.
It's been tested somewhat (interestingly, in a trademark case which rested on whether the infringed trademark was for a legal product) and it has succeeded at the Circuit Court level. AK Futures LLC v. Boyd Street Distro, LLC, 9th Cir. No. 2-56113 (May 19, 2022):
Importantly, the only statutory metric for distinguishing controlled marijuana from legal hemp is the delta-9 THC concentration level. In addition, the definition extends beyond just the plant to “all derivatives, extracts, [and] cannabinoids.” 7 U.S.C. § 1639o(1). The use of “all” indicates a sweeping statutory reach. See Lambright v. Ryan, 698 F.3d 808, 817 (9th Cir. 2012) (“The common meaning of the word ‘all’ is ‘the whole amount, quantity, or extent of; as much as possible’ . . . .” (quoting All, Merriam-Webster (online ed., visited Oct. 4, 2012))). This seemingly extends to downstream products and substances, so long as their delta-9 THC concentration does not exceed the statutory threshold.
Of course, as this was on an appeal of a denial of a preliminary injunction, the ruling is framed in likelihood of success rather than absolute terms, but its a pretty strong negative indicator for your argument that this is a clearly incorrect interpretation that no court would take seriously, since both the District Court and the Circuit Court very much took it seriously.
As other commenters have said, I think "the train has already left the station" on this one, and considering even conservative states aren't trying to crack down on this, who's going to bring it to court?
For example, Florida recently was about to pass a state law limiting the total amount of THC in each individual edible, which would have killed the "legal D9 THC" market. They apparently got huge pushback from producers/consumers in the state and dropped any limits: https://floridaphoenix.com/blog/florida-senate-approves-hemp...
Edit: BTW, though, that link from Matt Zorn was great, thanks for posting.
> I always try to explain this to people, that the Republicans actually unwittingly legalized weed in 2017, but no one ever gets it.
It's because you're using the word wrong. Weed is illegal federally. The problem is that you think THC is weed, and Delta-9 is weed, and CBD is weed. Words have meaning. A caffeine pill isn't coffee, and beef steak isn't a cow. Something being derived from something doesn't make it that original thing.
I think they are using the word correctly in the commonly agreed upon wording. Republicans legalized hemp technically, then set the legal definition of hemp such that THCa flower fit under that definition. THCa flower does not have more than 0.3% THC by weight (well it might but that's another issue of allowing pre harvest testing), it can however have more than 0.3% THCa by weight. THCa converts to THC when exposed to heat (such as combustion in a joint, pipe, oven, etc.). In common word usage of weed as a plant that gets you high off THC when you smoke it then they did legalize 'weed'.
These guys are legit. I just toured their production facility last week and I was impressed enough that we chose them as our contract manufacturer for gummies.
I have a hard time finding 5mg dose edibles for my wife. Most are 10 plus. Was at the dispensary the other day and a girl who probably weighed 115lbs suggested I try capsules as they are stronger. Capsules are 30mg and she says she takes 2 at a time.
That dosage is insane to me. I'm 235lbs and 15mg is a solid, "I'm not driving" dose for me.
Edibles at high doses are a completely different experience. a 60mg dose would be comparable to acid with heavy thought loops and perhaps ego death. Some people are looking for that I guess.
Tolerance varies insanely for edibles. Some people dont process them like others. Ive heard about people just not getting high from edibles at all, even high doses like you described. It‘d be curious if this phenomenon is backed by science or not.
I'm one of those people for whom edibles don't really seem to work. Knowing this, last time I gave it a go I took 90mg followed by another 90mg an hour later. Didn't feel a thing. Don't think I'll buy any again.
I had that problem too. I can usually eat like 40-60mg without anything... And yet one night I took a 10mg all by itself and had an amazing time! It makes no sense to me.
It's so easy/cheap to use low-spectrum cannabis oil in edibles, and most uneducated/recreational users can't/won't feel the difference between how THC feels, compared with all of the compounds you're supposed to have together when using cannabis.
One thing I've noticed is that a lot of edibles these days, especially stuff like the candies, don't have the same 'profile' as old school brownies and whatnot. The requirement for precise dosing means many edibles are made using some sort of extract that's been refined to a specific potency, but that can end up losing some of the other psychoactive compounds. But people are sensitive to different cannabinoids differently, which has led to a bigger variance in tolerance I think.
Edibles don't work for me, I'm so sick of hearing about edibles as the "fix all" to health issues. I vape loose leaf cannabis, I'm also sick of people assuming everyone who "vapes" uses cartridges.
Grow the plant, cut and dry the plant, heat the plant & breathe it in. It's pretty simple.
Edibles can definitely do the same, but not distillate made stuff from the store.
Even trying a firecracker (herb cooked in peanut butter on a tortilla chip) at home with your existing purchase of plant matter can show you the difference.
I've been using recreationally for 20 years and a 10mg edible still hits me plenty hard. 20 would hit me like a donkey kick, 60 would make me extremely uncomfortable to say the least.
Lucky. You can add a 0 on the end of those for me, more than that at the high end. I've done 1000mg over the course of ~12 hours before. Now, admittedly I wasn't DOING a whole lot in those 12 hours (mostly watching movies), but I was functional enough that if called upon to do so I could have had a coherent conversation.
I have to cut the 10mg gummies. 1.25mg is my happy place, and if I take more than 2.5mg the room will be rolling and I'll feel totally sick to my stomach for hours.
If you have a tolerance 50mg is nothing. That doesn't even get me high now, forget about when I took edibles every day (minimum 300mg). I'm not a genetic freak or anything either, my wife developed tolerance at the same pace as me.
There is a hemp derived mixture called "purple berry" that is so e proprietary blend of a bunch of cannabinoids. I took a whole one, once, and it was a massive trip, so crazy I don't want to do it again. A quarter of one means I'm doing a movie (or nothing) for the night.
For me, 5-10mg of delta 8 is a good relaxing evening. On the low end, it's an anxiety reducer, on the high end of that, a bit of a giggle and indacouch feeling. 25 mg (one gummy) is a zonk the brain kind of night.
Honestly, for knowing I drink too much alcohol, d8 can be a great substitute on the way to quasi sobriety.
Grey market isolated canabanoids are not at all the same. I would use caution with all of them, and particularly their sources, processing, and purity.
Anecdotal, but at sufficiently high doses, I've noticed that you can make contact with extracorporeal entities. I perceive them as distorted cartoon characters. I have taken other psychedelics like LSD-25, but only edibles at very high doses give me this effect.
Interesting, my wife takes a third to half of a 5mg edible and is good. I take 10mg and then another 5mg about 45 minutes later. I have taken 50mg over the course of a day before but I think the max single dose I have taken is 20mg and I was pretty high but still sociable. I like to maintain a solid sense of control.
It's easy to build a tolerance if you get high enough. I started smoking after years of not, and I was taking 2.5mg feeling toasssstty. But now I need +100mg to get me stoned off edibles.
Becoming a regular smoker is often a hunt for something that can get you just as high as the first time, but nothing will. (Concentrates can get you very high, though.)
With that said, I want to lower my usage -- and, admittedly, it has been hard. Especially if there's hardly anything disincentivizing me from not feeling good all the time. I also have ADHD and take Adderall every day, so it's a part of a routine that has a designated dopamine hit a least once every 1.5hrs, whether that be coffee, weed, whatever.
> Becoming a regular smoker is often a hunt for something that can get you just as high as the first time, but nothing will. (Concentrates can get you very high, though.)
At my peak, I was a half-gram, gram of concentrates a day smoker. There was always the option of taking three or four good dabs in a row and getting past the point of high and into psychedelic panic. The idea that "you can never get as high as the first time" is a total myth peddled by the same people who claim it's a "gateway drug".
Yeah but the first time you get high as fuck, you are high for hours and dont need more than a tiny smoke. Now you need to take 3 or 4 dabs to get that high? Certainly something has changed.
Being a regular smoker seems to require regular breaks or your tolerance is going to blow through your budget and you won't even have the advantage of being high while all your money disappears. A week or two off does wonders. A few months off and that first day back is really nice. I've never been very good at regulating my dosages. I find it much easier to switch between consuming all I want / not consuming anything at all than trying to maintain a consistent low dosage.
Fuckin crazy. In Washington, you cant buy an individual serving over 10mg. Nothing stopping you from eating the whole bag really, but I've heard of other states having edibles up in the 200mg range which seems nuts to me!
I'm not sure you want advice, but I use edible medicinally. I live in Washington and discussed it with my doctors. I also can pretty much only find 10mg doses. What I've found is that after a year I built a tolerance but because I'm regimented with my doctor, 10mg 1x every night, my tolerance has balanced out. It still affects me enough to put me to sleep but it doesn't drop below that. Before I talked to my doctor I was increasing my dosages and it felt like an endless uphill battle to get to the point I could sleep comfortably.
I'm not sure if you're looking for recreational or medicinal, but if it's medicinal the key is to have a regiment. If not, just cut the edible in half. If you're buying gummies they're well enough mixed that you can track the dosage by portioning them carefully.
This reminds me of spice. Synthetic cannabinoids started in 00s as a legal alternative to weed, but in a span of just around 10 years evolved into one of the most frightening drugs out there.
JWH-018, the first very widely available one seemed safer (based on my own limited research) than those that followed, but was banned. it's the same thing every time. chemical gets banned, more dangerous but legal chemical takes it's place, cycle continues.
Since you take a single puff of that pen, is it an oil cart you’re hitting that has just 3% THC?
For those who want to try using low controlled doses like you said, I gotta recommend dry herb/flower vapes - the normie portable ones, not the $400 desktop vape with a fan and everything. It’s easier to find low-but-not-0 THC flower than oil cartridges IME, and if you can’t find them, you can just pack less. It’s also a lot easier on your lungs and having to take multiple hits per packed chamber allows you to control your dose a bit better. Low dose edibles also work but they can last a long time in your body due to being metabolized differently and are similarly hard to find.
You can also mix CBD flower with THC flower to reintroduce what has been bred out. People here might appreciate a setup with a dynavap and an induction heater built from parts and a bit of soldering.
Yeah, it's an oil cart. I've been recommended dry flower vapes before, but for me personally it's just more involved of a process than I'm looking for. The oil cart is zero setup, zero smell, zero cleanup. Hard to beat.
Yeah, I’m convinced that the concentration of THC found in products these days is unhealthy. I’m a weed user myself, but since legalization I haven’t had a great experience due to the high THC contents.
Where do you find the 3% THC in California? Hopefully, it’s someplace in the Bay Area.
CBD is on its own an effective antipsychotic (comparable efficacy to one of the common treatment options in schizophrenia in a 2013 study), and has repeatedly been shown to balance out the psychotic effects of THC.
And I'd say easily 80% or more of the products I've seen in any dispensary I've walked into have ~0% of CBD compared to those heavy THC amounts.
It's no longer "just using something that grows as part of nature" if you completely disrupt the balance of the natural high with extreme levels of selective breeding and processing.
For starters, everyone’s goals for cannabis use are different. A person with Crohn’s for example, who uses cannabis for nausea relief will surely have a different ideal ratio of THC:CBD than a weekend warrior who uses it for muscle pain. There’s no one dosage or ratio that works for everyone and I think that you are greatly exaggerating the importance of weed's so-called "entourage effect" re: THC, THCA, CBD...prolly some terpenes floatin' around in there. I dunno...
Besides, pursuing greater THC "heights" and in process, pushing out CBD has been the way for decades. This is nothing new and those "80% of strains" you sneer at are borne of the same methodology as previous efforts before commercial outfits perfected it.
What's more, "CBD heavy" strains with only 0.3% THC are wildly in demand these days. The more "balanced" iterations with up to ~20-25% THC & ~6-12% CBD are also gaining in popularity.
Same for me, I am prescribed medical cannabis for neuropathic pain and by default they gave me 18% THC.
After a year of getting more and more anxious and panic I did some research and ecided to try 5% THC with 10% CBD, this is much better. No more couch lock, better sleep, more productive and waayyy less anxiety. Same if not better effect on pain.
Myself if I stay away from any cannabis projects for about two weeks I can almost forget that the stuff exists. However, if I have the stuff around I find it almost impossible to say no and I rapidly dose escalate. My guess is that cannabis smoking has both an irritating and anti-inflammatory effect so if I am smoking my breathing is OK and if I am away for two weeks I am OK but my breathing gets bad maybe 4-5 days after quitting. A vape just doesn’t do it for me.
I have few friends who are seriously addicted. Their lives revolve entirely around cannabis. That being said, I don't think it's a particularly addictive substance. People get addicted to all sorts of things. For instance gambling, it's hard to believe someone can be addicted to that, yet people are...
Why is it so difficult to understand how people get addicted to gambling? I'm pretty sure it causes observable physiological changes, like increased heart rate
> THC is destroying mitochondria like nothing else...
Really? I've never heard that.
What source did you learn this from?
I tend to eat weed before running and have for 20ish years. If it really did destroy mitochondria then I'd expect it would show up in my vo2 max or some other measurable health stat.
I'm slightly concerned but given that this is the first time I've heard this, I'm not too worried about it.
I personally believe cannabis + exercise is the most glorious thing on this planet. I've been using it primarily as an ergogenic for some time now, simply fabulous.
If THC was especially good at destroying mitochondria we'd be seeing lots of cannabis users with cases of necrotic tissue due to cells being unable to maintain their metabolism.
There is one great solution to all of this and it’s to never have a substance at all. I’ve had a few things but now don’t drink, smoke, or consume drugs and life is great.
It really must be nice to not feel the need or want to alter your consciousness. Lots of people I know who frequently use cannabis do so in order to change their perception of reality because for many, reality fucking sucks. Getting high is a great way to escape that.
It's clearly less damaging and chemically addictive than alcohol or whatever, but I wouldn't necessarily equate it with collecting Pokemon. I had a roommate who'd been persistently stoned for probably 30 years. A girlfriend convinced him to only use it on a few evenings a week, and he quickly realized that he'd entirely lost the ability to handle urgent negative emotions-- anger, frustration, disappointment, etc. He was still a great guy, but man did that put him through the ringer.
Normally steadfastly mellow, one day I heard him stomping up the stairs to our apartment, then stomped into the living room, looked at me and exasperatedly said "THE WHOLE WORLD IS STUPID. EVERYBODY IS STUPID. EVERYBODY SUCKS" and then went into his room, slammed the door, and literally screamed at the top of his lungs 4 or 5 times. About half an hour later, he came out, apologized and said he got blocked for maybe 45 seconds taking a left into our driveway because someone who'd stopped at the traffic light right there either rudely or obliviously didn't leave an opening, which pushed him right over the edge. I knew what he was going through, and knew he was talking to a therapist about it, so I wasn't worried for him... but I sure felt bad for him!
I want to thank you for sharing this story. I've struggled with my own THC addiction, using it as a crutch for trauma and anxiety, but your comment helped me realize that, like your roommate, the addiction has wrecked my ability to (responsibly and maturely) process negative situations. Enduring those situations is one thing, but seeing how they're connected to other parts of a more complete life is different.
Sometimes it helps to see it described by someone else before you really see what you, yourself are in.
Thanks again for helping a stranger connect some dots. You've given me more to think about in my approach to kick this habit.
check out /r/leaves for community and resources. you're not at all alone, I've been using weed as a crutch since I started during the pandemic and it became habitual--don't think I've quit for more than two weeks since.
it's great that people are discussing this, some people can definitely use weed responsibly and stop easily, but others really, really can't--and the sooner we recognize it as addiction the easier it is to get out.
That's another element I can add, but didn't want to as it's not something I've experienced and know, but have friends in this area.
Regardless of the drug you use, many are used to alleviate whatever problem you have e.g. Stress, Anxiety, Disorders, and then it becomes part of you, and you no longer have the need to address the root cause of why you need the drug. Again, not a doctor, but I think the poster above put it best as a "crutch". It's ok for short term, but long term, you allow yourself to ignore the root cause, which has long term effects.
I've stopped using weed about 3 weeks ago and my first week was rough. The emotional roller coaster I had is exactly what you described in your story. I didn't go as far as screaming or doing anything over the top, but inside I was boiling with anger and resentment.
It's definitely gets better with time but making sure you don't trust yourself and your emotions while going though withdrawal is a key. I didn't have anybody to support me while I was going though this but it's great that some people can understand this and don't take it personally is good to hear.
In my experiences, cannabis is about as addictive as coffee/caffeine.
By that, I mean it's unpleasant to quit after continuous usage due to various withdrawal side-effects but only for a relatively short period of time (3 or 4 days max).
Yes, I have. Though, I have another scheduled break coming up soon.
I didn't start using cannabis until I was in my late 20s almost 30s, and my brain was already fully developed by then (I guess?). So, perhaps that has something to do with it being easy to quit?
I'll say this, cannabis is no panacea, but I do find the benefits profound. There are some negative side-effects, but they are very benign in the grand scheme of life.
I am not anti-medicine by any means, but I will tell you this much. Cannabis has been better in terms of efficacy and side-effects than the one anti-anxiety medication I tried back in the day. Cannabis was far easier to quit too.
I had symptoms for about a month after quitting caffeine.
I think your analogy holds. Most people only have a couple of days of symptoms after quitting caffeine. But if you're on 4+ cups a day and/or you have a sensitive physiology, quitting can be rough.
dabbing all day and vaping oil is in no way comparable to caffeine, cannabis is way more addictive, side effects last longer than 3-4 days as well. People are extremely irritable having lost their main crutch for a month or longer. The fog doesn't lift for about a month. This article is talking about people actually addicted, not like they smoke once a day in the evenings or something.
> dabbing all day and vaping oil is in no way comparable to caffeine
That's comparing the extremes of cannabis administration. I do not utilized any of those methods of administration, so perhaps you are right on how badly it affects one. Then again, I imagine if people were snorting caffeine pills consistently, the withdrawals would be worse than a cup of green tea a day.
Oddly enough, I have never really noticed the irritability as a side-effect. I usually trend towards heightened levels of anxiety. The fog you speak of tends to dissipate for me after a few days to a week.
I just took a long break (1.5 months) after smoking every night for 6 months. Going cold Turkey I basically had no withdrawal symptoms other than my pre-existing sleep issues came back.
In my experience, quitting caffeine is much harder than quitting weed. I've managed to go from daily use to no use for years with marijuana, and did not notice any withdrawal symptoms. Caffeine on the other hand I have tried numerous times to quit, and failed every time. The longest I've managed to go is 3 months, and the withdrawals are terrible.
I do not really get that bad of withdrawals from either. I only get a headache for about a day or two if I quit caffeine, a bit of sluggishness, and that's it really.
I would agree quitting cannabis might actually be easier though. However, the only side-effect I really ever get that is somewhat annoying is insomnia, but that I why I started using cannabis in the first place.
I can't compare cannabis and caffeine because I don't enjoy cannabis so have never become chronic with it; but caffeine is seriously insanely hard to quit. 3-4 days isn't it for me. The one time I kicked it for a chunk of time, it took about 3 weeks before I felt normal enough to feel I'd really kicked it, and lost the craving. I'm very sensitive to the stuff, and I love (good quality) coffee. After a couple months without it, I just ended up back drinking it again.
In comparison, I've smoked cigarettes, cigars, pipe tobacco, and never had a problem quitting. Few days of craving after smoking for a few days, then kicked it. Coffee... brutal brutal brutal
The body metabolizes strains differently. Same with coffee. Really strong robusta coffee bean crashes hard whereas light roasted Arabica tapers very nicely.
From my perspective and my best rationalisation of it, when I'm bored or stressed I reach for a dopamine hit and weed is a great source of one. The next day I'll have a low and there's a 'battle' between the rational and want. The rational side almost never wins and I'll be in a daily usage cycle for months.
That being said I think it's an easier drug to break the cycle of with planning, since it only takes a few days of no use to dramatically improve my chances of resisting and honestly, if I didn't suffer from poor memory performance, I'd be okay as a daily smoker. But working is next to impossible at the level needed as a SDE.
>working is next to impossible at the level needed as a SDE.
This is the truth. I can't reason as well or as quickly. Things go over my head. My working memory is so much smaller. I get lost in code all the time. I forget what I'm working on.
> I can't reason as well or as quickly. Things go over my head. My working memory is so much smaller. I get lost in code all the time. I forget what I'm working on.
Is that while being high on THC, or being sober but having consumed lets say the day before?
why if its cost you so much? Are you seeking treatment or is treatment something you even want? This is not an attack, genuinely interested. My sister is bipolar and she saw positives from stopping cannabis use.
Because I don't care. I'm burnt out. I have lost motivation. I used to care but I let my bipolar disorder get the best of me and there were consequences. I fell off the wagon and it stuck. I started smoking a lot in the pandemic and it compounded.
I work a dead end job now. It pays a fraction of google and is nowhere near the prestige of SpaceX. I don't care at this point.
Sorry you reached that point. You are clearly a smart person to have landed those jobs in the first place. I hope that everything works out for you, really do
Personally I care more about continuing to use marijuana than continuing to work. I've made enough money that I don't really need to work at least for the next decade and don't have anyone depending on me being responsible so the motivation to quit isn't really there.
I would guess marijuana only makes me about 10% worse at my job so it's not like I'm being fired like the other guy.
Not the GP, but for me it can be both. Depends a lot on your overall usage pattern.
Right now I only really smoke once a month at most, when the opportunity presents itself. In these cases, I'm obviously completely non-functional under the influence. But I also smoke a lot less because I have no tolerance, I feel pretty much completely fine the next day, possibly even better than usual, because the resulting night of REM suppressed sleep gives me a jolt of antidepressant effect without the downsides of sleep deprivation.
If I'm in a binging mode, it means I have a huge tolerance, smoke a ton more, and honestly it takes at 2-3 weeks of abstinence before I'm back to baseline for working memory, possibly longer.
But paradoxically, if I'm in such a binge, I'm probably more functional if I've had my morning smoke compared to skipping it for the day, because abstaining would then cause me to be highly irritable and unable to focus on anything in addition to the state of temporary dementia I'd be in. And since there's a massive tolerance, one dose won't have acute deleterious effects to the same degree.
This puts what I tried typing out a lot more succinctly than I could, at least as far as my own experience goes (YMMV, of course). At the beginning of the year I went cold turkey after consuming cannabis on a daily basis for about three years straight. At the time, I was plowing through at least ~4000mg of tincture (~150mg/dose) and ~2oz of flower in a single month - my frequent use meant that even one bong rip would do nothing, I'd need at least 5 or so to even reach the point where I'd go, "Oh, I think I'm stoned now, maybe?". Went cold turkey for a month and when I ate 20mg it rocked my world, and a single rip would kick my ass for an entire evening.
>That being said I think it's an easier drug to break the cycle of with planning...
Yep, this is what's worked best for me. I ended up using daily for a week earlier this summer and it was wild to me that I could watch my use go from one bong rip on a Monday rocking my world, to needing 3 or 4 rips the following Friday to get to the same level. Now, what works for me, is buying only a tiny amount at a time and saying, "Okay, this is gonna be used at X event, Y event and Z event over the next two months". If I'm an idiot and use it up before the end of that time, oh well, no more until then.
I would say the same for myself. It doesn't interfere with my work performance, and I tell myself it's better than if I were drinking or whatever, but it has definitely become a compulsion and I basically can't regulate my usage if I have it available in the house. Lately I've gotten a little timed lock box to force myself to take breaks which I'm kind of ashamed to have to resort to, but it's helping me keep a better balance.
I will also say - and maybe this is more self-justification - but while I definitely cannot really do focused productive software work while stoned, I really do think that it puts me in a more creative mind-space and helps me see alternatives I wouldn't otherwise. I often go for a long hike after work and get stoned and stumble upon an approach to a work or life problem that's bouncing around in my head that I would not have otherwise.
>... but it has definitely become a compulsion and I basically can't regulate my usage if I have it available in the house.
I just replied to the OP myself, but I can definitely agree with this. When I first quit earlier in the year, I noticed that I'd be sitting on the couch watching TV or chatting with my wife in the evening, and I'd have this innate urge to get up, go to the garage and go smoke. It didn't even feel like I was consciously thinking I needed to get high, it had just become such a habit to do that in those moments. I had to re-train myself to ask, "Okay, why?" before actually doing it, and more often than not I couldn't justify the actual act of getting stoned in that moment beyond, "Well... to just be stoned," and that didn't seem like a good enough excuse to me, making it quite easy to fight the urge.
> I noticed that I'd be sitting on the couch watching TV or chatting with my wife in the evening, and I'd have this innate urge to get up, go to the garage and go smoke
One of the longer lasting effects of quitting tobacco was the urge at random times to get up and go outside. I knew I didn't smoke any more, I wasn't craving a cigarette, but it had been part of my behaviour for so long, that I just get up and go outside sometimes, that it lingered as a sort of tic for a while.
Having a compulsion to go and stand outside your back door for five minutes randomly in the middle of doing something else is not 'natural', no, it's a learned behaviour from smoking.
Yes, we should all get fresh air and sunlight. No we don't need to pause the tv show and head outside for no reason at 9pm when it's dark and cold.
It can be programmed to remain locked for anywhere from minutes to many months. There’s no override code. The only way to open it once locked is to take a hammer to it (according to the instructions, haven’t verified!).
This is not necessary a rebuttal, but I definitely have the same experience with coming up with creative ideas when I go walking or hiking without weed. I think walking is a great way to get your subconscious working effectively on something.
I found that with the pens/oil I have no self restraint. It's just too convenient and easy to take a quick puff anytime I would feel stressed, bored, etc. Whenever I get an oil cartridge I smoke it every day until it's gone.
Lately I switched to gummies only. It helps because I need to be more deliberate. For me they take an hour to kick in and last a few hours after that, so I know I'm making a conscience choice of whether or not I want to be stoned for the next few hour.
I'm 20 years deep in at least every-other-day usage (since I was 16), with breaks whenever I have to travel for work. Honestly the idea of quitting is a bit scary.
The only saving grace is that I've very rarely been a day-smoker (now vaper), it's almost always been a post-8pm thing.
I would guess it's less than 5% of users in the US.
There are weed addicts. My college dorm had about half a dozen students jonesing when all the dealers (5-6 in our area) went home for the winter holidays. Did anyone lose their job, get in a wreck, end up in the hospital, or die from it? I seriously doubt it.
I'd say alcoholism and binge drinking are far bigger threats. You know, like my roommate who nearly died from alcohol poisoning on his 21st birthday from downing half a dozen shots of everclear and more.
The magnitude of harm, impairment, and life dysfunction for substance abuse varies by said substance. Weed addiction isn't nothing but it's not tobacco, drinking, or meth.
I'd said the biggest harm of weed is people who smoke it unfiltered and inhale microfines and ultrafines more so than filtered tobacco cigarettes. Dabbing could be potentially better, but so much of the market is grey and black that there's not enough research or uniform safety standards on producing healthy inhalation products.
this isn't a measuring contest to see which drug is worse, this is just acknowledging that people can have severe addiction issues with cannabis. Just because you don't die from withdrawals doesn't mean it can't lead to serious quality of life issues and poor mental health.
The phrase "burnt out hippie" exists for a good reason. I was widely regarded as brilliant when I started smoking. After 30 years of smoking almost every day, and about 5 years of smoking a few times a year, I'm noticeably dumber than peers who didn't smoke, who I used to run circles around. With very few exceptions, I've only used weed. For me, the biggest harm was brain damage.
I'm curious what you're really trying to say here and why feel the need to compare yourself to your peers in such a way. Do you feel like you wasted those years because your peers are "smarter" than you now?
Exactly that. It's hard to have any sort of control over a lifetime, but I went to university, have worked in software, and some of the friends I compare myself to did the same. I'm still "smart". But I feel like smoking as much as I did has accelerated my age-related cognitive decline.
I don't feel that I wasted the years, but I do think that the thousands of hours spent stoned were a complete waste and have decreased the potential quality of the latter half of my life.
I've been addicted to thc for much of my adult life. I know people who smoke much more than I ever did. I'd use every day, only after work, but I never didn't use it after work. I was using it as a crutch, I used it as a cure-all, I used it as a social lubricant. As mentioned in the article, I used it for anxiety, and the anxiety got worse.
I tried to quit a bunch of times, some more successfully than others. But quitting is really hard. I'd successfully exhaust my supply, but there's always bowl- and grinder-scrapings. After a night or two of smoking tar and dust, "fuck it", I'd find some more.
My #1 excuse was always sleep. Weed is the best sleep aid I've ever found. Quitting usually went fine until I wanted to go to bed. Several hours into a sleepless night, desperation sets in.
Eventually, I found a hack in LSD when I first had the determination to use it without mixing THC. I slept like a baby. No cravings the next day, or the next. I started dreaming again, after years of sleeping like a corpse and waking up exhausted.
I've since started and stopped a few times. Picked it back up to be social (and, hey, it's fun!), the habit-driving insomnia comes back with a vengeance. Stopping with LSD seems to work reliably for me. I only allow myself a hit of LSD per year, so that's how often I excuse a social session. But the last couple of times, I haven't needed the LSD. It seems that I finally kicked the compulsion. Although, I don't trust that enough to make it a more regular habit.
Edit reply to jrflowers:
No, I do not take acid to sleep. Taking it once allows me to quit thc cold turkey. I take it first thing in the morning, so I'm hungry for dinner and sleepy for bedtime. Last thing I need is a new habit.
Edit reply to gvedem (an hour and a half later I'm still "posting too fast" to make a second comment):
I bought the acid from a friend. I am aware that "one tab" is not a standardized dose and that adjacent tabs on a sheet can have significant discrepancy. But "one tab" is what I took.
Yes, be very careful not to accidentally dose yourself continuously during days-long sleep deprivation torture in a CIA mind control experiment. You might break something!
During the times in which they are illegal, there's a certain beauty to the rebellion of a person fed up enough with their unconscious misalignment that they break the rules and heal themselves. (as long as they don't get punished for it. if they're punished for it, the society becomes a degree crueler)
Of course, it would be a lot better if they were legal, but I don't particularly want to see a time in which the only way you can get access to these things is through system-mandated control.
>My #1 excuse was always sleep. Weed is the best sleep aid I've ever found.
I started smoking weed to get to sleep when I was in a crappy college dorm with those awful cheap Venetian blinds and a streetlight outside the window that birds liked to congregate around and chirp all night. When I got older I found I could achieve the desired effect by lowering the indoor temperature, using a decent mattress, installing curtains and (this part is still hard to manage due to funds and neighbors) having a quiet room.
I had a crappy college dorm with morning birds, not all night birds.
If you can't do a truly quiet room, I've found either an AC or fan can mask most noises effectively (I can still feel cars idling outside, or hear people yelling).
Also see https://mynoise.net/ which has a panoply of sound-generation options. I have spent hours trying various noises.
> My #1 excuse was always sleep. Weed is the best sleep aid I've ever found. Quitting usually went fine until I wanted to go to bed. Several hours into a sleepless night, desperation sets in.
Weed and alcohol destroy your sleep. Taking marijuana to sleep is like hitting your toenail with a hammer so that when you stop you feel better, it does not make sense.
I recently stopped after years of using indica strains primarily for sleep. On one hand, I don't feel noticeably more (or less) rested now that I've stopped, but the dreams I have now.. it's kind of incredible how vivid and memorable they are. I'd forgotten what it's like to wake up and just reflect on whatever series of events my subconscious mind constructs.
>But quitting is really hard. I'd successfully exhaust my supply, but there's always bowl- and grinder-scrapings. After a night or two of smoking tar and dust, "fuck it", I'd find some more.
I've found my attempts to quit go better when I actually have a large supply of it that I'm consciously choosing not to indulge in. When your supply is exhausted your brain goes into a bit of a panic mode about it and you can't think rationally about how/why you're quitting.
I have had other successes with LSD as well. I assume it is related to mindfulness helping break thought-spirals. Show the brain a way out of the spiral, and it can rewire the escape for future use. LSD increases neuroplasticity: the propensity of the brain to rewire itself. Which is probably why LSD is also incredibly risky.
I am not sure where to start with on this article. There are a lot of extraneous and tired points being trotted out that really clouds the underlying point.
Essentially the point I took is some people could use serious help, and they get laughed at by society and the drug treatment programs they find because their problem is cannabis (and not say meth).
I don't think this is a surprise or that profound. Drug treatment in the US has been generally 'jail' (and still is for most drugs, and for cannabis as well in many regions). Actual drug treatment in the US is something of a joke for any substance, whether you are taken seriously or not. Drug treatment programs are expensive, often not covered by health insurance (if you have health insurance), often not effective - and that is the tip of the iceberg.
US medicine severely struggles for holistic treatments. Drug addiction treatment needs holistic treatment.
For example, detox centers will help a person come down and get over the most intense part of withdrawal. This is super important for alcohol as that withdrawal can kill you. But, this is symptomatic of how US medicine works - treats the chemical and biology, but not the person.
A couple of other notable points I'd like to raise:
> “You smell it in the air when you’re sitting at a stoplight,” Courtney said.
This made me laugh. Try to quit smoking tobacco... Try to give up alcohol. Both are _everywhere_
On a serious point, giving up any substance can be a real challenge, no matter what it is.
> and the potency of the drug has been increased —
This is such a boogeyman. Total amount of drug ingested is quantity times potency. Old school people made up the low potency with quantity. What is more though, there always was high potency strains available (just not as prevalent today). Thai sticks, hash oils, they have been around for a long time. So, the high potency stuff has been around, that is not new, and most people compensate for the high potency by ingesting less.
> This is such a boogeyman. Total amount of drug ingested is quantity times potency. Old school people made up the low potency with quantity. What is more though, there always was high potency strains available (just not as prevalent today). Thai sticks, hash oils, they have been around for a long time. So, the high potency stuff has been around, that is not new, and most people compensate for the high potency by ingesting less.
My supply back when I used to smoke was limited to “what my dealer had available.” There may have been better strains available, but I sure couldn’t get my hands on them. There’s also an issue of “minimum viable dose” - provided you have sufficient time and determination, you can get just as high with shitty weed as you can with the good stuff, but it’s an awful lot harder to get only as high with the good stuff as you did with the shitty stuff. I am pro-legalization and anti-drug war, but I hear this bromide about the enormously increased availability of high-potency THC products not leading people to consume more and I just wonder what world y’all are living on.
> There may have been better strains available, but I sure couldn’t get my hands on them.
The point is those strains certainly did exist. You are right to point out they were not as prevalent though.
> the enormously increased availability of high-potency THC products not leading people to consume more and I just wonder what world y’all are living on.
This is not quite the same angle as I was getting at. I agree that larger supply generally does drive more usage. There is data that agrees with that too - studies regarding consumption in WA post legalization did find a statistically significant (but still somewhat marginal) increase in overall consumption (let me know if you'd like to see that for yourself, I can try to dig it up, IIRC it was about 10% more consumption).
The angle I'm coming at is two fold.
(1) One of the biggest harms (if not the primary harm) of cannabis consumption comes from the combustion of carbon. More carbon burned and inhaled means more harm. That is different from alcohol. For example, if I were to drink a shot of vodka, or a shot of vodka mixed with a pint of water, it's about the same harm either way because the harmful thing there is the alcohol itself. For cannabis, that is not the case. If we smoke more, it's more harm because of the carbon, regardless of whether we are getting more THC or not. This is almost obvious in some cases with cannabis, scrape a bong and smoke that - it's basically smoking charcoal and the THC output is very low; it's way worse than consuming magnitudes more THC but smoking far less [consuming magnitudes more THC may be unpleasant, but overall health wise you're going to be better off compared to smoking charcoal (aka resin)]
(2) Generally if you give someone cannabis that is twice as strong, they will use about half as much (and perhaps maybe a bit more). This is generally true from my experience, there are exceptional individuals who will smoke as much as they have, always. Regardless of those exceptions, to illustrate, let's say someone is shooting for a 1.5 gram dose of THC per day (at 10% potency, multiply that by 10 for the plant weight, ergo 15 grams of plant weight per day - this is a heavy user). Let's say with greater supply they are now going to smoke 1.7 grams (10% increase, in line with the increase observed post legalization). For the sake of this napkin math, let's say they increase by 20% to 1.9 grams per day (so smoking 19 grams of plant matter total). Now, even at the increased usage, let's say they get some 20% grade weed, they still consume that 1.9 grams of total THC, but now the plant volume smoked is just shy of 10 grams. Even at higher usage, smoking higher potency, it's still a huge net benefit to smoke 10g of plant per day compared to 15g of plant matter per day.
In the above, Q is the thing that causes harm. If Q is limited because there is no supply or no cash, then we have an upper bound of Q due to that factor. Otherwise, 'T' generally has an upper bound, in my experience it is a pretty fixed value, which means if we increase 'P' (potency) we will decrease 'Q' (which is the total quantity smoked, and reducing the total quantity smoked is reducing the harm [at least the harm that is directly related to smoking cannabis, namely the inhalation of CO and other toxic elements that are by-products from the combustion of carbon).
"Not as prevalent" is underselling the transformation that's happened in the marijuana market to an almost laughable degree.
> One of the biggest harms <...> of cannabis consumption comes from the combustion of carbon
> T = PQ
So there's two spots here where we're going to disagree, and I expect the disagreement to be fairly irreconcilable:
The first, primarily, is in seeing THC consumption as fundamentally fine with no downsides in and of itself aside from the potential physical harms from the means of consumption. This has been a primary argument from the legalization community and for good reason - the drug war did far, far more harm to cannabis consumers than cannabis ever did - but it's wrong. There are a whole lot of folks for whom some recreational weed use is totally fine, but I'm sure you already know people who should be consuming less (or you will). Not everyone handles psychoactive substances well, it can get habit-forming, and not everyone is Carl Sagan.
The second is seeing T in your equation as a fixed quantity and assuming people are rationally capable of solving that equation perfectly over time. I think this combines with #1, but I also suspect you've seen enough people who's Ts have crept up over time to know that equation's a bit fallacious.
Again, I do not think marijuana should be illegal. I think it's generally one of the safer drugs out there - in fact, I've got a hard time thinking of many drugs with a better risk profile or even a lower long-term impact to heavy users. That said, I think that the community at large has both oversold its safety and undersold the potential for (psychological) dependency and the impacts on users, and is continuing to do so at potential risk to the movement itself. I understand why that's been the case historically, but I think the community at large needs to move past pretending there are no downsides to the drug at all and to start acknowledging that it's a psychoactive substance, and like every other psychoactive substance out there requires some care and attention to harm reduction.
(And, to be very clear on this: I think by and large most people who consume cannabis recreationally on an even quasi-regular basis will have few to no negative effects. I also don't think that cannabis consumption itself should be dramatically regulated to prevent the few long-tail negative outcomes - but those outcomes DO exist, and we can't and shouldn't pretend they don't.)
I really appreciate your considered response and the dialog we are able to have. I don't think we actually disagree that much (perhaps only maybe on whether the war on drugs is worse than the drugs themselves); but overall we are at risk of talking past each other.
My point is very simply that the majority of cannabis users are seeking to achieve a desired effect, not smoke a certain volume. Hence the statement (that I'm paraphrasing with some exaggerated emphasis) of "OMG, because pot is so much stronger today, people are getting so much THC! Unprecedented amounts!". I say no, people are just smoking less to get the same level of high. Further, nothing about the high potency is that novel, there _were_ higher potency strains and they were quite available (the availability was spotty due to black market, but the still very available). A really notable example would be domestic production. Generally that has always produced strains over 10%. There has been a _lot_ of domestic production for quite some time running. Certainly not everyone knew a grower, or knew someone that knew someone, but plenty of people did. It would be super interesting to know the percentage of domestic cultivation around the 1960s to 1980s compared to imports, but those numbers will never be known with any certainty. Further though, not all imports were low quality cannabis, people have been rolling Afghani hash-balls for a very long time. In short, smoking hash in the 1960s is very similar to smoking high potency pot of today - and there was quite a bit of hash available in the 1960s and prevously.
Second, and this is really my point - the majority of cannabis users are looking to achieve a desired effect. If it takes less to get the same effect, then less is consumed. It's exactly similar to how people will have 3 drinks, they're going to stick to 3 drinks whether that is 1 pint of beer and 2 shots, or 3 beers and 0 shots. For smoking and the health impacts and toxicitiy, the volume smoking is the dominant factor, not the quantity of THC consumed. Alcohol is not like that, it's the amount of alcohol that drives the toxicity, not the volume that contained the alcohol.
Which also brings me to another point, I failed to convey the nuance carefully, in terms of harm - I'm only talking about chemical toxicity and the biological harm of the drug itself. I'm not at all talking about the societal harm and I do not discount it.
Regarding societal harm - pegging millions of people with felonies, with life sentences for simple first time possesion is immense societal harm. There is only one job in my life I could have had with a felony record. You can't even bag groceries if you have a felony... (that was my first job, and it didn't accept felons). Though, nobody is pretending it's all roses on the other side. The big point though is those suffering from severe impacts because of their consumption - it's not the case that the war on drugs actually did anything to help them. In other words, the war on drugs generally only hurt people further. The legalization movement gained a lot of steam when it was commonly acknowledged that the legal consequences of getting caught with cannabis were the largest risk for cannabis users, not the dealer, and not the person failing school because of cannabis use. That's just saying for 90% of some users during prohibition, their dealers were safe and they were not going to fail school because of cannabis. Legalization really helps for two reasons, it removes the black market and the ties and interactions average users were forced to create (they no longer had to work with someone that also sold other drugs, or dealt with large amounts of cash and the associated violence, etc..); and it removed the legal penalties. This leaves us with the just the societal harms of cannabis use, none of which are helped with black markets.
> The second is seeing T in your equation as a fixed quantity and assuming people are rationally capable of solving that equation perfectly over time. I think this combines with #1, but I also suspect you've seen enough people who's Ts have crept up over time to know that equation's a bit fallacious.
I omitted a response to this. I totally agree T is a function of time and tolerance. I fully agree even T can become extremely elevated due to tolerance.
My point though is analgous to drinkers. Most people are looking to acquire a certain BAC and they stop when they hit that. EG: if I want a BAC of 0.12%, I'll stop after 2 pints or 2 shots; just because I have a bottle of vodka in front of me I'm not going to drink 2 pints of it.
Thus, the _typical_ effect of providing someone with double potency is they consume half as much. Typically though, there are exceptions (ballpark 5-15% of heavy users, which are already a small subset of all users)
This ties back into the potency thing though, the inverse is true; decrease potency by half and the volume consumed will double. For those that were seeking a very high 'T' value - they were making up for it in quantity. Thus, the average value of 'T' has not gone up to dramatic levels.
I would guess it is likely that generally more people are getting higher, but it's like 10%, something like 0.35 grams of THC or 0.4 grams in a session compared to 0.3 grams. It's only heavy users I've ever met that can do more than that; and believe me that they were getting plenty high smoking absurd quantities
I spoke with a rehab specialist and he mentioned that since cannabis is oil based, there is no physical withdrawal symptoms as there are with other opioid products. This is due to taking weeks to get cannabis out of your system. Thus, it is often argued that it is not physically addictive but rather psychologically addictive.
Forgive my ignorance, but I’ve never been clear on the distinction between “psychologically addictive” and “physiologically addictive”. Surely anything that produces a measurable dependency and withdrawal is just addictive?
This distinction seems rooted in mind-body dualism, further driving my skepticism.
I don't think anyone has ever died because they stopped smoking tobacco. Is tobacco not "physically addictive"? If it's not, this only underscores the point that physically/psychologically addictive distinction is not all that useful. And if it is, that only underscores your explanation isn't a very good explanation of the differences.
It's not that you will die but your body will react adversely. Like with alcohol if you quit cold turkey you can get tremors and seizures. Even with caffeine you get brain fog and hardcore headaches.
Basically with hard chemical dependence there will be some kind of adverse body reaction. With marijuana that doesn't exist or is so vanishingly small that you don't feel anything.
I believe it is rather established that cannabis has withdrawal symptoms in the form of sleep and mood impairments. That would qualify cannabis as physiologically addictive, as indeed would be any drug with physical withdrawal symptoms.
Granted, they may be lesser than other drugs, but they are still there.
Ok there are symptoms but my understanding is for many people they're negligible. Also I'd be interested to see the symptoms related to actual chemical dependency on marijuana-specific chemicals, versus generic withdrawal symptoms from denial of expected dopamine release, which you could get by changing how you game, work out, have sex, eat, whatever.
While I'm not an expert, it's probable some things directly cause addiction by modifying something in your brain, while others don't do it directly with the chemicals but by other means
The divide is probably clearer with non-drug addictions, like gambling. Gambling isn't some drug that modifies chemicals in your brain and makes you addicted, and yet some people are addicted to gambling.
It's possible some drugs function like gambling, where they don't actually modify chemicals in your brain to make you addicted, but you can get addicted anyways, psychologically
My interpretation is that physiologically addictive means actual physical changes, such as some receptor becoming downregulated and to feel something again you take the drug again. Whereas psychologically addictive could mean you need something for the identity you have or to cope with life experiences. For example I am physically addicted to nicotine but psychologically addicted to caffeine, I would describe it, since I get an actual craving for nicotine whereas caffeine well I like doing a lot of work and fitting into capitalism but I go weeks or months without thinking about it there's no mechanism in my body which tells me to take an energy drink although some people have it that way
Receptor modulation happens when you play video games, too, but I doubt anyone would claim they are “physiologically addictive”.
Again, this whole distinction is predicated on the idea that something can affect behavior without affecting the brain. I struggle to see how that is even possible.
All roads lead to rome right. But the brain doesn't have to be the first busstop. One avenue is via the gut, bacteria screaming for unhealthy food. Or just the old ghrelin, hunger hormone.
But on a more analytical approach, I just don't agree with your premise. There's a stark difference between the brains lowlevel mechanics such as serotonin receptor downregulation all the way to buying the brand in the supermarket that reminds you of your childhood. What I mean is it's not a mind-body dualism problem, rather, it's a scale problem. Does the mechanism that drives you to behave consist of individual molecules or cells, or unfathomably complex dynamic patterns of neurons firing across every region of your brain that constitute almost a religious reminder of who you are and what you desire. What I'm saying is is it the hardware or the software. That's physiological vs psychological. But if you wish you can turn any topic in the world into metaphysical philosophy, I just think we have a lot of textbooks in any hospital university library already on these topics that don't bring philosophy into it.
This isn’t metaphysics. I’d like to know what distinguishes physiological from psychological addiction. So far, the proposed mechanisms don’t hold up to scrutiny, since the proposed physiological mechanisms (e.g. serotonin modulation) are at play in psychological phenomena as well.
On a related note, I’m not sure what to tell you if you don’t see how espousing mind-body dualism can lead people to propose nonsensical distinctions, especially in medicine. I’d have expected a vehement defender of scientific medicine to agree with this.
Mind-body problem is metaphysics. I could ignore that part, but it would help if you strengthened that initial connection. Currently I'm experiencing a socratic style where I throw information and then it gets deconstructed but I don't have much to go off of. State your case why this seems rooted in the mind-body problem.
Otherwise I really like my scale argument and would like to see you deconstruct it, right above read it again if you feel like it, I don't think your argument that just because physiological mechanisms are "at play" in psychological ones defeats it.
Are you a nondualist? I've had that period so I can understand both sides, if you expand more on your viewpoints with some real detailed fleshing out rather than just deconstructing any incoming argument. Personally I have my criticisms of medicine, but can celebrate a lot of textbook content as true.
So now that you know I'm an ex-nondualist, maybe you can give my scale argument a reread and see if you accept it as a description of the phenomenon? So to be perfectly obvious, there's direct chemical reaction and implicit chemical reaction. I consider it a big difference to flood a bunch of molecules past the blood-brain barrier, versus experiencing something such as a video game and reacting to it.
And hey, I am in a period of my life where I definitely put precedence for the body and let the mind follow. Daily exercise in nature, oh boy that really improves my mind. Reason alone in a dark room did not get me far at all.
But if you feel like we're not getting anywhere or I'm not convincing then that's fine and you can ignore this
I read, interpreted and answered your comment much too hastily, and now I feel foolish. Please accept my sincerest apologies. In my defense, I can only point to the large number of posts that are frustratingly missing the point, and to the fact that I am regrettably not the most patient of persons.
Let me try again...
My response should have been something like "my question is less focused on the metaphysics, and more focused on what I think is an issue of logic, so I am happy to stick to the level of analysis of a university hospital textbook". It seems to be the case that people are attempting to partition the phenomenon of addiction into psychological vs physiological addiction. My issue is twofold:
1. I know of no substance that is well-established as being addictive that does not produce both (1) a physiological response at the time of consumption/engagement and (2) an unpleasant physiological withdrawal symptom of some kind. This notably includes drugs that are popularly described as being purely psychologically addictive, such as cannabis.
2. The psychological (i.e. cognitive and behavioral) patterns that we associate with addiction are driven, in a fairly direct manner, by the physiological responses to the presence and absence of the drug. Addicts return to drugs both to avoid physiological withdrawal symptoms and to pursue pleasurable physiological effects.
Together, these suggest a psychological effect of the drug that mediated by physiology. In all cases, the physiological phenomena are necessary. I am generally quite sensitive to arguments of emergence at a particular scale, but I don't see the necessity for it here. Can you be more precise? The closest you come to providing an example has to do with a "reminder of who you are and what you desire". I am also not-insensitive to higher-order explanations for behavior, including some from the psychoanalytical tradition, but I don't think these negate the causal chain outlined in point #2. Therefore, I don't see how psychological addiction can exist separately from physiology, except perhaps in the trivial case of categorizing psychology as a subset of or emergence from physiology. Certainly, I think, one does not encounter "psychological addiction" without also encountering its physiological counterpart, rendering the ontological distinction questionable. It is further made questionable by the prima facie dualist argument that subtends the psychological-vs-physiological distinction. Certainly, if this is not a dualist position, the argument is not immediately obvious to me, and I would be interested in hearing it.
Moreover, if you'll allow me to stray from the purely logical argument surrounding biology and psychology, my sense is that this dichotomy between physiological and psychological addiction is in large part a semantic game that serves to advance a certain political discourse. Invariably, it serves to argue that cannabis isn't "really" addictive by arguing that is withdrawal is qualitatively very different from that of, say, heroin. To this I can only say, "of course it is!" Nobody is really arguing that cannabis is as dangerous as heroin! But this is indeed the argument of scale; I might be convinced that the severity of cannabis' toxicity, intoxication and withdrawal is minor enough to warrant the drug's legality, but I still contend that for those who are addicted to cannabis, the same commingling of physiological state and behavior is at play.
And in case it needs to be said, of course the difference in degree that separates cannabis from heroin (and other "hard" drugs) is large enough to place the two in qualitatively different categories. Again, my point is that despite this, both produce their addictions in similar ways (roughly: the dopaminergic circuit), as is supported by the scientific literature.
Let's jump into a more structured analytical response using your neat presentation as help. I will exposit a psychoanalytical attempt to obfuscate the dependency on low-level chemical/mechanical action. I do this to kick the purely physiological chair that #2 stands on.
1) All substances produce a) physiological response and b)unpleasant withdrawal. Including substances described as purely psychological.
2) Psychological (cognitive and behavioral) addiction patterns are driven directly by physiological response to presence/absence of the drug. Addicts return to drugs to avoid physiological withdrawal, and pursue pleasurable physiological effects.
#1 and #2 gives #3
3) Emergent complexity not necessary, example needed, even from e g psychoanalytics, still wouldn't negate #2
#3 gives: Therefore, psychological cant exist apart from physiological, except if psychology subset of physiologically which we both agree is boring interpretation.
So why a distinction at all.
My first thought is practical. Does someone need acute help, a patient needing medicine to avoid serious harm? Categorise as physiological, give the medicine, time is of the essence! Does someone need a support group to process their emotions and discuss their situation with others going through the same thing? Psychological!
For these purposes, helping others in an almost economical way to have efficient hospitals, the dichotomy is useful. I, and the literature, you as well, consider physiological and psychological as interwoven. The question is how much and if the dichotomy should be there at all, where we disagree.
It can be dynamic and the one can reinforce the other, maybe even the inverse. Personally, my psychological aversion to being used by unethical companies made me quit nicotine pouches. So it's dynamic. Just a side exposition.
> Together, these suggest a psychological effect of the drug that mediated by physiology. In all cases, the physiological phenomena are necessary. I am generally quite sensitive to arguments of emergence at a particular scale, but I don't see the necessity for it here. Can you be more precise? The closest you come to providing an example has to do with a "reminder of who you are and what you desire". I am also not-insensitive to higher-order explanations for behavior, including some from the psychoanalytical tradition, but I don't think these negate the causal chain outlined in point #2.
Behavior is so complex. If someone read 2000 years worth of literature and behaves in the world inspired by everything from Alcibiades statesmanship to von Neumanns mathematical theorems, whatever one would do in the world hypothetically I would categorise that complex emergent behaviour as psychological, emergent, high level, thinking with words and symbols in highly patterned and reactive ways maybe even different states of consciousness and let's say some delusions like they're possessed by ancestral spirits. That's a VERY weird sentence but bear with me. That can not be understood at a physiological level except by god hypotethically, and psychologically primarily by their older wiser self retroactively, in a compressed descriptive way. So what does this have to do with #2. Well let's say that immense complexity drives them do a bunch of coke over and over, as a rational requirement to orate effectively in front of the populace or whatever. Like dictators have done, drugs for the right state of mind for diplomatic affairs or speeches. The meaning of this paragraph is to inundate you with an extreme example of a psychological driveforce to an addiction. Rather than the physiological craving, the dictator returns to the coke to fulfill their ambitions, perhaps. I don't know man I'm just trying to describe a complex motive, rather than "grug need crazy honey because body uncomfortable".
For a more normal example, let's say my dad dies and we would always drink vanilla tea. I keep returning to the vanilla tea PURELY out of psyc...
Yes. This distinction drives me up a wall. The way I see it, all addictive substances are psychologically addictive[0]. Some are also physically addictive.
Addiction, by definition, is a psychological phenomenon. For recreational drugs, it's the only thing that keeps you using even when the net effect is harmful to your life.
It's really annoying to see people say things like, "It's only psychologically addictive" as if that's somehow less perilous than the alternative, or easier to overcome if you want to stop.
Most alcoholics have a hard time quitting not just because of the DTs (not that I'm dismissing those!), but because it's bloody hard to break that habit! The yearning for a drink is incredibly strong, long after you've detoxed. The physical withdrawal from alcohol can be managed over just a few days. The psychological withdrawal from it is typically a long-term journey with plenty of opportunities for relapse. Same with heroin. Kicking it is no fun, that's for sure. But once you've done your 30 days or whatever, the physical part is over. The real challenge is just beginning.
[0] Okay, I supposed there are addictions that are purely physical. Some blood pressure medications, for example. I ignore these, because "addiction" is probably not the right term for them. "Dependence" better suits therapies that you really do need to continue, or taper when it's time to stop.
I still don’t understand the distinction between “physical” and “psychological”, especially when the thing being manipulated by the drug is the central nervous system.
Surely psychological phenomena are also physical ones, insofar as they are seated in the brain and the rest of the body? Do you have an example of a pure case of “psychological addiction”? The only thing I can think of is the social aspect of consuming the drug. But then, I can think of a great number of activities that, when removed, cause “withdrawal” in the form of longing for the social interaction, none of which fit the common-sense definition of “addiction”.
So I’m left to conclude that this distinction is a false one. For the purposes of things we generally consider to be drugs, the only possible kind of addiction physiological.
> Forgive my ignorance, but I’ve never been clear on the distinction between “psychologically addictive” and “physiologically addictive”.
Quit cigs/caffeine and you'll be irritable and nothing much else... maybe constipated for the first days? Quit heroin and you will likely stop to function, your brain needs it. Same as alcohol, real alcoholics don't stop cold turkey or they will likely die, their body needs it. As the substances have replaced their natural counterparts which the body has forgot how to make.
this is an emotionally charged topic and people are often not very precise with terminology when discussing it. so I can understand why you would be confused just from reading a couple articles and comment sections.
> This distinction seems rooted in mind-body dualism, further driving my skepticism.
this does not really make sense though, and opioid withdrawal is a good example to demonstrate why. people who abruptly stop consuming opioids usually get symptoms that are similar to a bad cold or flu. it's not just "in their head"; they literally have snot pouring out of their nose and sweat uncontrollably for days. this is typically what people mean by "physiological addiction". sometimes it is also called "dependence" to distinguish long-term pain management patients from addicts. btw, most common recreational drugs cause some degree of withdrawal, but it's often not significant enough to notice.
in the short term, drug with significant withdrawal symptoms are especially difficult to stop consuming for any length of time. but it doesn't take that long for the body to return to homeostasis. a couple weeks is typical, but it might take up to a year in extreme cases.
the learning (ie, what you might call "psychological addiction") never quite goes away though. this is why addicts must be extremely cautious, if not abstain entirely, for the rest of their lives.
I appreciate your example (and level-headedness, btw), but what are we to make of:
1. The fact that these behaviors are learned precisely in response to physiological changes (be it avoidance of withdrawal or chasing the high)
2. The fact that all the supposedly non-physically-addictive drugs like cannabis have well-documented withdrawal symptoms, like sleep dysfunction, that are very much physiological.
If your point is that the physiological withdrawal from heroin is worse than cannabis, then I don’t disagree. I just disagree with the premise that anything can be meaningfully addictive without having a measurable physiological effect. This includes things like gambling, in which the physiological effects are well-documented.
So I’m not so sure that the two forms of addiction can be so well separated. It seems to me that physiology is the mediator of behavior, here, which points back to the very definition of addiction.
I’m left to wonder why people insist on the relevance of this distinction. I don’t believe it’s only to make the point that cannabis is less bad than heroin, as nobody is seriously debating that. I instead get a strong whiff of semantic games.
severe withdrawal complicates the early stages of recovery and probably makes a relapse more impactful (just what I've observed; I'm not a doctor). but in general I agree, the distinction does not matter much within the context of addiction. detoxing is not the hardest part of recovery for most addicts. the hard part is usually "what to do instead" for the next n decades.
there is a useful distinction to be made between what I would call "addiction" and "dependence" though. this is why I included the example of PM patients in my initial comment. just like addicts, these people build tolerance and would experience severe withdrawal if their supply were abruptly cut off. the difference is that these people are (mostly, pill mills are a thing) not chasing a high for its own sake. their lives are actually improved by consuming opioids, and they would be just fine with an equally effective substitute.
to be clear, I am not implying PM patients are morally superior to opioid addicts in some way. the distinction is that addiction is intrinsically damaging to a person's quality of life. dependence is merely a tradeoff that may or may not be worth it.
>the hard part is usually "what to do instead" for the next n decades.
Agreed. And (as you've no-doubt guessed by now), I would argue that this second, harder phase of recovery has very little to do with addiction per se, in both it s mechanisms and coping strategies.
>there is a useful distinction to be made between what I would call "addiction" and "dependence" though.
I'd have to think about this a bit more, but even though I agree the distinction is practically useful for treatment, it's once again a distinction of degree rather than kind. In both cases, there is a physiological habituation to a substance that causes unpleasant withdrawal symptoms. Something analogous to the pleasure-seeking behavior of bona fide addicts is still there, I think, when you consider that drug-dependent people will consume a substance to "feel normal".
>dependence is merely a tradeoff that may or may not be worth it.
I'd quibble about merely, since the worm can turn mighty quick, and people are generally pretty bad at knowing how deep in the hole they are. But I take your general point.
> I'd have to think about this a bit more, but even though I agree the distinction is practically useful for treatment, it's once again a distinction of degree rather than kind. In both cases, there is a physiological habituation to a substance that causes unpleasant withdrawal symptoms. Something analogous to the pleasure-seeking behavior of bona fide addicts is still there, I think, when you consider that drug-dependent people will consume a substance to "feel normal".
I've mostly agreed with you up until here, but having known both heroin addicts and a few PM patients, I don't agree with this at all. while there is a significant minority of PM patients that are addicts in disguise, I genuinely don't believe most of them enjoy taking their prescription. at least in theory, the PM patient works with their doctor to find a dose that adequately manages their chronic pain while minimizing impairment and other unpleasant side effects like nausea and constipation. the addict seeks the highest dose they can get away with (not arousing suspicion of employer/family, being able to afford it, etc.). the intention behind the use is very different.
more generally, my working definition of addiction is something like this: a) inability or extreme difficulty in regulating b) an activity or use of a substance that c) negatively impacts one's health, interpersonal relationships, or other meaningful goals. the PM patient clearly satisfies b). but I would argue they don't satisfy a) if they are able to stick to what they've agreed with their doctor and haven't specifically chosen that doctor for being a total pushover. they don't satisfy c) at all: the drug is what allows them to participate in something like an ordinary life. in extreme cases, it is what allows them to exist at all.
btw, I could also have chosen SSRIs as my example for dependence. I think the PM example is better for teasing apart addiction vs dependence, since there is a bit of overlap in reality. but SSRIs are interesting because they do not demonstrate the same tolerance building effect as other psychoactive drugs, nor are they (commonly) used recreationally. nevertheless, people do report fairly nasty withdrawal symptoms from abrupt cessation of SSRIs. you can google "ssri brain zaps" if you're curious.
tl;dr: addiction and dependence can look similar from the outside. one simple heuristic for distinguishing them is how the person behaves after acute withdrawal subsides. the addict will always feel the temptation to go back, and resisting that temptation is usually a lifelong struggle. the person who was merely dependent will stop and never look back if they find an alternate solution to their problem.
You're totally right and it's funny even the comments agreeing with you don't get your point. Humans love to categorize, you can't blame us for making them up most of the time.
And the mind-body dualism is still very much here to stay, culturally.
I'm with you here. I think talking about both is important but its a false dichotomy.
I would classify "psychologically addictive" as something that makes a little voice in my head go "do that thing again" and is mainly driven by the speed at which an action(drug or not) receives a physiological response in my body. If I take a hit of a weed vape I feel it so fast that my psychological addiction gets triggered more easily. Whereas when I eat a weed edible the response takes so long that the little voice in my head doesn't say, "eat another one". Unless I eat one every day then that little voice becomes stronger over time.
I can do either of those things one time and only experience the acute withdrawal.
I would classify "physical addiction" as a habit where cessation causes a lengthy (not acute) withdrawal period, caused by some type of brain changes like receptor degrowth because of over-agonization or whatever. I think we qualify ones that have worse withdrawal as more physically addictive. As some have already pointed out, alcohol withdrawal can make you dead and opiate withdrawal can make you wish you were, so we consider these very physically addictive. THC withdrawals exist, but they are so minor when compared to death or opiate-withdrawal hell that we consider it not very physically addictive.
An extreme example: Someone could spike my coffee with opiates every day for a year without me knowing, slowly increasing the dose so I'm not too messed up. I would be physically addicted but have no psychological addiction.
That’s fair. I cringe at the linguistic abuse that is “physiological vs psychological”, if that’s how we’re defining things, but I guess that’s “just” semantics. [0]
To reiterate an important point you make: if we’re going with those definitions, then the only difference between the two is one of quantity. In both cases, physiological effects of the drug are driving the addiction, mediated by behaviors that emerge in response to changes in physiology. So again, the qualitative difference is only the one that emerges from a vast difference in quantity.
I’d also insist that we recognize some of the very-physiological withdrawal symptoms experienced by at least some cannabis users, e.g. sleep disruption…
[0] Part of my reason for asking this question initially is because I’m convinced this is not mere semantics, but rather a linguistic game that people play to argue that cannabis has zero meaningful addictive potential. I find that to be disingenuous.
P.S.: I hope it’s obvious to everyone that I’m not bashing cannabis use in general. Hell, I appreciate the occasional joint.
It's an overused distinction - but certain drugs when used over long periods of time result in such large biochemical changes to the human body that if they are suddenly withdrawn, the person may experience various medical emergency situations that require hospitalization (delirium tremens with alcohol, seizures with benzodiazepines, dehydration due to vomiting and diarrhea with opiates).
These extreme physical effects are seen at the upper end of abuse limits, and the majority of people who legitimately suffer from addiction don't need round-the-clock medical care if they quit - and even those who do can generally avoid such problems if they go through a tapering-off process over the period of about a month.
I should have been more clear: Physical addiction is when sickness, pain or impairment demands that you get your fix or possibly die. Example: "...benzodiazepines can kill you. This type of withdrawal can cause seizures, which increase your risk of life-threatening harm. It can also cause psychosis, which alters your perception of reality."
When an individual, who has chronically misused alcohol, suddenly stops or drastically reduces, they can experience a combination of withdrawal symptoms—both physical and emotional—that can range from mild to severe, and in rare cases, can be life-threatening."
Psychological addiction: "...Psychological dependence on drugs or alcohol is the emotional, motivational, and mental addictive qualities that come with substance abuse. ..."
"rehab specialist" typically means someone who was previously a client of a treatment center, perhaps with or perhaps without a certificate in counseling.
Source: my observations routinely interacting with numerous clients and employees (never a client nor employee myself) of more than a few treatment centers.
An Addictionologist is an M.D. with a specialty in addiction who can speak to the matter on a scientific basis.
Indeed, and so can smoking shortly before bed. Regular daily use can also suppress your ability to dream (or at least your ability to remember those dreams).
I've gone through periods where I smoke a relatively small amount of flower on a daily basis for months at a time, and then stop cold turkey, over a dozen or so times in my life. One thing I really enjoy about stopping cold turkey to take a tolerance break is that my dreams become profoundly vivid during the first week or so of withdrawal. I can often remember dreams vividly as if they occurred in waking life, for as long as two days after the night I dreamt, and with enough clarity to write them out in detail. I usually look forward to the experience.
Maybe I'm just a weirdo, but I actually enjoy the "come down" from individual smoke "sessions", and the "reset" I experience when stopping cold turkey. It feels refreshing in a way, not really sure how to describe it.
For sure. Head over to /r/leaves and you'll see others complaining about pretty gnarly symptoms when they quit. Cold sweats, loss of appetite, nausea, irritability, etc.
I know of plenty of people who have to fall asleep with the TV on, and if they turn off the TV before attempting to sleep, its massively disruptive to their sleep patterns.
I doubt anyone would argue that that's indicative of a physical addiction to the television, even as there are obviously "withdrawal" symptoms. Thus the grandparent's distinction between physical and psychological addiction.
yep. this is part of the skepticism mentioned in the article--I have anxiety, depression, hot/cold flashes, appetite loss, sleep issues, and disgusting night sweats for a few days after I stop heavy use, but am often told it's all in my head. the reality is that our own cannabinoids do all kinds of things for our homeostasis that are not well understood. so asserting categorically that there is no physical withdrawal when you stop flooding your body with external cannabinoids is naive.
I think this distinction really confuses the issue because the actual physiological changes that can make quitting cold turkey actually fatal for certain drugs at certain intensities can appear to be on a continuum if you're not looking at actual cells and organs.
I think a lot of what we understand as "psychological" addictions to drugs are just drugs where the addictive changes are limited to higher functioning portions of the brain. And our obsession with mind-body duality means we understand those differently.
> This is due to taking weeks to get cannabis out of your system.
I doubt it. It's not psychoactive weeks later.
I agree with the "psychologically addictive" vs "physically" though. (I think it's even simpler than that though - you're just addicted to the quick dopamine surge, same as another round of Counter Strike, sex, cupcake, whatever)
> I spoke with a rehab specialist and he mentioned that since cannabis is oil based, there is no physical withdrawal symptoms as there are with other opioid products.
Cannabis is not an opioid, and I don't think there is any indication that being oil-based has any impact on whether a substance has withdrawal symptoms. Also, while the substances of interest in cannabis may be in oils naturally and in the easiest extractions, they aren’t actually “oil-based”, anyway. So, whether it came from a rehab specialist or not, this seems to be multilayered misinformation.
All 15 participants ... At 12-month follow-up, 10 participants (67%) were confirmed as smoking abstinent. At long-term follow-up, nine participants (60%) were confirmed as smoking abstinent.
At 12-month follow-up 13 participants (86.7%) rated their psilocybin experiences among the five most personally meaningful and spiritually significant experiences of their lives.
I'm addicted to weed and do a lot of mushrooms as well. Never felt the urge to stop weed after a trip. As with all addictions, but especially weed, the only way to stop is to want to. The only really bad thing about quitting is the boredom from not being high. I've quite a dozen times myself, going upwards of a year sober, but I'm much less happy afterwards.
That's exactly what I'm saying. Mushrooms aren't the key, wanting to quit is. Quitting weed is pretty easy if you want to. Not at all like tobacco or opioids.
The success scenarios I’ve heard about involve psilocybin + trained therapist. Some people have undirected transformative experiences, but some people (most?) need help navigating.
Going in without a therapist doesn't necessarily mean the experience is undirected.
Even during an intense psilocybin experience, people typically retain some degree of agency and control over their actions. In most cases, individuals on a psilocybe trip can still make decisions and perform basic tasks, though their perceptions and judgments might be altered.
The key with these studies is the associated therapy.
I’ve heard the effects of psilocybin described as (roughly) increasing neuroplasticity for a time, thus allowing changes that would be significantly harder to accomplish otherwise.
But I don’t think unguided trips would automatically have this effect if you don’t already have the necessary tools/frameworks going in.
Aside from the over-generalizations, psilocybin is a potent psychoactive substance. While it might not be "addictive" in the classic sense, it can lead to intense, sometimes challenging, psychological experiences. These experiences can be traumatic for some individuals, especially without proper guidance or in unsupportive settings.
I'll note that "proper guidance" and "supportive setting" are very much undefined terms here and also do not preclude a traumatic trip.
There's no situation in which using a significant dose of a psychoactive substance as powerful as psilocybin is without risks. That's not to say the risks aren't worth it for anyone, and experienced, supportive guidance can minimize some risks, but it's never without any risk at all.
> Psilocybin is able to instantly turn off an addiction, and it is not addictive itself.
please don't share misinformation like this so confidently. was just yesterday in an AA meeting with someone who tried psilocybin and it made him relapse.
It's interesting to see mushrooms on the same ride as marijuana 5-10 years ago. Almost identical.
It's illegal -> "This probably shouldn't be illegal, it's not as bad as the government has suggested" -> "___ will cure ____" -> "___ can be used to treat almost anything" -> ___ is legalized in some capacities -> ___ isn't nearly as impactful as the original medicinal claims and also presents its own set of issues.
I'm very curious to see what psilocybin presents in the final phase of this ride.
I was waiting for someone to post this clip (was just searching the thread before I did it as well). It's all I could think of when setting the article.
823 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] threadWhile it’s not “withdrawal” in the traditional sense, it can be quite unpleasant. And the thing that sounds most helpful in that moment is…smoking a bowl.
What comes next is a lot of emotion management. Doable. Hard. Help is good.
I think legalization was good. Cannabis has mostly been a good thing in my life. At times, it hasn’t been. I worry about the crazy high THC strains everywhere now, and the misperception that these are completely harmless plants.
I still partake and find it worthwhile for creative endeavors, but had to make drastic changes to my usage habits with a promise to quit permanently if I found myself back in a similar cycle.
Enjoy responsibly.
I used to live basically next door to a dispensary, and would smoke multiple times a day. If I didn't smoke, I'd sometimes find it hard to get to sleep the first night or so, but it wasn't as bad as going without a cigarette, missing adderall, or what I've seen people go through on opiates.
Given that many recreational users are into other stuff, too (especially before legal dispensaries that looked like Apple stores came along), along with the pro-cannabis propaganda, it's easy to see how people don't take it seriously.
It's a comparison problem. It won't kill you like alcohol withdrawals will or make you agitated like nicotine will. So then it must be okay right? These same potheads will quote studies and news articles talking about the benefits or just how risk free it is.
Its very similar to the way a functional alcoholic will justify their drinking. They even use avoidance language. 20 years ago we called it weed, now we call it "cannabis". Oh, you're not addicted to weed you're just using cannabis every hour of every day. I think legalization didn't help, nor hurt, but the re-branding of weed as "cannabis" while biologically correct gave these type of people a get out of jail free card. If you don't believe me, say to yourself "I smoke weed 8 times a day" versus "I use cannabis 8 times a day". One of them makes you sound like a degenerate, one of them makes you sound like you take a medication. That difference is very important in justifying addiction in the mind of an addict.
The behavior of an addict doesn't need a degree to see. If you are in a perpetual haze, need it to get up in the morning, and say you do not have a problem you do have a problem.
> These strawmen are transparent and juvenile, while substance dependency of every kind is a complicated and common problem that requires far more nuance.
This is not worth addressing because it seems like you're just mad.
> Whatever axe you're grinding, it's basically unhinged and socially degenerate in and of itself.
I've noticed people who like the word "cannabis" take issue with it being called avoidance language. It's the same thing seen in vapes, different variations of alcohol, designer drugs, etc. In fact, vapes follow almost the same model as the "cannabis industry" and do quite a bit to dance around the fact it's a drug. Vape stores in particular will sell to 50mg salt nic as a new user. A weed store will sell you medical grade 80% THC hydro as a first time user. Drugs are drugs. If you use them responsibly you probably aren't smoking/drinking/injecting it to feel normal. The path to profitability is to create addicts. You do this by feeding them more of the addicting substance they they realize.
I'm not sure what you're on about but maybe you forgot to toke up before posting.
You're the one who engaged in childish name calling. Maybe back off and get some context.
Addiction is not addiction, either. Not everything has the same addictive potential, and not every substance creates an equally strong addiction.
Frankly, you're making a lot of very strong claims about addiction, but it's pretty clear you aren't knowledgeable in the subject.
Actually I would normally ban a new(ish) account that posted like this without replying to it, but you also posted some quite good comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36941582
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895303
... so I want to give you a chance. If you'd please post like that, and not like this, in the future, you should be fine here.
Isn't denying an addiction when told one has an addiction also the first sign of not having an addiction? "Methinks the lady doth protest too much" works well and good for a play, but doesn't really meet the traditional standards for evidence.
> There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to, he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
-- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Or if you prefer the Monty Python version [0]:
> "Will you please listen!? I am not the Messiah, do you understand? HONESTLY!"
> "Only the true Messiah denies his divinity!"
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HB7zqP9QNo
Going by that charitable interpretation, I think his point stands.
Is this a non sequential fallacy? I think the worst offender of this argument that I see on the internet is, "if this offends you, it proves that I'm right".
I am mostly thinking out lout.
How so? Comparing relatively normal doses, the effects of caffeine seem subtle in comparison.
If you're a habitual user, you may not even realize how it effects you, and you'll need more dosage to get effects.
I'm a very long way from the folks on r/decaf, most of whom I think need some serious help, but it's much more impactful than you may realize.
Caffeine doesn't make me feel particularly great, and I feel almost no compulsion to have more than one cup, but it made him feel amazing, and he felt compelled to drink more.
I can stop drinking coffee for a week without any annoyance, but if he tries to pull back or stop drinking caffeine, he experiences 2 weeks of crippling headaches.
My takeaway: work your way into any drugs tentatively, and don't listen to people who tell you how much "everyone" responds to it.
I have to actively remind myself to consume my caffeine when I really need the boost in focus. The euphoria is a pleasing side effect, but not something I think about when I'm not experiencing it. It's common for me to go weeks at a time without having any, just because I didn't think to.
I think there could be a genetic factor here. Addiction (to alcohol, cigarettes, caffeine, etc.) seems to be fully absent in my family history.
I have an espresso superautomatic, beer in my fridge, and prescribed stimulants, and I often go months without partaking in any of that because it has to be a conscious decision and sometimes it never crosses my mind. I'm uncomfortable leaving my baseline.
It's like wearing fancy clothes. It's enjoyable for a few hours, but I wouldn't want to wear them frequently.
The first sign of an addiction (at least, the first which is visible to an outside observer) is that it interferes with your life and you won't stop. Until about a week ago, I was a heavy daily cannabis user for a very long time (more than ten years). If you had asked me if I had an addiction, I would have said no.
Recently I came to believe I had Cannaboid Hyperemesis Syndrome, a disease for which the only cure is to quit cannabis. So I quit - immediately. I have a gigantic pile of weed in the house (I had just bought more when I started having symptoms), and I pass by it everyday. I just shake my head and go, "darn, wish I could smoke that," and go about my day.
That's not a story you're going to hear from an addict.
That's not to minimize the experience of people who do experience a cannabis addiction. I have known people I suspect have a problem. But no, cannabis and alcohol continue not to be comparable as far as their harm and addictive potential.
(And I have absolutely no regrets about my consumption, it was an incredible medication for my anxiety.)
As a fellow anxiety-sufferer, I strongly encourage you to pursue sleep hygiene to the utmost. It doesn't fix everything for me, but it makes things way more manageable
Any feedback on CBD oil? Dosing? Type? I've never used cannabis at all, but I intend to try CBD.
I appreciate the advice.
I'm honestly a terrible person to ask, I preferred THC strains and never tried CBD products, and I mostly bought the most potent stuff which was on sale. It's also hard for me to judge dosage because I have developed a really high tolerance.
When I first started smoking it had a completely different effect on me, including visual hallucinations. Over time & with heavy use (which I don't necessarily recommend) the effects mellowed out a lot. So take things with a grain of salt, my experience may not be indicative of what your experience with CBD products would be.
I would say to make sure you're purchasing from a reputable dispensary, start with the smallest dosage (I've noticed people sometimes even cut up their gummies to get a smaller dose than is commercially available, for example.), and experiment. I know that's very generic advice, but the older I get and the more I learn, the less confident I am that I can understand how cannabis will effect other people. If I had to recommend a starting dose to someone, knowing very little about them, I'd probably say 5mg. But again I have low confidence in my ability to recommend a dose.
For me it had two primary benefits:
1.) As a "rescue inhaler," it could terminate panic attacks and sometimes shorten depressive episodes by helping me escape repetitive cycles of thought. I cannot promise it will work this way for everyone, for some people it could make them paranoid and ruminative.
2.) Reducing the incidence of repetitive anxious thoughts like, "I should have worded that email differently, they're going to think X of me, this is just like that time you did something embarrassing in high school." Again, cannot promise anything.
The one area of major disagreement is regarding the "cannabis" designation. For me, this term is associated with the opposite connotation. When I started taking its effects more seriously, I started using the cannabis word because I feel it lends more respect to the plant. This wasn't originally my idea, and so I'm not alone in this.
This respect was part of my own mindset shift on usage away from habitual use. A way to remind myself to take it seriously, and to partake intentionally if/when I do.
Most people I know are pretty aware of their "problem" but have no intention of changing it. Calling it one thing over another might be a form of self deception for a few, but self deception will always find some answer.
> It won't kill you like alcohol withdrawals will or make you agitated like nicotine will. So then it must be okay right? These same potheads will quote studies and news articles talking about the benefits or just how risk free it is.
I do think we have major issues with how we paint these different groups. When someone is an alcoholic, they gain sympathy and support from society proportional to their maladaptive behaviors and/or willingness to address the issue.
"Potheads" is almost always derogatory, and I don't think people who struggle with this are seen in the same light as people who struggle with other drugs of abuse, and it's not surprising considering the pretty clear misconceptions the public has about cannabis as a whole.
And I think this is important to note, because one of the #1 emotional factors that leads to continued maladaptive substance use is shame. Society has progressed quite a bit towards supporting and celebrating people who struggle with drugs/alcohol. I don't think society has done the same with cannabis. Attitudes are closer to "they're just lazy and it's not even addictive so what's their problem?".
The status quo is "drugs are bad, m'kay?" and "drinking is fine, everybody does it, just don't drive when drunk".
The way forward should be understanding the following:
I'm sure there's room for improvement there, but it's a start.Edit: tweaked a tad based on input
> * Let's use the word "drug" for any compound that alters your state of mind.
> * If you are going to use a drug, treat it as dessert rather than a meal
Consider that your definition rightly includes things like antidepressants, but people for whom antidepressants are working should take them regularly (which I assume is the distinction you're drawing with dessert versus meal).
I think this kind of abstraction is what gets people into risky situations. I'd rather we raised awareness across the board about the benefits and repercussions of the popular substances of choice. Some general rules of thumb are good, but less compelling than direct information about the ways things can go wrong, and ultimately not useful in the moment of choosing "do I partake?".
I think most people understand that some drugs are dangerous and some are not. But the drug conversation has been so dishonest for so long, that people struggle to assess what is real/true, or what to take seriously. I don't think people will take seriously anything that collapses mind altering substances under that single umbrella.
I think there are strong arguments to be made that psychedelics - especially psilocybin - deserve to remain in a category of their own. To associate them with "drugs" broadly seems counterproductive at a time when we're finally seeing research dollars pour into the field, and the effects of these compounds doesn't seem comparable with other recreational drugs. And no one gets addicted to psilocybin, but there are some very real risks that users need to know about.
It's incredibly important that we collectively recognize that alcohol is a drug. More so, recent research shows that it has zero health benefits. We need to understand the extensive damage it does to society -- not to demonize or prohibit it, but to give context to when pearl clutching happens about other drugs.
Likewise, people should understand the history of the War on Drugs and be aware of the real reason they came about (spoiler: to oppress their users).
It is true that psychedelics can have incredible therapeutic value, but they can also be a lot of fun (I certainly consumed them in that context when I was much younger). Cannabis can be added to that list, as well as others.
So yes, let's be entirely honest about the subject (which I'm trying to do). We can't wish them away, so let's deal with it like rational adults and minimize the risks of harm.
Well, the US tried Prohibition. Drunkenness went down and crime went up.
Not a value judgement, just an observation about current attitudes around mind altering substances.
"Ever since it became legal I have friends who spend majority of their day high. Of course, when confronted"
Maybe you should quit interrogating your friends to prop up your own puritanical moralities. All I see when I read your post is how much you hate people who use weed.
I don't understand this attitude. Do you not care about the people around you? I'm not smashing my friend's joints or tossing their bongs. I'm asking because I am concerned about their health.
What I enjoy about the comments to my comment is it demonstrates how deeply ingrained this righteous indignation is in the "cannabis community". I don't understand your insults. "Puritan", etc. For some reason having concern for friends is now puritanical...what a world. Your focus on dissecting my use of idiom as some sort of in-built hatred for weed smokers is honestly so on point for the HN commenter community its actually almost funny.
"Hey man have you tried going a couple days without smoking weed?" is not interrogation. It's concern."
Or maybe it is both?
Your friends are probably old enough to no want to be controlled by you. Tell them your opinion, it might do them good, but maybe don't tell them what to do. They should figure that out on their own.
There's no controlling that is necessarily suggested by their comments. Certainly such questions can be asked in bad faith but it might be assumed that OP isn't doing that.
The comment rightly calls out that it is a personal take about your friends but that is also something which might be done by someone with more pointed and less honest intentions. Certainly assumptions can be more charitable, however. I don't mean to justify these complaints of your comment but hopefully they're more understandable.
If when considering this, you feel hesitant to show them what it is you wrote about them, then I think that's something to reflect on.
Not really trying to insult you, that wasn't my intent, but in an era in society where personal autonomy and agency is becoming paramount to societal influence it makes damn near no sense that you're so worked up over someone else's personal choices.
Notice I don't disagree with the presented findings, how cannabis addiction isn't a boogeyman or false flag, it's can become a chemical dependency, but I do disagree with your stance of wanting to police the behavior of others to fit your own perspective, despite calling it 'concern' or 'caring about the people around me'.
If you were my friend, I'd tell you to mind your own business then eventually lose your number. I'm an adult, I take my own calculated risks and understand the consequences of my actions.
OP is clearly not upset about “personal choices” — they are sad to see their friends become visibly worse versions of themselves.
Expressing concern about troubling patterns of behavior is one of the greatest things a friend could do for me.
If a friend is becoming unhealthier and squandering opportunities because of a plant, substance, or whatever, it is completely okay to bring it up to them in a tactful way. The kind of friend who is unwilling to tell you the truth when you may need it most is the kind who's number you need to be throwing in the dumpster.
I don’t know about that, I swear that ever since the Reddit drama the temperature has been dialed way up in the comment section if HN. More downvotes, more pithy comments, more line by line comment dissections.
It's still telling them what YOU think they should do, no matter how nicely and concerned you phrase it. At some point you have to walk away; they're full adults, they're not your responsibility, they're able to make their own choices, and unless they affect you directly it's ultimately not your job to fix them.
Do you verify with people on other optional meds and caffeine etc to get off that stuff for a week just to be sure?
this has to be more nuanced, because according to this logic 100% of all humans have this addiction. If you confront a non-addict, they too will tell you that they don't have a problem.
For example, smiling can be addictive. Now, most people aren't "problem smilers", but for some it becomes a crutch and takes over their personality.
They were talking specifically about cannabis addiction, and suggesting that denial that you have a cannabis addiction is a sign of having a cannabis addiction. (However, this doesn't really make sense because people who are not addicted to cannabis will equally claim to not be addicted to cannabis.)
A relative drinks tea all day. They tried to compare another relatives cigarette smoking and their tea drinking to my weed usage. Both of those people can’t go a day without their substance. That seems to be an addiction.
this was the moment.
or was it? no, it was earlier.
> Of course, when confronted…
of course…
That's exactly what a criminal would say!
Before it became legal, I'm willing to bet those friends spent a majority of their day doing something equally unproductive. Be it playing video games, or watching tv, whatever $couch_potato_activity. And they're probably just doing the same stupid thing while high, because it's even more fun that way.
It's easy to villify a drug for what would happen either way, you're not proving a causal relationship. Pot and being a lazy slob dovetail quite nicely, just like pizza and beer. Nobody blames pizza and beer for the fat stained-shirt slob who never gets off their ass.
> while biologically correct gave these type of people a get out of jail free card.
Yikes.
I think part of the problem is ever since legalization weed became more mainstream (potentially dangerous) but weed-conservatism (i.e. exaggerating real risks of THC) also became much more common to encounter (also potentially dangerous). The reality is somewhere in between. I do not use THC, but as someone who used it previously and it tremendously helped me, my current mental model and set of anecdotes say you're likely wrong and exaggerating the real risk your friend is under.
On the topic of biases, I wonder why you consider theirs to be "dangerous".
Regardless, their biases to seem to stem from a certain personal experience with marijuana, particularly their friends' habits with it. It's possible this person's "friends who spend majority of their day high" have a substance abuse problem even if not everybody who uses the substance abuses it.
> Because THC is shown to be an effective care for many mental and physical problems. THC itself can be dangerous or even very dangerous (psychosis risk etc) but this doesn't warrant being so overly cautious that we miss the forest for the trees. Facts show THC can be a very effective palliative tool, and it's unclear how much damage you can do with short-term regular use.
To add, it also leads to apologism of (or apathy for) locking people up for consuming THC.
No, saying you don’t have an addiction may be a common thing addicts (and non-addicts!) do, but its not even close to the first sign of addiction. Or even a recognized symptom. Or even a recognized danger sign that would call for more intense screening. Its not a useful indicator of addiction at all.
> 20 years ago we called it weed, now we call it "cannabis".
“Weed”/“pot"/“ganja”/etc. are sonewhat vague slang. “Marijuana” and “hemp” are legal categories. “Cannabis” is a correct, precise term that encompasses both hemp and marijuana.
Take your morals and shove them. Go look in the mirror and judge yourself if you want to judge somebody but leave me out of it.
We don't know anything of the sort.
It's common for addicts to think they aren't addicted. But it's also common for non-addicts to think they aren't addicted, because, you know, they aren't.
It's just difficult in many cases to tell whether someone is addicted, and your confidence that you know isn't warranted, nor does it make you particularly helpful to addicts.
I am addicted to tobacco. It causes me social and relationship grief. It's very hard to stop. Health-wise I don't need a lecture on the long-term harm I am doing, but in the short-term I'm generally going pretty good. Great cardio, decent blood pressure, shrug. I low-key want to stop, but it's not urgent.
I am likely addicted to caffeine as well, although suffer virtually zero obvious negative consequences from that other than needing a cup or two throughout the day to feel alert.
Someone else in this this thread mentioned losing multiple jobs because of weed. They're likely addicted to it, or suffering from some other kind of mental condition that results in them having poor impulse control/pleasure-seeking behaviour.
Clearly "weed" is the slang term and "cannabis" is the name of the plant!
> These same potheads
This seems more like branding to me :P
The ultimate denial has to be the people with ADHD, because of course the only cure for ADHD is daily meth amphetamine use. "It actually calms me down"
Pedantically, that's a treatment, not a cure.
But the side effect of being high all the time is indifference. Things can wait.
I don't think the wording makes much of a difference, that's like saying "I drink" vs "I imbibe alcohol". Or as South Park said it, "I'm not having a glass of wine, I'm having six, it's called a tasting and it's classy".
But it does become dangerous when people think of it as medicinal, as a kind of self-medication. Some people need it, for sure, but for a lot of people it's self-medicating without dealing with the root issues.
But then there's plenty of examples of self-medicating, ranging from sugar, energy drinks, video games, alcohol, sex, work, etc.
I had a rough childhood. I didn’t get help. I tried, but I have debilitating anxiety and the system expects you to be able to manage getting help even if that’s what you need help with.
The pandemic broke my brain. The amt of complaining every one did about the lockdowns. All people were talking about was a life I was forced to subsist in because I was never given help. Last year I tried weed and it has helped a lot.
I don’t need to say I smoke weed X a day to myself. I’ll just say it to you or anyone else. Sound like a degenerate to who? You? Judgmental people?
I got tired of proving I’m not a “degenerate”. I would get off weed to prove to people around me I don’t need it, but it’s never enough. If you don’t think weed is medication then that’s on you.
People commonly say things like this to suggest that it necessarily causes addiction which makes it a Bad Thing. It is true generally that it "can" cause addiction but only true circumstantially that it "does" cause addiction. Again, I may be reading too much into the comment but it seemed to be trying to make the "necessarily does cause addiction" point.
being "friendly and creative" does not make good armies. It really does come down to that, doesnt it?
Obviously all kinds of people abuse substances daily. I saw a grown man sniff solvent glue from a bag once! How stupid is that? No one is suggesting that substance abuse is benign. The difference here is that this is a Political Newspaper pointing to "peril." The article is not the entire story, it is a partial story designed to create reactions along a story-line.
get more exercise and relate to people.. not a headliner
I mean, they pick and choose.
Before the current weed era, weed was always compared favorably, by smokers, to alcohol with the adage: Weed is illegal, yet I've never seen a bar fight after everyone gets high.
Now we can do a real comparison of the effects of weed smoking on the general public, the same way we've done with drinking.
The point seems to be interesting in a way which might be called "cool" if one happens to be so interested. Even if one finds it lurid they may also find it interesting or "cool".
> It's like cheering that a smallpox outbreak occurred so you can study the disease progression.
I believe I understand the point. We don't want to celebrate a negative occurrence simply because there is silver lining. However, it's hard to see past a certain false equivalence that's being made. A disease which propagates ought to be treated differently from personal choices even if the things are equally destructive to the individual.
But I'm a philosopher at heart. Let's say a person chooses to infect themselves with a disease to facilitate study of some aspect of it. Let's also say that they are able to do this in an environment that all but guarantees the disease will not propagate except possibly to other willing volunteers. Should this research be prevented? Would the results of this research definitely not be "cool", meaning "interesting"?
Dude! Who ate all of the pizza?
...
;)
However, these products are disappointingly few and far between. When I walk into a CA dispensary, I actually have to hunt around for them, if they're even available. When I ask, staff members wonder if I'm buying it for my grandmother! It would be great to see the industry refocus on products that are designed to be consumed in moderation.
I feel that the legal weed industry is speedrunning the past decade of craft brewing. Craft beer focused on growing the scene while focusing on higher and higher ABV beers, but now is transitioning back towards beers that are a bit more sessionable and don’t get you blasted after 2 beers. Wouldn’t be surprised to see the weed industry start focusing on sessionable items sooner rather than later.
Oils from plants in nature are super helpful, when used correctly!
(Hint: if you're a medicinal user in any form, probably best to stop lighting shit on fire)
No health provider is ever going to approve burning anything for medicinal usages.
All studies have proven all the bad stuff comes from combustion.
Obviously the progression doesn't happen as fast for some. However, the key being they can't quit in moderation or in excess. Some can abstain for 3 months, some for six, thinking they don't have a problem but then find themselves using even a little. There's a self-rationalization as well as self-centeredness that's part of the disease process of addiction. I would say it's not only a disease process but it is a huge factor. Cross addiction substituting one substance for another is also part of that self-rationalization.
...can't quit without side-effects.
Most addicts can stop using immediately with the side-effect that becoming less productive/energetic.
For THC, it is relatively easy to mitigate most side effects by adjusting the dose.
Modulation is not the key, but helps a lot
To me, I feel as though that behavioral addiction is completely disregarded by the medical community. If someone is lighting up every night / having a drink and want to stop, they need an alternative way of closing out the day. Otherwise of course it'll be difficult.
1. Imagine you're going to Walmart. You see a friend. "You say hi and raise your hand to draw attention" However, they walk right past you without even acknowledging your presence.
What is your first thought? Maybe "Jerk!", "he's busy?".
You don't have control over that first thought, but you do have control over that second thought and your actions thereafter. Addiction messes with your first thoughts and attention. Next scenario
2. A wife and a husband are driving down the road. The wife notices Kohl's is having a 50% off and the husband notices that Andy's liquor store has two six pack for the price of one.
In this case, due to addiction, the husband noticed that Andy's liquor store and that's a craving. His awareness was drawn to that sign with a subconscious cue influenced by addiction.
Therefore, someone who wishes to maintain sobriety has to be very self-aware of their thoughts and actions. They have to guard themselves from triggers, situations, people and then manage those other aspects they can't control.
It isn't helpful for people to view themselves as simply a character flaw when going through addiction because their brain is scarred. It doesn't mean they can't make poor choices and not choose to maintain to pursue sobriety. Their behavior matters and their disease matters.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851068/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-018-0220-9
I feel similarly about the store-bought THC products in Canada. They're like high ABV, hopped-up IPAs when really I just want a light, refreshing, repeatable beer with good flavour.
I'm not going to lie-- I'm also put off by some vibes in the craft beer scene has taken on in the past 10 or 15 years. When many craft beer fans see me order a classic European pilsner, with shocking frequency they a) attempt to shame me for ordering such a 'boring' beer, b) assume they need to educate me about this amazing thing called craft beer that I've clearly never encountered before, or c) assume my palate is unsophisticated. Like... listen bro... I'm a classically trained chef-- I've spent more time actively developing my palate than you've spent even thinking about it. I can tell you things you didn't know about the beer you're drinking based solely on your breath. Some very big names in craft beer were my multiple-times-per-week drinking buddies for years. I'm glad you've cultivated a passion for a locally-made food/bev product... now go be smug about your foamy bug spray juice elsewhere. lol
That is how I feel about most of the overpoweringly strong IPAs that have been all the rage for so long.
If you don't like that as a motivation, I have some bad news for you about 99% of the entire edifice of human history...
As an aside, how often do you offer unsolicited patronizing critique of other people's beer order?
While I'm classically trained, my focus is from-scratch bar food while keeping it at the same price point as the frozen food service shit. I used white truffles, beluga caviar, and things like that when working in fine dining and in culinary school, but never once have I purchased such things for my own menu.
I worked in bars and restaurants as a side gig for about 15 years and full-time for a few so the sheer number of people I've encountered naturally means I'll have encountered more dinks than most. And because of my food/bev-industry-heavy social set, I've spent quite a lot of time in the more "serious" craft beer bars, and those are magnets for that type. That said, I've also spent a ton of time in high-end restaurants and wine bars and never had anyone make snide comments about, say, ordering a more straightforward wine or a cheeseburger (but in kitchens, I've definitely heard chefs talk shit about people ordering burgers... mostly because they're frustrated more people aren't trying their more creative offerings. And then they go home and eat hot pockets for dinner.) And most sommeliers I've encountered are so worried about coming across like snobs that they almost overcompensate.
(saving this for the next time someone claims we moderate HN according to our personal beliefs...)
What we need is more accurate vapor delivery devices that can meter better.
Now, sure, if you slam 12 shots of Cuervo back to back you're going to have a bad time - 12 shots is an entire bottle if you're actually getting full pours.
But if you consumed one shot or one beer every hour... no difference in the effects.
Their point is that it is much easier socially to sip a beer slowly over an hour than it is to sip a shot over that same hour.
Also most people who take shots aren't trying to get wasted. Drinking a shot the normal way every half hour to an hour alongside always having a beer to sip until done for the night is fairly standard. e.g. about 6 beers and 3 shots over the course of 2 to 4 hours.
That's the real play... decent gin, soda water, maybe a splash of lime juice, served on ice in a pint glass (usually ordered as a double or else it's too watery).
You up with something as sippable as beer, with fewer calories and zero added sugar. (except a little from the lime, but lime doesn't have that much by fruit standards).
PS: Shot glasses are for college students. A glencairn (good luck...) or a rocks glass are far better. Much of the taste comes from smell so you really wanna get those vapors up your nose... at least if you're drinking something worth drinking, and not just trying to get plastered on the cheap.
In California, 6 beers (typical beers averaging 6% abv) + 3 shots (5.5oz of hard alcohol) over 2-4 hours would be straight up alcoholic levels of consumption.
Over the course of two hours, that's pretty wasted. Depending on the beer, that might be your entire weekly recommended alcohol intake in two hours.
Where and in which circle? Because from where I stand it seems very unusual.
Edibles are very consistent, at least today they are. The problem with them is that people are stupid and don't know how to find the right dose responsibly. They take a gummy, it tastes pretty good, and then after 15 or 20 minutes they don't feel anything so they take another, because yum, it tastes like candy so why not. Then it starts to kick in after 30 or 40 minutes and it's double the dose so they feel nauseated and sick.
The best way to gauge the effects of an edible dose is to take the edible on an empty stomach, wait about 20 minutes, then eat a meal, and do not take a second dose. After eating your metabolism will get that dose into your blood stream right quick and before you're done with the meal you will definitely be feeling the full effect if you took enough. And if you don't feel much, then the dose is too low. Try again tomorrow. Don't double up the dose in the same sitting, because then you're really not getting an accurate result. Take maybe 1/3 more the next day, try again. If it's still not enough then the next day try a little more. When you find the right dose, then stick to it.
That being said, the other side of this (in a pre-legalized world) was that the plants you grew on your own tended to be within a certain potency range, which meant 1 puff roughly equaled another — as opposed to baked goods, where butter could end up spread throughout inconsistently. There’s also the swifter intake-to-feedback loop when smoking/vaping, which made “taking too much” easier to see coming and avoid. Thus my old fashioned POV.
But you're right, it's way easier to not "overdose" with inhaled THC than it is with edibles. People just need to approach the two methods differently. Inhaling is instant gratification, where as eating is delayed gratification. Not everyone is capable of delaying gratification because so many people are impatient and impulsive. Edibles are still vastly superior in terms of healthiness so long as they aren't just 95% sugar and 5% THC.
Personally, these days I use "Protabs" which contain 0 sugar, just THC and a binder (probably corn starch) and the high is extremely clean and clear and completely guilt-free. And the dosage is very reliable and repeatable. There's no guessing involved now that I know my tolerance.
I get what you’re saying - but this is not practically true. Weed that contains 35% THC has a lot to do with the conditions it’s grown in which affects a lot of the other physical qualities of the weed. Smell, color, size of nug, density, humidity all are very correlated with potency.
Density is just a measure of humidity in practice and thus pick date.
Alternate take, dispensaries have enabled many people I know to get a reliable product that acts the same each time they buy it and use it, and let them dial in exactly what strain and quantity and method of ingestion works best for them. Before the commercialization one never had the diversity and reliability of product they have now.
Contrast that to the before times where people, as you put it, bought whatever the dealer was selling.
I don’t know if that comes down to dosing, or if the body just reacts differently, but either way, it’s just rarely the experience I’m looking for.
I can not smoke cigarettes, never liked them, always got headaches from them. With vaping quality liquid I have no issues and I'm a heavy user. Not saying it's good for you but claiming it is worse or the same as literal smoke is just wrong
That sort of vape liquid is nicotine in a suspension of food/medical grade PG/VG and likely some small bit of flavoring in the same. It's essentially a tiny version of the fog machines that blast out vapor in nightclubs.
I know its just an anecdote but people YOU ONLY GET ONE PAIR OF LUNGS and they heal differently then other parts of your body (or they don't heal at all - COPD is TERMINAL).
It's easy to drink 12 shots in succession, but it's very hard to take 12 beers in a reasonably comparable amount of time. This is not a good comparison. It's obviously much easier to poison yourself with strong alcohol.
Not anti in any way, so please don't jump at me without looking first.
Craft beers are just a niche. I don't trust the industry to self-regulate towards less profit.
As a recovered addict who has spent many months in multiple rehabs and many hours at meetings -- with hundreds of other addicts, I can assure you that booze is EASILY more dangerous/unhealthy/addictive than weed. Across the board; worse by every general measure.
Judging from the number of users who say they would like to stop using it but can't, cannabis is more addictive, however. There are plenty of surveys of this, and I've seen even cannabis activists take them seriously, advocating offerings to cut down/quit similar to those we offer to smokers.
I don't know why, and this is just one possible measure of addictiveness, but it is what it is.
A lot of people went from drinking beer and wine when Prohibition was first enacted in the US and moved to liquor. This happened because many of the speakeasies would rather have a given volume of liquor versus beer because they can serve more customers and there is less of a concern about your product being large and conspicuous.
With illicit drugs you often find the producers making the drugs more and more concentrated so they can move more product in a smaller volume and then step on it to make up the bulk later down the supply chain.
It would make sense to me that dispensaries would be more interested in buying and receiving higher THC product because they can either do more with less or they can have customers come in less often and serve more of them.
People are only aware of what they can put hands on in their locale.
It's basically the one thing I hope Amazon gets their way on (they're one of the bigger lobbyists for legalization).
So funny that that law didn't account for how edibles work. If you have a baked good (brownie, cookie, etc.) which weighs 100 grams, and it contains 29mg delta-9 THC, thats below the 0.3% legal threshold, and still a solid dose.
I always try to explain this to people, that the Republicans actually unwittingly legalized weed in 2017, but no one ever gets it. Fact is, delta-9 THC edibles are now federally legal (and can be ordered online) in all 50 states due to the Farm Bill loophole.
Delta 9 is the long-known active ingredient in regular marijuana. You're thinking of delta 8, which is a new isolate.
This is kind of my point though. When I talk about this stuff, people assume I just mean delta 8, or CBD or whatever. Nope. Straight up delta 9 edibles are 100% federally legal now.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_Improvement_Act_...
It's the entire reason for the explosion of hemp stores everywhere in the last few years.
That "0.3%" clause is the kicker. Because 0.3% is a long way away from being 0%, it means posession of THC is now federally legal.
CBD has been legal for a while and is completely different than THC products so it shouldn't be compared.
Stating Delta-9 is legal, not Delta-8, is not that big of a difference. If you think it is, you should talk about why it matters because your attitude obviously hasn't worked thus far for dealing with people who just don't understand. Maybe, you're not concerned with people understanding as much as you state.
Here's a commentary by drug policy litigator Matt Zorn: https://ondrugs.substack.com/p/delta-9-thc-gummies
This is the key. Who will ever bring this in front of a judge? The "anti-weed" lobby has all but ceased to exist. Which leaves basically a small handful of deep red state attorney generals that would even have the standing to be able to attempt it.
And which side do you think has the funding (and incentive) to defend it all the way to the supreme court?
The floodgates have opened, and they're never going back. There's simply too much money and momentum behind it. Even the conservatives are on board at this point now that they've seen the tax revenues.
Apparently, an accused trademark violator, in the hopes of proving that, as it was not in legal use in trade, the trademark they are accused of violating was not valid in the first place.
It's been tested somewhat (interestingly, in a trademark case which rested on whether the infringed trademark was for a legal product) and it has succeeded at the Circuit Court level. AK Futures LLC v. Boyd Street Distro, LLC, 9th Cir. No. 2-56113 (May 19, 2022):
Importantly, the only statutory metric for distinguishing controlled marijuana from legal hemp is the delta-9 THC concentration level. In addition, the definition extends beyond just the plant to “all derivatives, extracts, [and] cannabinoids.” 7 U.S.C. § 1639o(1). The use of “all” indicates a sweeping statutory reach. See Lambright v. Ryan, 698 F.3d 808, 817 (9th Cir. 2012) (“The common meaning of the word ‘all’ is ‘the whole amount, quantity, or extent of; as much as possible’ . . . .” (quoting All, Merriam-Webster (online ed., visited Oct. 4, 2012))). This seemingly extends to downstream products and substances, so long as their delta-9 THC concentration does not exceed the statutory threshold.
Of course, as this was on an appeal of a denial of a preliminary injunction, the ruling is framed in likelihood of success rather than absolute terms, but its a pretty strong negative indicator for your argument that this is a clearly incorrect interpretation that no court would take seriously, since both the District Court and the Circuit Court very much took it seriously.
For example, Florida recently was about to pass a state law limiting the total amount of THC in each individual edible, which would have killed the "legal D9 THC" market. They apparently got huge pushback from producers/consumers in the state and dropped any limits: https://floridaphoenix.com/blog/florida-senate-approves-hemp...
Edit: BTW, though, that link from Matt Zorn was great, thanks for posting.
They're swapping out legacy industry worker addiction to opioid and alcohol for cannabis.
Socially, it's done a lot of good in those places.
It's because you're using the word wrong. Weed is illegal federally. The problem is that you think THC is weed, and Delta-9 is weed, and CBD is weed. Words have meaning. A caffeine pill isn't coffee, and beef steak isn't a cow. Something being derived from something doesn't make it that original thing.
//Asking for a friend.
These guys are legit. I just toured their production facility last week and I was impressed enough that we chose them as our contract manufacturer for gummies.
That dosage is insane to me. I'm 235lbs and 15mg is a solid, "I'm not driving" dose for me.
It's so easy/cheap to use low-spectrum cannabis oil in edibles, and most uneducated/recreational users can't/won't feel the difference between how THC feels, compared with all of the compounds you're supposed to have together when using cannabis.
No different than early vape pens.
No terpenes? No CBD? You're just gonna be high.
Grow the plant, cut and dry the plant, heat the plant & breathe it in. It's pretty simple.
Edibles can definitely do the same, but not distillate made stuff from the store.
Even trying a firecracker (herb cooked in peanut butter on a tortilla chip) at home with your existing purchase of plant matter can show you the difference.
10mg I’m not sure I could reliably ABX with a placebo.
For me, 5-10mg of delta 8 is a good relaxing evening. On the low end, it's an anxiety reducer, on the high end of that, a bit of a giggle and indacouch feeling. 25 mg (one gummy) is a zonk the brain kind of night.
Honestly, for knowing I drink too much alcohol, d8 can be a great substitute on the way to quasi sobriety.
Don't do drugs, kids.
Becoming a regular smoker is often a hunt for something that can get you just as high as the first time, but nothing will. (Concentrates can get you very high, though.)
With that said, I want to lower my usage -- and, admittedly, it has been hard. Especially if there's hardly anything disincentivizing me from not feeling good all the time. I also have ADHD and take Adderall every day, so it's a part of a routine that has a designated dopamine hit a least once every 1.5hrs, whether that be coffee, weed, whatever.
At my peak, I was a half-gram, gram of concentrates a day smoker. There was always the option of taking three or four good dabs in a row and getting past the point of high and into psychedelic panic. The idea that "you can never get as high as the first time" is a total myth peddled by the same people who claim it's a "gateway drug".
Something I'm looking to buy and test soon: isolated terpene tincures of my most helpful strain, for when I have no interest in THC.
I'm not sure if you're looking for recreational or medicinal, but if it's medicinal the key is to have a regiment. If not, just cut the edible in half. If you're buying gummies they're well enough mixed that you can track the dosage by portioning them carefully.
3-methylfentanyl is an early example of this.
For those who want to try using low controlled doses like you said, I gotta recommend dry herb/flower vapes - the normie portable ones, not the $400 desktop vape with a fan and everything. It’s easier to find low-but-not-0 THC flower than oil cartridges IME, and if you can’t find them, you can just pack less. It’s also a lot easier on your lungs and having to take multiple hits per packed chamber allows you to control your dose a bit better. Low dose edibles also work but they can last a long time in your body due to being metabolized differently and are similarly hard to find.
Your preferred ratio, for recreation OR medicinal purposes, may be way closer to 1:1 (THC/CBD) than you thought!
Where do you find the 3% THC in California? Hopefully, it’s someplace in the Bay Area.
CBD is on its own an effective antipsychotic (comparable efficacy to one of the common treatment options in schizophrenia in a 2013 study), and has repeatedly been shown to balance out the psychotic effects of THC.
And I'd say easily 80% or more of the products I've seen in any dispensary I've walked into have ~0% of CBD compared to those heavy THC amounts.
It's no longer "just using something that grows as part of nature" if you completely disrupt the balance of the natural high with extreme levels of selective breeding and processing.
For starters, everyone’s goals for cannabis use are different. A person with Crohn’s for example, who uses cannabis for nausea relief will surely have a different ideal ratio of THC:CBD than a weekend warrior who uses it for muscle pain. There’s no one dosage or ratio that works for everyone and I think that you are greatly exaggerating the importance of weed's so-called "entourage effect" re: THC, THCA, CBD...prolly some terpenes floatin' around in there. I dunno...
Besides, pursuing greater THC "heights" and in process, pushing out CBD has been the way for decades. This is nothing new and those "80% of strains" you sneer at are borne of the same methodology as previous efforts before commercial outfits perfected it.
What's more, "CBD heavy" strains with only 0.3% THC are wildly in demand these days. The more "balanced" iterations with up to ~20-25% THC & ~6-12% CBD are also gaining in popularity.
Really? I've never heard that. What source did you learn this from?
I tend to eat weed before running and have for 20ish years. If it really did destroy mitochondria then I'd expect it would show up in my vo2 max or some other measurable health stat.
I'm slightly concerned but given that this is the first time I've heard this, I'm not too worried about it.
Dried or fresh plant and oil administration by ingestion or other means Psychoactive agent
https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/hc-sc/documents/services/d...
I think what people need to be reminded of is that addiction will always exist. Whether it is collecting Pokémon, Video Games, Gambling, Drugs etc.
What cannabis brings is less damage, post use, than say, Oxycontin. This is one simple example.
Not a doctor, so don't ask me for details!
Normally steadfastly mellow, one day I heard him stomping up the stairs to our apartment, then stomped into the living room, looked at me and exasperatedly said "THE WHOLE WORLD IS STUPID. EVERYBODY IS STUPID. EVERYBODY SUCKS" and then went into his room, slammed the door, and literally screamed at the top of his lungs 4 or 5 times. About half an hour later, he came out, apologized and said he got blocked for maybe 45 seconds taking a left into our driveway because someone who'd stopped at the traffic light right there either rudely or obliviously didn't leave an opening, which pushed him right over the edge. I knew what he was going through, and knew he was talking to a therapist about it, so I wasn't worried for him... but I sure felt bad for him!
Sometimes it helps to see it described by someone else before you really see what you, yourself are in.
Thanks again for helping a stranger connect some dots. You've given me more to think about in my approach to kick this habit.
it's great that people are discussing this, some people can definitely use weed responsibly and stop easily, but others really, really can't--and the sooner we recognize it as addiction the easier it is to get out.
Regardless of the drug you use, many are used to alleviate whatever problem you have e.g. Stress, Anxiety, Disorders, and then it becomes part of you, and you no longer have the need to address the root cause of why you need the drug. Again, not a doctor, but I think the poster above put it best as a "crutch". It's ok for short term, but long term, you allow yourself to ignore the root cause, which has long term effects.
It's definitely gets better with time but making sure you don't trust yourself and your emotions while going though withdrawal is a key. I didn't have anybody to support me while I was going though this but it's great that some people can understand this and don't take it personally is good to hear.
By that, I mean it's unpleasant to quit after continuous usage due to various withdrawal side-effects but only for a relatively short period of time (3 or 4 days max).
I didn't start using cannabis until I was in my late 20s almost 30s, and my brain was already fully developed by then (I guess?). So, perhaps that has something to do with it being easy to quit?
I'll say this, cannabis is no panacea, but I do find the benefits profound. There are some negative side-effects, but they are very benign in the grand scheme of life.
I am not anti-medicine by any means, but I will tell you this much. Cannabis has been better in terms of efficacy and side-effects than the one anti-anxiety medication I tried back in the day. Cannabis was far easier to quit too.
I think your analogy holds. Most people only have a couple of days of symptoms after quitting caffeine. But if you're on 4+ cups a day and/or you have a sensitive physiology, quitting can be rough.
That's comparing the extremes of cannabis administration. I do not utilized any of those methods of administration, so perhaps you are right on how badly it affects one. Then again, I imagine if people were snorting caffeine pills consistently, the withdrawals would be worse than a cup of green tea a day.
Oddly enough, I have never really noticed the irritability as a side-effect. I usually trend towards heightened levels of anxiety. The fog you speak of tends to dissipate for me after a few days to a week.
With weed I go through periods of using it constantly for a couple weeks, and then just getting bored with it and not using for months.
I would agree quitting cannabis might actually be easier though. However, the only side-effect I really ever get that is somewhat annoying is insomnia, but that I why I started using cannabis in the first place.
In comparison, I've smoked cigarettes, cigars, pipe tobacco, and never had a problem quitting. Few days of craving after smoking for a few days, then kicked it. Coffee... brutal brutal brutal
From my perspective and my best rationalisation of it, when I'm bored or stressed I reach for a dopamine hit and weed is a great source of one. The next day I'll have a low and there's a 'battle' between the rational and want. The rational side almost never wins and I'll be in a daily usage cycle for months.
That being said I think it's an easier drug to break the cycle of with planning, since it only takes a few days of no use to dramatically improve my chances of resisting and honestly, if I didn't suffer from poor memory performance, I'd be okay as a daily smoker. But working is next to impossible at the level needed as a SDE.
This is the truth. I can't reason as well or as quickly. Things go over my head. My working memory is so much smaller. I get lost in code all the time. I forget what I'm working on.
I have the same symptons but I don't smoke weed. Maybe I'm just bored of the work required.
Is that while being high on THC, or being sober but having consumed lets say the day before?
Weed and untreated bipolar disorder are directly responsible for me losing my jobs at SpaceX, Google, and 2 other smaller companies.
I work a dead end job now. It pays a fraction of google and is nowhere near the prestige of SpaceX. I don't care at this point.
I would guess marijuana only makes me about 10% worse at my job so it's not like I'm being fired like the other guy.
Right now I only really smoke once a month at most, when the opportunity presents itself. In these cases, I'm obviously completely non-functional under the influence. But I also smoke a lot less because I have no tolerance, I feel pretty much completely fine the next day, possibly even better than usual, because the resulting night of REM suppressed sleep gives me a jolt of antidepressant effect without the downsides of sleep deprivation.
If I'm in a binging mode, it means I have a huge tolerance, smoke a ton more, and honestly it takes at 2-3 weeks of abstinence before I'm back to baseline for working memory, possibly longer.
But paradoxically, if I'm in such a binge, I'm probably more functional if I've had my morning smoke compared to skipping it for the day, because abstaining would then cause me to be highly irritable and unable to focus on anything in addition to the state of temporary dementia I'd be in. And since there's a massive tolerance, one dose won't have acute deleterious effects to the same degree.
>That being said I think it's an easier drug to break the cycle of with planning...
Yep, this is what's worked best for me. I ended up using daily for a week earlier this summer and it was wild to me that I could watch my use go from one bong rip on a Monday rocking my world, to needing 3 or 4 rips the following Friday to get to the same level. Now, what works for me, is buying only a tiny amount at a time and saying, "Okay, this is gonna be used at X event, Y event and Z event over the next two months". If I'm an idiot and use it up before the end of that time, oh well, no more until then.
I will also say - and maybe this is more self-justification - but while I definitely cannot really do focused productive software work while stoned, I really do think that it puts me in a more creative mind-space and helps me see alternatives I wouldn't otherwise. I often go for a long hike after work and get stoned and stumble upon an approach to a work or life problem that's bouncing around in my head that I would not have otherwise.
I just replied to the OP myself, but I can definitely agree with this. When I first quit earlier in the year, I noticed that I'd be sitting on the couch watching TV or chatting with my wife in the evening, and I'd have this innate urge to get up, go to the garage and go smoke. It didn't even feel like I was consciously thinking I needed to get high, it had just become such a habit to do that in those moments. I had to re-train myself to ask, "Okay, why?" before actually doing it, and more often than not I couldn't justify the actual act of getting stoned in that moment beyond, "Well... to just be stoned," and that didn't seem like a good enough excuse to me, making it quite easy to fight the urge.
But YMMV, of course.
One of the longer lasting effects of quitting tobacco was the urge at random times to get up and go outside. I knew I didn't smoke any more, I wasn't craving a cigarette, but it had been part of my behaviour for so long, that I just get up and go outside sometimes, that it lingered as a sort of tic for a while.
Animals don't breathe indoor air all day, with no sunlight, and neither should we.
Yes, we should all get fresh air and sunlight. No we don't need to pause the tv show and head outside for no reason at 9pm when it's dark and cold.
Here’s a $40 one I can vouch for: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BGPKQD17
It can be programmed to remain locked for anywhere from minutes to many months. There’s no override code. The only way to open it once locked is to take a hammer to it (according to the instructions, haven’t verified!).
Lately I switched to gummies only. It helps because I need to be more deliberate. For me they take an hour to kick in and last a few hours after that, so I know I'm making a conscience choice of whether or not I want to be stoned for the next few hour.
The only saving grace is that I've very rarely been a day-smoker (now vaper), it's almost always been a post-8pm thing.
There are weed addicts. My college dorm had about half a dozen students jonesing when all the dealers (5-6 in our area) went home for the winter holidays. Did anyone lose their job, get in a wreck, end up in the hospital, or die from it? I seriously doubt it.
I'd say alcoholism and binge drinking are far bigger threats. You know, like my roommate who nearly died from alcohol poisoning on his 21st birthday from downing half a dozen shots of everclear and more.
The magnitude of harm, impairment, and life dysfunction for substance abuse varies by said substance. Weed addiction isn't nothing but it's not tobacco, drinking, or meth.
I'd said the biggest harm of weed is people who smoke it unfiltered and inhale microfines and ultrafines more so than filtered tobacco cigarettes. Dabbing could be potentially better, but so much of the market is grey and black that there's not enough research or uniform safety standards on producing healthy inhalation products.
(I imagine the friends here are a rough “control” for baseline cognitive potential)
I don't feel that I wasted the years, but I do think that the thousands of hours spent stoned were a complete waste and have decreased the potential quality of the latter half of my life.
I tried to quit a bunch of times, some more successfully than others. But quitting is really hard. I'd successfully exhaust my supply, but there's always bowl- and grinder-scrapings. After a night or two of smoking tar and dust, "fuck it", I'd find some more.
My #1 excuse was always sleep. Weed is the best sleep aid I've ever found. Quitting usually went fine until I wanted to go to bed. Several hours into a sleepless night, desperation sets in.
Eventually, I found a hack in LSD when I first had the determination to use it without mixing THC. I slept like a baby. No cravings the next day, or the next. I started dreaming again, after years of sleeping like a corpse and waking up exhausted.
I've since started and stopped a few times. Picked it back up to be social (and, hey, it's fun!), the habit-driving insomnia comes back with a vengeance. Stopping with LSD seems to work reliably for me. I only allow myself a hit of LSD per year, so that's how often I excuse a social session. But the last couple of times, I haven't needed the LSD. It seems that I finally kicked the compulsion. Although, I don't trust that enough to make it a more regular habit.
Edit reply to jrflowers:
No, I do not take acid to sleep. Taking it once allows me to quit thc cold turkey. I take it first thing in the morning, so I'm hungry for dinner and sleepy for bedtime. Last thing I need is a new habit.
Edit reply to gvedem (an hour and a half later I'm still "posting too fast" to make a second comment):
I bought the acid from a friend. I am aware that "one tab" is not a standardized dose and that adjacent tabs on a sheet can have significant discrepancy. But "one tab" is what I took.
If you abuse it, or mix it with something else, you can hurt yourself for sure.
I swear, 'they' don't want us free of addiction. (Why would they - they're making bank).
Of course, it would be a lot better if they were legal, but I don't particularly want to see a time in which the only way you can get access to these things is through system-mandated control.
I started smoking weed to get to sleep when I was in a crappy college dorm with those awful cheap Venetian blinds and a streetlight outside the window that birds liked to congregate around and chirp all night. When I got older I found I could achieve the desired effect by lowering the indoor temperature, using a decent mattress, installing curtains and (this part is still hard to manage due to funds and neighbors) having a quiet room.
If you can't do a truly quiet room, I've found either an AC or fan can mask most noises effectively (I can still feel cars idling outside, or hear people yelling).
Also see https://mynoise.net/ which has a panoply of sound-generation options. I have spent hours trying various noises.
Weed and alcohol destroy your sleep. Taking marijuana to sleep is like hitting your toenail with a hammer so that when you stop you feel better, it does not make sense.
Ever had memory problems?
I've found my attempts to quit go better when I actually have a large supply of it that I'm consciously choosing not to indulge in. When your supply is exhausted your brain goes into a bit of a panic mode about it and you can't think rationally about how/why you're quitting.
Related, in 2012 a meta-analysis concluded it helped alcohlics
> a single dose of LSD, in the context of various alcoholism treatment programs, is associated with a decrease in alcohol misuse
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0269881112439253
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-022-01389-z/s41386-02...
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/fashion/article/fugly-shoes-ad...
People's ability to form psychological depenndancies on just about anything is a well established phenomenon.
Essentially the point I took is some people could use serious help, and they get laughed at by society and the drug treatment programs they find because their problem is cannabis (and not say meth).
I don't think this is a surprise or that profound. Drug treatment in the US has been generally 'jail' (and still is for most drugs, and for cannabis as well in many regions). Actual drug treatment in the US is something of a joke for any substance, whether you are taken seriously or not. Drug treatment programs are expensive, often not covered by health insurance (if you have health insurance), often not effective - and that is the tip of the iceberg.
US medicine severely struggles for holistic treatments. Drug addiction treatment needs holistic treatment.
For example, detox centers will help a person come down and get over the most intense part of withdrawal. This is super important for alcohol as that withdrawal can kill you. But, this is symptomatic of how US medicine works - treats the chemical and biology, but not the person.
Read further on the updated rat-park experiment for why 'treating the person' is so important: https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/what-does-rat-park-tea...
A couple of other notable points I'd like to raise:
> “You smell it in the air when you’re sitting at a stoplight,” Courtney said.
This made me laugh. Try to quit smoking tobacco... Try to give up alcohol. Both are _everywhere_
On a serious point, giving up any substance can be a real challenge, no matter what it is.
> and the potency of the drug has been increased —
This is such a boogeyman. Total amount of drug ingested is quantity times potency. Old school people made up the low potency with quantity. What is more though, there always was high potency strains available (just not as prevalent today). Thai sticks, hash oils, they have been around for a long time. So, the high potency stuff has been around, that is not new, and most people compensate for the high potency by ingesting less.
My supply back when I used to smoke was limited to “what my dealer had available.” There may have been better strains available, but I sure couldn’t get my hands on them. There’s also an issue of “minimum viable dose” - provided you have sufficient time and determination, you can get just as high with shitty weed as you can with the good stuff, but it’s an awful lot harder to get only as high with the good stuff as you did with the shitty stuff. I am pro-legalization and anti-drug war, but I hear this bromide about the enormously increased availability of high-potency THC products not leading people to consume more and I just wonder what world y’all are living on.
The point is those strains certainly did exist. You are right to point out they were not as prevalent though.
> the enormously increased availability of high-potency THC products not leading people to consume more and I just wonder what world y’all are living on.
This is not quite the same angle as I was getting at. I agree that larger supply generally does drive more usage. There is data that agrees with that too - studies regarding consumption in WA post legalization did find a statistically significant (but still somewhat marginal) increase in overall consumption (let me know if you'd like to see that for yourself, I can try to dig it up, IIRC it was about 10% more consumption).
The angle I'm coming at is two fold.
(1) One of the biggest harms (if not the primary harm) of cannabis consumption comes from the combustion of carbon. More carbon burned and inhaled means more harm. That is different from alcohol. For example, if I were to drink a shot of vodka, or a shot of vodka mixed with a pint of water, it's about the same harm either way because the harmful thing there is the alcohol itself. For cannabis, that is not the case. If we smoke more, it's more harm because of the carbon, regardless of whether we are getting more THC or not. This is almost obvious in some cases with cannabis, scrape a bong and smoke that - it's basically smoking charcoal and the THC output is very low; it's way worse than consuming magnitudes more THC but smoking far less [consuming magnitudes more THC may be unpleasant, but overall health wise you're going to be better off compared to smoking charcoal (aka resin)]
(2) Generally if you give someone cannabis that is twice as strong, they will use about half as much (and perhaps maybe a bit more). This is generally true from my experience, there are exceptional individuals who will smoke as much as they have, always. Regardless of those exceptions, to illustrate, let's say someone is shooting for a 1.5 gram dose of THC per day (at 10% potency, multiply that by 10 for the plant weight, ergo 15 grams of plant weight per day - this is a heavy user). Let's say with greater supply they are now going to smoke 1.7 grams (10% increase, in line with the increase observed post legalization). For the sake of this napkin math, let's say they increase by 20% to 1.9 grams per day (so smoking 19 grams of plant matter total). Now, even at the increased usage, let's say they get some 20% grade weed, they still consume that 1.9 grams of total THC, but now the plant volume smoked is just shy of 10 grams. Even at higher usage, smoking higher potency, it's still a huge net benefit to smoke 10g of plant per day compared to 15g of plant matter per day.
We can express this in math:
T(otal quantity THC) = P(otency) * Q(uantity smoked)
T = PQ
In the above, Q is the thing that causes harm. If Q is limited because there is no supply or no cash, then we have an upper bound of Q due to that factor. Otherwise, 'T' generally has an upper bound, in my experience it is a pretty fixed value, which means if we increase 'P' (potency) we will decrease 'Q' (which is the total quantity smoked, and reducing the total quantity smoked is reducing the harm [at least the harm that is directly related to smoking cannabis, namely the inhalation of CO and other toxic elements that are by-products from the combustion of carbon).
"Not as prevalent" is underselling the transformation that's happened in the marijuana market to an almost laughable degree.
> One of the biggest harms <...> of cannabis consumption comes from the combustion of carbon
> T = PQ
So there's two spots here where we're going to disagree, and I expect the disagreement to be fairly irreconcilable:
The first, primarily, is in seeing THC consumption as fundamentally fine with no downsides in and of itself aside from the potential physical harms from the means of consumption. This has been a primary argument from the legalization community and for good reason - the drug war did far, far more harm to cannabis consumers than cannabis ever did - but it's wrong. There are a whole lot of folks for whom some recreational weed use is totally fine, but I'm sure you already know people who should be consuming less (or you will). Not everyone handles psychoactive substances well, it can get habit-forming, and not everyone is Carl Sagan.
The second is seeing T in your equation as a fixed quantity and assuming people are rationally capable of solving that equation perfectly over time. I think this combines with #1, but I also suspect you've seen enough people who's Ts have crept up over time to know that equation's a bit fallacious.
Again, I do not think marijuana should be illegal. I think it's generally one of the safer drugs out there - in fact, I've got a hard time thinking of many drugs with a better risk profile or even a lower long-term impact to heavy users. That said, I think that the community at large has both oversold its safety and undersold the potential for (psychological) dependency and the impacts on users, and is continuing to do so at potential risk to the movement itself. I understand why that's been the case historically, but I think the community at large needs to move past pretending there are no downsides to the drug at all and to start acknowledging that it's a psychoactive substance, and like every other psychoactive substance out there requires some care and attention to harm reduction.
(And, to be very clear on this: I think by and large most people who consume cannabis recreationally on an even quasi-regular basis will have few to no negative effects. I also don't think that cannabis consumption itself should be dramatically regulated to prevent the few long-tail negative outcomes - but those outcomes DO exist, and we can't and shouldn't pretend they don't.)
My point is very simply that the majority of cannabis users are seeking to achieve a desired effect, not smoke a certain volume. Hence the statement (that I'm paraphrasing with some exaggerated emphasis) of "OMG, because pot is so much stronger today, people are getting so much THC! Unprecedented amounts!". I say no, people are just smoking less to get the same level of high. Further, nothing about the high potency is that novel, there _were_ higher potency strains and they were quite available (the availability was spotty due to black market, but the still very available). A really notable example would be domestic production. Generally that has always produced strains over 10%. There has been a _lot_ of domestic production for quite some time running. Certainly not everyone knew a grower, or knew someone that knew someone, but plenty of people did. It would be super interesting to know the percentage of domestic cultivation around the 1960s to 1980s compared to imports, but those numbers will never be known with any certainty. Further though, not all imports were low quality cannabis, people have been rolling Afghani hash-balls for a very long time. In short, smoking hash in the 1960s is very similar to smoking high potency pot of today - and there was quite a bit of hash available in the 1960s and prevously.
Second, and this is really my point - the majority of cannabis users are looking to achieve a desired effect. If it takes less to get the same effect, then less is consumed. It's exactly similar to how people will have 3 drinks, they're going to stick to 3 drinks whether that is 1 pint of beer and 2 shots, or 3 beers and 0 shots. For smoking and the health impacts and toxicitiy, the volume smoking is the dominant factor, not the quantity of THC consumed. Alcohol is not like that, it's the amount of alcohol that drives the toxicity, not the volume that contained the alcohol.
Which also brings me to another point, I failed to convey the nuance carefully, in terms of harm - I'm only talking about chemical toxicity and the biological harm of the drug itself. I'm not at all talking about the societal harm and I do not discount it.
Regarding societal harm - pegging millions of people with felonies, with life sentences for simple first time possesion is immense societal harm. There is only one job in my life I could have had with a felony record. You can't even bag groceries if you have a felony... (that was my first job, and it didn't accept felons). Though, nobody is pretending it's all roses on the other side. The big point though is those suffering from severe impacts because of their consumption - it's not the case that the war on drugs actually did anything to help them. In other words, the war on drugs generally only hurt people further. The legalization movement gained a lot of steam when it was commonly acknowledged that the legal consequences of getting caught with cannabis were the largest risk for cannabis users, not the dealer, and not the person failing school because of cannabis use. That's just saying for 90% of some users during prohibition, their dealers were safe and they were not going to fail school because of cannabis. Legalization really helps for two reasons, it removes the black market and the ties and interactions average users were forced to create (they no longer had to work with someone that also sold other drugs, or dealt with large amounts of cash and the associated violence, etc..); and it removed the legal penalties. This leaves us with the just the societal harms of cannabis use, none of which are helped with black markets.
I omitted a response to this. I totally agree T is a function of time and tolerance. I fully agree even T can become extremely elevated due to tolerance.
My point though is analgous to drinkers. Most people are looking to acquire a certain BAC and they stop when they hit that. EG: if I want a BAC of 0.12%, I'll stop after 2 pints or 2 shots; just because I have a bottle of vodka in front of me I'm not going to drink 2 pints of it.
Thus, the _typical_ effect of providing someone with double potency is they consume half as much. Typically though, there are exceptions (ballpark 5-15% of heavy users, which are already a small subset of all users)
This ties back into the potency thing though, the inverse is true; decrease potency by half and the volume consumed will double. For those that were seeking a very high 'T' value - they were making up for it in quantity. Thus, the average value of 'T' has not gone up to dramatic levels.
I would guess it is likely that generally more people are getting higher, but it's like 10%, something like 0.35 grams of THC or 0.4 grams in a session compared to 0.3 grams. It's only heavy users I've ever met that can do more than that; and believe me that they were getting plenty high smoking absurd quantities
This distinction seems rooted in mind-body dualism, further driving my skepticism.
Basically with hard chemical dependence there will be some kind of adverse body reaction. With marijuana that doesn't exist or is so vanishingly small that you don't feel anything.
I believe it is rather established that cannabis has withdrawal symptoms in the form of sleep and mood impairments. That would qualify cannabis as physiologically addictive, as indeed would be any drug with physical withdrawal symptoms.
Granted, they may be lesser than other drugs, but they are still there.
What? For many, many users this is just completely not true. Insomnia, headaches, nausea, irritability are all common symptoms of weed withdrawal.
The divide is probably clearer with non-drug addictions, like gambling. Gambling isn't some drug that modifies chemicals in your brain and makes you addicted, and yet some people are addicted to gambling.
It's possible some drugs function like gambling, where they don't actually modify chemicals in your brain to make you addicted, but you can get addicted anyways, psychologically
Again, this whole distinction is predicated on the idea that something can affect behavior without affecting the brain. I struggle to see how that is even possible.
But on a more analytical approach, I just don't agree with your premise. There's a stark difference between the brains lowlevel mechanics such as serotonin receptor downregulation all the way to buying the brand in the supermarket that reminds you of your childhood. What I mean is it's not a mind-body dualism problem, rather, it's a scale problem. Does the mechanism that drives you to behave consist of individual molecules or cells, or unfathomably complex dynamic patterns of neurons firing across every region of your brain that constitute almost a religious reminder of who you are and what you desire. What I'm saying is is it the hardware or the software. That's physiological vs psychological. But if you wish you can turn any topic in the world into metaphysical philosophy, I just think we have a lot of textbooks in any hospital university library already on these topics that don't bring philosophy into it.
On a related note, I’m not sure what to tell you if you don’t see how espousing mind-body dualism can lead people to propose nonsensical distinctions, especially in medicine. I’d have expected a vehement defender of scientific medicine to agree with this.
Otherwise I really like my scale argument and would like to see you deconstruct it, right above read it again if you feel like it, I don't think your argument that just because physiological mechanisms are "at play" in psychological ones defeats it.
Are you a nondualist? I've had that period so I can understand both sides, if you expand more on your viewpoints with some real detailed fleshing out rather than just deconstructing any incoming argument. Personally I have my criticisms of medicine, but can celebrate a lot of textbook content as true.
So now that you know I'm an ex-nondualist, maybe you can give my scale argument a reread and see if you accept it as a description of the phenomenon? So to be perfectly obvious, there's direct chemical reaction and implicit chemical reaction. I consider it a big difference to flood a bunch of molecules past the blood-brain barrier, versus experiencing something such as a video game and reacting to it.
And hey, I am in a period of my life where I definitely put precedence for the body and let the mind follow. Daily exercise in nature, oh boy that really improves my mind. Reason alone in a dark room did not get me far at all.
But if you feel like we're not getting anywhere or I'm not convincing then that's fine and you can ignore this
Let me try again...
My response should have been something like "my question is less focused on the metaphysics, and more focused on what I think is an issue of logic, so I am happy to stick to the level of analysis of a university hospital textbook". It seems to be the case that people are attempting to partition the phenomenon of addiction into psychological vs physiological addiction. My issue is twofold:
1. I know of no substance that is well-established as being addictive that does not produce both (1) a physiological response at the time of consumption/engagement and (2) an unpleasant physiological withdrawal symptom of some kind. This notably includes drugs that are popularly described as being purely psychologically addictive, such as cannabis.
2. The psychological (i.e. cognitive and behavioral) patterns that we associate with addiction are driven, in a fairly direct manner, by the physiological responses to the presence and absence of the drug. Addicts return to drugs both to avoid physiological withdrawal symptoms and to pursue pleasurable physiological effects.
Together, these suggest a psychological effect of the drug that mediated by physiology. In all cases, the physiological phenomena are necessary. I am generally quite sensitive to arguments of emergence at a particular scale, but I don't see the necessity for it here. Can you be more precise? The closest you come to providing an example has to do with a "reminder of who you are and what you desire". I am also not-insensitive to higher-order explanations for behavior, including some from the psychoanalytical tradition, but I don't think these negate the causal chain outlined in point #2. Therefore, I don't see how psychological addiction can exist separately from physiology, except perhaps in the trivial case of categorizing psychology as a subset of or emergence from physiology. Certainly, I think, one does not encounter "psychological addiction" without also encountering its physiological counterpart, rendering the ontological distinction questionable. It is further made questionable by the prima facie dualist argument that subtends the psychological-vs-physiological distinction. Certainly, if this is not a dualist position, the argument is not immediately obvious to me, and I would be interested in hearing it.
Moreover, if you'll allow me to stray from the purely logical argument surrounding biology and psychology, my sense is that this dichotomy between physiological and psychological addiction is in large part a semantic game that serves to advance a certain political discourse. Invariably, it serves to argue that cannabis isn't "really" addictive by arguing that is withdrawal is qualitatively very different from that of, say, heroin. To this I can only say, "of course it is!" Nobody is really arguing that cannabis is as dangerous as heroin! But this is indeed the argument of scale; I might be convinced that the severity of cannabis' toxicity, intoxication and withdrawal is minor enough to warrant the drug's legality, but I still contend that for those who are addicted to cannabis, the same commingling of physiological state and behavior is at play.
And in case it needs to be said, of course the difference in degree that separates cannabis from heroin (and other "hard" drugs) is large enough to place the two in qualitatively different categories. Again, my point is that despite this, both produce their addictions in similar ways (roughly: the dopaminergic circuit), as is supported by the scientific literature.
(Edits made for clarity.)
1) All substances produce a) physiological response and b)unpleasant withdrawal. Including substances described as purely psychological.
2) Psychological (cognitive and behavioral) addiction patterns are driven directly by physiological response to presence/absence of the drug. Addicts return to drugs to avoid physiological withdrawal, and pursue pleasurable physiological effects.
#1 and #2 gives #3 3) Emergent complexity not necessary, example needed, even from e g psychoanalytics, still wouldn't negate #2
#3 gives: Therefore, psychological cant exist apart from physiological, except if psychology subset of physiologically which we both agree is boring interpretation.
So why a distinction at all.
My first thought is practical. Does someone need acute help, a patient needing medicine to avoid serious harm? Categorise as physiological, give the medicine, time is of the essence! Does someone need a support group to process their emotions and discuss their situation with others going through the same thing? Psychological!
For these purposes, helping others in an almost economical way to have efficient hospitals, the dichotomy is useful. I, and the literature, you as well, consider physiological and psychological as interwoven. The question is how much and if the dichotomy should be there at all, where we disagree.
It can be dynamic and the one can reinforce the other, maybe even the inverse. Personally, my psychological aversion to being used by unethical companies made me quit nicotine pouches. So it's dynamic. Just a side exposition.
> Together, these suggest a psychological effect of the drug that mediated by physiology. In all cases, the physiological phenomena are necessary. I am generally quite sensitive to arguments of emergence at a particular scale, but I don't see the necessity for it here. Can you be more precise? The closest you come to providing an example has to do with a "reminder of who you are and what you desire". I am also not-insensitive to higher-order explanations for behavior, including some from the psychoanalytical tradition, but I don't think these negate the causal chain outlined in point #2.
Behavior is so complex. If someone read 2000 years worth of literature and behaves in the world inspired by everything from Alcibiades statesmanship to von Neumanns mathematical theorems, whatever one would do in the world hypothetically I would categorise that complex emergent behaviour as psychological, emergent, high level, thinking with words and symbols in highly patterned and reactive ways maybe even different states of consciousness and let's say some delusions like they're possessed by ancestral spirits. That's a VERY weird sentence but bear with me. That can not be understood at a physiological level except by god hypotethically, and psychologically primarily by their older wiser self retroactively, in a compressed descriptive way. So what does this have to do with #2. Well let's say that immense complexity drives them do a bunch of coke over and over, as a rational requirement to orate effectively in front of the populace or whatever. Like dictators have done, drugs for the right state of mind for diplomatic affairs or speeches. The meaning of this paragraph is to inundate you with an extreme example of a psychological driveforce to an addiction. Rather than the physiological craving, the dictator returns to the coke to fulfill their ambitions, perhaps. I don't know man I'm just trying to describe a complex motive, rather than "grug need crazy honey because body uncomfortable".
For a more normal example, let's say my dad dies and we would always drink vanilla tea. I keep returning to the vanilla tea PURELY out of psyc...
Addiction, by definition, is a psychological phenomenon. For recreational drugs, it's the only thing that keeps you using even when the net effect is harmful to your life.
It's really annoying to see people say things like, "It's only psychologically addictive" as if that's somehow less perilous than the alternative, or easier to overcome if you want to stop.
Most alcoholics have a hard time quitting not just because of the DTs (not that I'm dismissing those!), but because it's bloody hard to break that habit! The yearning for a drink is incredibly strong, long after you've detoxed. The physical withdrawal from alcohol can be managed over just a few days. The psychological withdrawal from it is typically a long-term journey with plenty of opportunities for relapse. Same with heroin. Kicking it is no fun, that's for sure. But once you've done your 30 days or whatever, the physical part is over. The real challenge is just beginning.
[0] Okay, I supposed there are addictions that are purely physical. Some blood pressure medications, for example. I ignore these, because "addiction" is probably not the right term for them. "Dependence" better suits therapies that you really do need to continue, or taper when it's time to stop.
Surely psychological phenomena are also physical ones, insofar as they are seated in the brain and the rest of the body? Do you have an example of a pure case of “psychological addiction”? The only thing I can think of is the social aspect of consuming the drug. But then, I can think of a great number of activities that, when removed, cause “withdrawal” in the form of longing for the social interaction, none of which fit the common-sense definition of “addiction”.
So I’m left to conclude that this distinction is a false one. For the purposes of things we generally consider to be drugs, the only possible kind of addiction physiological.
Quit cigs/caffeine and you'll be irritable and nothing much else... maybe constipated for the first days? Quit heroin and you will likely stop to function, your brain needs it. Same as alcohol, real alcoholics don't stop cold turkey or they will likely die, their body needs it. As the substances have replaced their natural counterparts which the body has forgot how to make.
I’m struck by how you and others point to physiological symptoms when arguing that the withdrawal is purely psychological.
> This distinction seems rooted in mind-body dualism, further driving my skepticism.
this does not really make sense though, and opioid withdrawal is a good example to demonstrate why. people who abruptly stop consuming opioids usually get symptoms that are similar to a bad cold or flu. it's not just "in their head"; they literally have snot pouring out of their nose and sweat uncontrollably for days. this is typically what people mean by "physiological addiction". sometimes it is also called "dependence" to distinguish long-term pain management patients from addicts. btw, most common recreational drugs cause some degree of withdrawal, but it's often not significant enough to notice.
in the short term, drug with significant withdrawal symptoms are especially difficult to stop consuming for any length of time. but it doesn't take that long for the body to return to homeostasis. a couple weeks is typical, but it might take up to a year in extreme cases.
the learning (ie, what you might call "psychological addiction") never quite goes away though. this is why addicts must be extremely cautious, if not abstain entirely, for the rest of their lives.
1. The fact that these behaviors are learned precisely in response to physiological changes (be it avoidance of withdrawal or chasing the high)
2. The fact that all the supposedly non-physically-addictive drugs like cannabis have well-documented withdrawal symptoms, like sleep dysfunction, that are very much physiological.
If your point is that the physiological withdrawal from heroin is worse than cannabis, then I don’t disagree. I just disagree with the premise that anything can be meaningfully addictive without having a measurable physiological effect. This includes things like gambling, in which the physiological effects are well-documented.
So I’m not so sure that the two forms of addiction can be so well separated. It seems to me that physiology is the mediator of behavior, here, which points back to the very definition of addiction.
I’m left to wonder why people insist on the relevance of this distinction. I don’t believe it’s only to make the point that cannabis is less bad than heroin, as nobody is seriously debating that. I instead get a strong whiff of semantic games.
there is a useful distinction to be made between what I would call "addiction" and "dependence" though. this is why I included the example of PM patients in my initial comment. just like addicts, these people build tolerance and would experience severe withdrawal if their supply were abruptly cut off. the difference is that these people are (mostly, pill mills are a thing) not chasing a high for its own sake. their lives are actually improved by consuming opioids, and they would be just fine with an equally effective substitute.
to be clear, I am not implying PM patients are morally superior to opioid addicts in some way. the distinction is that addiction is intrinsically damaging to a person's quality of life. dependence is merely a tradeoff that may or may not be worth it.
Agreed. And (as you've no-doubt guessed by now), I would argue that this second, harder phase of recovery has very little to do with addiction per se, in both it s mechanisms and coping strategies.
>there is a useful distinction to be made between what I would call "addiction" and "dependence" though.
I'd have to think about this a bit more, but even though I agree the distinction is practically useful for treatment, it's once again a distinction of degree rather than kind. In both cases, there is a physiological habituation to a substance that causes unpleasant withdrawal symptoms. Something analogous to the pleasure-seeking behavior of bona fide addicts is still there, I think, when you consider that drug-dependent people will consume a substance to "feel normal".
>dependence is merely a tradeoff that may or may not be worth it.
I'd quibble about merely, since the worm can turn mighty quick, and people are generally pretty bad at knowing how deep in the hole they are. But I take your general point.
I've mostly agreed with you up until here, but having known both heroin addicts and a few PM patients, I don't agree with this at all. while there is a significant minority of PM patients that are addicts in disguise, I genuinely don't believe most of them enjoy taking their prescription. at least in theory, the PM patient works with their doctor to find a dose that adequately manages their chronic pain while minimizing impairment and other unpleasant side effects like nausea and constipation. the addict seeks the highest dose they can get away with (not arousing suspicion of employer/family, being able to afford it, etc.). the intention behind the use is very different.
more generally, my working definition of addiction is something like this: a) inability or extreme difficulty in regulating b) an activity or use of a substance that c) negatively impacts one's health, interpersonal relationships, or other meaningful goals. the PM patient clearly satisfies b). but I would argue they don't satisfy a) if they are able to stick to what they've agreed with their doctor and haven't specifically chosen that doctor for being a total pushover. they don't satisfy c) at all: the drug is what allows them to participate in something like an ordinary life. in extreme cases, it is what allows them to exist at all.
btw, I could also have chosen SSRIs as my example for dependence. I think the PM example is better for teasing apart addiction vs dependence, since there is a bit of overlap in reality. but SSRIs are interesting because they do not demonstrate the same tolerance building effect as other psychoactive drugs, nor are they (commonly) used recreationally. nevertheless, people do report fairly nasty withdrawal symptoms from abrupt cessation of SSRIs. you can google "ssri brain zaps" if you're curious.
tl;dr: addiction and dependence can look similar from the outside. one simple heuristic for distinguishing them is how the person behaves after acute withdrawal subsides. the addict will always feel the temptation to go back, and resisting that temptation is usually a lifelong struggle. the person who was merely dependent will stop and never look back if they find an alternate solution to their problem.
And the mind-body dualism is still very much here to stay, culturally.
I would classify "psychologically addictive" as something that makes a little voice in my head go "do that thing again" and is mainly driven by the speed at which an action(drug or not) receives a physiological response in my body. If I take a hit of a weed vape I feel it so fast that my psychological addiction gets triggered more easily. Whereas when I eat a weed edible the response takes so long that the little voice in my head doesn't say, "eat another one". Unless I eat one every day then that little voice becomes stronger over time.
I can do either of those things one time and only experience the acute withdrawal.
I would classify "physical addiction" as a habit where cessation causes a lengthy (not acute) withdrawal period, caused by some type of brain changes like receptor degrowth because of over-agonization or whatever. I think we qualify ones that have worse withdrawal as more physically addictive. As some have already pointed out, alcohol withdrawal can make you dead and opiate withdrawal can make you wish you were, so we consider these very physically addictive. THC withdrawals exist, but they are so minor when compared to death or opiate-withdrawal hell that we consider it not very physically addictive.
An extreme example: Someone could spike my coffee with opiates every day for a year without me knowing, slowly increasing the dose so I'm not too messed up. I would be physically addicted but have no psychological addiction.
To reiterate an important point you make: if we’re going with those definitions, then the only difference between the two is one of quantity. In both cases, physiological effects of the drug are driving the addiction, mediated by behaviors that emerge in response to changes in physiology. So again, the qualitative difference is only the one that emerges from a vast difference in quantity.
I’d also insist that we recognize some of the very-physiological withdrawal symptoms experienced by at least some cannabis users, e.g. sleep disruption…
[0] Part of my reason for asking this question initially is because I’m convinced this is not mere semantics, but rather a linguistic game that people play to argue that cannabis has zero meaningful addictive potential. I find that to be disingenuous.
P.S.: I hope it’s obvious to everyone that I’m not bashing cannabis use in general. Hell, I appreciate the occasional joint.
These extreme physical effects are seen at the upper end of abuse limits, and the majority of people who legitimately suffer from addiction don't need round-the-clock medical care if they quit - and even those who do can generally avoid such problems if they go through a tapering-off process over the period of about a month.
When an individual, who has chronically misused alcohol, suddenly stops or drastically reduces, they can experience a combination of withdrawal symptoms—both physical and emotional—that can range from mild to severe, and in rare cases, can be life-threatening."
https://americanaddictioncenters.org/withdrawal-timelines-tr...
Psychological addiction: "...Psychological dependence on drugs or alcohol is the emotional, motivational, and mental addictive qualities that come with substance abuse. ..."
https://footprintstorecovery.com/blog/psychological-dependen...
Seems like a notable withdrawal symptom of you ask me.
Source: my observations routinely interacting with numerous clients and employees (never a client nor employee myself) of more than a few treatment centers.
An Addictionologist is an M.D. with a specialty in addiction who can speak to the matter on a scientific basis.
I've gone through periods where I smoke a relatively small amount of flower on a daily basis for months at a time, and then stop cold turkey, over a dozen or so times in my life. One thing I really enjoy about stopping cold turkey to take a tolerance break is that my dreams become profoundly vivid during the first week or so of withdrawal. I can often remember dreams vividly as if they occurred in waking life, for as long as two days after the night I dreamt, and with enough clarity to write them out in detail. I usually look forward to the experience.
Maybe I'm just a weirdo, but I actually enjoy the "come down" from individual smoke "sessions", and the "reset" I experience when stopping cold turkey. It feels refreshing in a way, not really sure how to describe it.
I doubt anyone would argue that that's indicative of a physical addiction to the television, even as there are obviously "withdrawal" symptoms. Thus the grandparent's distinction between physical and psychological addiction.
I think a lot of what we understand as "psychological" addictions to drugs are just drugs where the addictive changes are limited to higher functioning portions of the brain. And our obsession with mind-body duality means we understand those differently.
> other opioid products
Not even close
> This is due to taking weeks to get cannabis out of your system.
I doubt it. It's not psychoactive weeks later.
I agree with the "psychologically addictive" vs "physically" though. (I think it's even simpler than that though - you're just addicted to the quick dopamine surge, same as another round of Counter Strike, sex, cupcake, whatever)
Cannabis is not an opioid, and I don't think there is any indication that being oil-based has any impact on whether a substance has withdrawal symptoms. Also, while the substances of interest in cannabis may be in oils naturally and in the easiest extractions, they aren’t actually “oil-based”, anyway. So, whether it came from a rehab specialist or not, this seems to be multilayered misinformation.
https://time.com/6167638/psilocybin-addiction-therapeutic-br...
Psilocybin Could be a Therapeutic Breakthrough For Addiction
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9947277/
All four clinical trials indicated a beneficial effect of psilocybin-assisted therapy on SUD symptoms
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27441452/
All 15 participants ... At 12-month follow-up, 10 participants (67%) were confirmed as smoking abstinent. At long-term follow-up, nine participants (60%) were confirmed as smoking abstinent.
At 12-month follow-up 13 participants (86.7%) rated their psilocybin experiences among the five most personally meaningful and spiritually significant experiences of their lives.
If you don't want to quit, nothing will help, probably.
> the boredom from not being high
Maybe this is the real problem?
Going in without a therapist doesn't necessarily mean the experience is undirected.
Even during an intense psilocybin experience, people typically retain some degree of agency and control over their actions. In most cases, individuals on a psilocybe trip can still make decisions and perform basic tasks, though their perceptions and judgments might be altered.
It unfortunately doesn't work for everyone.
I’ve heard the effects of psilocybin described as (roughly) increasing neuroplasticity for a time, thus allowing changes that would be significantly harder to accomplish otherwise.
But I don’t think unguided trips would automatically have this effect if you don’t already have the necessary tools/frameworks going in.
There's no situation in which using a significant dose of a psychoactive substance as powerful as psilocybin is without risks. That's not to say the risks aren't worth it for anyone, and experienced, supportive guidance can minimize some risks, but it's never without any risk at all.
please don't share misinformation like this so confidently. was just yesterday in an AA meeting with someone who tried psilocybin and it made him relapse.
the only way to turn off an addiction is sobriety
It's illegal -> "This probably shouldn't be illegal, it's not as bad as the government has suggested" -> "___ will cure ____" -> "___ can be used to treat almost anything" -> ___ is legalized in some capacities -> ___ isn't nearly as impactful as the original medicinal claims and also presents its own set of issues.
I'm very curious to see what psilocybin presents in the final phase of this ride.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwG3HWubpZI
Definitely some skepticism there!