> I’m unfamiliar with the weed market in general, but it seems like this problem is self-inflicted.
>I hope we can all agree that over-consumption is not good.
The following is for the purpose of conversation only, food for thought if you will, and does not constitute any sort of condonement or endorsement, tacit or otherwise, of the use of cannabis products. Tread with extreme caution if you have any personal or family history of schizophrenia or schizotypical personality disorder as their is rather strong evidence that cannabis can have particularly profound effects on this group. Everybody reacts differently to different psychoactive substances, you only have one brain and one body, and treat them as your greatest asset:
What is the “over consumption” of weed? Unfortunately we really don’t have much reliable data on marijuana consumption, that I’m aware of anyway, and the longitudinal studies that do exist are from institutions with an obvious agenda, the National Institute on Drug Abuse being chief among them[1], and there was a ban on marijuana research until 2015 [2]. NORML has a pretty comprehensive overview of what data we do have with context of other substances.[3] Another good, more traditional take, is this review in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry[4]. The biggest problem I see with most of the data is that, for obvious ethical reasons, all the marijuana users are self-selected, I’m personally of the belief that many people who consume cannabis, especially into adulthood, are self medicating, and as [4] suggests this may have a lasting effect on their psychiatric outcomes.
I don’t know how much experience you (or other readers) have with weed or drugs in general, but I have decades of experience (with sometimes lengthy breaks) of what by most definitions is “heavy” use, and know some extremely heavy (i.e. nearly constant) users who are also extremely capable. Before I delve further, I’d like to stop (again) and point out that I’m not trying to focus on the exceptional here, but I feel in the context of recreational drug use, it is important to look at the whole spread of users.
Most of the following is anecdata: One interesting thing about cannabis use that I wanted to highlight for non-users in the context of “over-consumption” is that a very common sentiment among long-term chronic (pun intended) users, is that you develop a sort of “permanent tolerance”, even if such a user has a long period of abstinence, upon recommencing use they will rapidly return to their previous state of tolerance—-a (lower) level of efficacy that might have taken years of use to get too will return in a matter of days/weeks. This seems particularly pronounced in cannabis relative to other psychoactive compounds.
I would, based on my experiences and those of all the (hundreds of) people I’ve met and had frank discussions with about their use, rate weed on a “problematicness scale” between coffee and alcohol, but much closer to coffee. Their is a component to cannabis use that it was[5] seen as something of an act of rebellion, and that people who are past the “teenage rebellion” stage tend to self moderate similarly to coffee drinkers—-many of whom have a cup in the morning with the spectrum going all the way to people who drink coffee all day. I say its closer to coffee than alcohol because if someone is an alcoholic, and drinks all day, it will absolutely be noticeable to most people around them, and have an obvious and severe effect on their health. Conversely, I’ve known near constant weed users who were able to keep their use a secret from their family, employer and colleagues, were in athletic clubs and in some case on the extreme end of physical fitness. I’ve yet to meet someone who drinks all day and is otherwise extremely healthy, but I definitely don’t feel I have enough data to make any claims one way or the other about physical fitness. Overall though, I think the jury is still out about how harmful cannabis consumption is, especially if taken independently from smoking, and one of the best things about legalization movement, in my opinion, is that its given users much healthier alternatives to smoking, gummies are great!
[1] https://www.drugabuse.gov/news-events/nida-notes/2018/02/lon...
[2] https://www.marijuanatimes.org/medical-marijuana-research-ba...
[3] https://norml.org/marijuana/library/cannabis-mental-health-a...
[4]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3221171/#ref47
[5] https://archives.drugabuse.gov/news-events/news-releases/201...
