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Are all cannabis users addicts?
Speaking as an addict, yes most regular users are. It's not the same kind of addiction (emotional, not physical) but it's still addictive. If you smoke weed every day for a year, and stop, for the first year you stop, your suicide rate is doubled.
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Isnt it possible that people smoking weed were treating conditions like anxiety or depression and are more likely to commit suicide in the first place? Weed has had a real deficit of actual study and although some people can get a dependency on it I have a hard time qualifying those people as addicts when stopping weed is so much less dangerous and difficult than other substances. Its a complicated topic that require…
Oh that’s absolutely part of it.
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Speaking as an addict, yes most regular users are. It's not the same kind of addiction (emotional, not physical) but it's still addictive. If you smoke weed every day for a year, and stop, for the first year you stop, your suicide rate is doubled.
People don’t take the withdrawal potential seriously. I’ve had a complex relationship with cannabis over the years, and one of the things that I didn’t understand before getting stuck in a daily habit of heavy use for a period of time is how hard it can be on your body to just stop. I had major upset stomach and food aversion for a few weeks to the point that I lost 10 pounds, major sleep issues, a major spike in dep…
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Yeah, that’s a bit of a red flag. A better study would of course open up the data, so validation would be easier. But a better study would also have figured out whether the effects are correlated with specific strains of cannabis, perhaps even specific cannabinoids. There is no guarantee that it is specifically THC causing these effects, it could very well be CBG (cannabigerol) or just the inhalation of smoke itself:…
I’m more inclined to believe the physical stress of coughing my ass off on a bad hit would wreck my heart over time than the THC itself, times thousands and thousands of coughs…
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Same here. I think the link to panic attacks and psychosis triggers gets downplayed a bit.
had a six month period where i was pretty much a zombie. i call it my time in hell... i know another guy that got admitted to a mental institution... and seen plenty of people 'stuck in their own heads' - talking to themselves, blabbering about things nobody understands but them... side effects of weed are downplayed a lot
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People don’t take the withdrawal potential seriously. I’ve had a complex relationship with cannabis over the years, and one of the things that I didn’t understand before getting stuck in a daily habit of heavy use for a period of time is how hard it can be on your body to just stop. I had major upset stomach and food aversion for a few weeks to the point that I lost 10 pounds, major sleep issues, a major spike in dep…
Anecdotes are not helpful here. Did you commonly have an upset stomach and food aversion before?
These symptoms are well known among the cannabis community, and there is increasing awareness in the medical community [0] especially for people who experience the most extreme forms like CHS [1], which has become increasingly common with more people using extremely high % THC products.
If you're curious about this subject, I'd highly recommend reading the thousands of 1st hand accounts of the quitting process on a subreddit like /r/petioles or /r/leaves.
It's extremely common for people to be skeptical of cannabis addiction/withdrawal [2], and I'm pretty certain this is an overcorrection after the decades of demonization and straight-up lies about cannabis. This is understandable, but the pendulum is gradually swinging back as more people experience difficulties quitting.
I'm still in favor of legal cannabis, but the addiction potential is very real and worth highlighting. Part of the issue currently is that research is decades behind at this point due to the federal scheduling of the drug, and much of the research we do have was conducted with old low-THC strains. Hopefully we'll get better studies that highlight the things many heavy users already know 1st hand.
- [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9110555/
- [1] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21665-cannabi...
- [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/07/31/marijuana-a...
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He was recommended by my therapist. Essentially runs an all-inclusive, boutique medical service; expensive, but actually turned out to be cheaper than all the services I'd previously had to use, for the best care of my life. That said, he only sees a limited number of patients (actually just closed new memberships from the web, only accepting referrals until he hits his cap) and only in Georgia. I imagine there are o…
Just to tail off this and explain the business model, searching for “direct primary care” is a good way to find this type of physician. A lot of these smaller shops start under the “DPC” label to build up a client base, charging something like $75-150/mo for unlimited primary care services. When the practice starts to hit its limits, they close off new patient signups, and start offering “concierge” signups at ~4x th…
I have no idea why we keep putting this stuff on HN. Common thing X causes/reduces 1 (out of 100) types of cancer or health issue. Without looking at all the effects together, the comparison product (alcohol?), and the actual change in risk it’s as likely to confuse as inform.