Re:Stop Treating Marijuana Like Heroin
by wutbrodo on Saturday August 13, 2016 @03:27PM
(#12282731)
> I am 99.99% certain that if you already suffer problems with motivation or life direction, marijuana can majorly f... you up.
> If you have your s... more or less together, you can probably use weed semi-regularly without too much damage. But if there are one or more real problems in your life, things which would take real effort and motivation to fix (poor social life / grades slipping / lack career direction / etc), weed will tempt you to chill out and ignore said problems. You concoct wild rationalisations about why you don't really want X, why people who chase X are manipulated by the system, etc, etc.
As a counterexample to your 99.99% certainty, I had more or less the opposite reaction. I was in a pretty terrible place about a year and a half ago, and I found myself coming home after work and getting high almost every weekday evening. Not only did it serve the intended purpose of getting me through the day-to-day of a pretty horrible and anxiety-inducing time in my life, the fact that I noticed myself using so much more was one of the clearest signals that made me realize that something was wrong in the first place (without the health costs and potential physical dependency that most other drugs would've imposed). In most measurable ways, I was still pretty functional (e.g., still very productive at work, etc), but the place I was in mentally was absolutely unsustainable.
That signal made me take a look at what might be wrong and start thinking about fixing it. As soon as I took the first step towards fixing everything I needed to, my marijuana usage dropped off a cliff (even though I had quit my job and had far, far more free time). A year after quitting, I'm better off in almost every way. AFAICT, marijuana is more or less like junk food (except physically better for you): the costs aren't as dramatic as other drugs but if you're doing it what you perceive as too often you should at least consider that there's an underlying reason (much as I would conclude I was stress eating or had a poorly balanced diet if I was eating junk food once a week or more).
> If you have your s... more or less together, you can probably use weed semi-regularly without too much damage. But if there are one or more real problems in your life, things which would take real effort and motivation to fix (poor social life / grades slipping / lack career direction / etc), weed will tempt you to chill out and ignore said problems. You concoct wild rationalisations about why you don't really want X, why people who chase X are manipulated by the system, etc, etc.
As a counterexample to your 99.99% certainty, I had more or less the opposite reaction. I was in a pretty terrible place about a year and a half ago, and I found myself coming home after work and getting high almost every weekday evening. Not only did it serve the intended purpose of getting me through the day-to-day of a pretty horrible and anxiety-inducing time in my life, the fact that I noticed myself using so much more was one of the clearest signals that made me realize that something was wrong in the first place (without the health costs and potential physical dependency that most other drugs would've imposed). In most measurable ways, I was still pretty functional (e.g., still very productive at work, etc), but the place I was in mentally was absolutely unsustainable.
That signal made me take a look at what might be wrong and start thinking about fixing it. As soon as I took the first step towards fixing everything I needed to, my marijuana usage dropped off a cliff (even though I had quit my job and had far, far more free time). A year after quitting, I'm better off in almost every way. AFAICT, marijuana is more or less like junk food (except physically better for you): the costs aren't as dramatic as other drugs but if you're doing it what you perceive as too often you should at least consider that there's an underlying reason (much as I would conclude I was stress eating or had a poorly balanced diet if I was eating junk food once a week or more).