My personal pet peeve is hearing there is no addiction. I sold pot for years and some of my clients were definitely showing all the signs of addiction. My guess is that as humans, we can get addicted to pretty much anything as long as we can use it to cope with the hard parts of life.
Yep, I've had two friends who were heavy smokers and would become horrible fiends if their supply was interrupted. Whereas the rest of my heavy-smoker friends would be annoyed but wouldn't go crazy.
It seems to be like alcoholism, it only affects a percentage of users.
On the other hand, cut sugar from me and I'm an asshole during the first 3 days.
I think people are referring to the idea that pot is not physically addicting, meaning that your body won't experience withdrawal symptoms when you come down.
Tons of people are habitual smokers though bordering on mental addiction.
I now deeply believe (I'll admit I have no more evidence than my subjective experience) that many of our abusive substance intakes, be it cigarettes, alcohol, weed or even coffee or sugar, are in part to cope with those unpleasant physical sensations, not just the mental burden. Slowly, you build a physical intolerance to them because you are used to be liberated from them using whatever is substance you abuse.
And hence I do think there is a physical addiction as well.
E.G: if you can't cope with stress without getting some THC, I don't classify that as only mental, as stress is not a phenomenon that is only in the mind, but affect the entire nervous and hormonal system.
I think there's another class of substances though where withdrawal results in symptoms like fever, vomiting, etc. that are consistent across users regardless of their mental state.
genotype T/T: roughly equal risk of psychosis (1.0/1.0/1.0) regardless of marijuana use.
genotype C/T: roughly 0.8 risk with no marijuana use, 1.0 risk with occasional use, and 0.9 risk with daily marijuana use
genotype C/C: roughly 0.5 risk with no marijuana use, 1.0 risk with occasional use, and 7.0* risk with daily use.
It's the daily-use C/C case that is emphasized, but note that it requires frequent use; otherwise, the risk is roughly on par or better than other genotypes.
Note: numbers and relative risks may change with better studies. It's unclear if the type/severity of psychosis is statistically the same for different genotypes.
So, the conclusion I draw is that only frequent marijuana users should be very concerned. Once a week or less isn't too worrying, but if you absolutely want to take advantage of a half-normal risk of psychosis if you have the C/C variant, consider skipping the marijuana and doing advanced meditation instead?
I wonder how difficult it would be (and how much it would cost) to have a portable AKT1 genotype assay available in marijuana dispensaries.
That and several other genetic variations, and their implications for marijuana users, are described at http://profofpot.com/genetics-thc-psychosis/
[1] https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/mari...
To the extent that caffeine is safer than cocaine even though they're almost pharmacologically identical then that's the only reason, in terms of caffeine quickly becoming unpleasant after a certain dose.