Getting this subthread back on topic, the study defines heavy (or medium) use - i.e., the problem categories in the study - as 1000+ (or 11-1000 days of usage). Are you a medium-heavy user?

I don't think you being an exception disproves the parent's generality that on the average heavy weed usage doesn't correlate with people in your position.

Anyone who smokes every couple of hours is averaging around 8 times a day and hits that in under five months.

People who do not smoke weed have no idea how heavy, heavy really is.

Why do these studies assume weed is cumulative but alcohol isn’t? Is it because most researchers have experience with being drunk but zero to little experience with being high on weed?

It seems likely there is a difference between someone who is buzzed all day every day for years vs someone that smokes several times each weekend, but these studies all group them together as one. Most likely because the researchers don't understand what they are studying and produce results that do not match the lived experience of their research subjects.

Thanks for the clarification

To your point, AFAIK, the study doesn't differentiate potency of weed. Not all cannabis is created equal and the strands commonly available now are way more potent (with more arrows pointing to addictiveness) than "your dad's weed."

Literally every highly successful person you look up to in tech has been a proponent of weed usage, hell some even went farther with psychedelics.

Like op, I too attribute a lot of my success to being a daily user of weed since I was 12.

I also imagine extreme success drives social issues. It has to suck not ever truly being able to know if somebody is interested in you because they're interested in you, or if they're simply interested in your money/fame. To say nothing of the fact that a lot of these guys can't even really safely walk around strangers anymore. It all seems like a path to various artificial forms of coping, like drugs. Basically the same reason Hollywood types are also screwed.

I found out I'm a slow metabolizer of caffeine, a cup of coffee will last like 16-18 hours for me, even though the half-life is supposed to be 3-7 hours for adults, which makes coffee a more dangerous drug for me because it'll disrupt my sleep more than the average joe. I still like coffee but I have to be more careful than most people.

That being said I'm pretty sure cannabis is horrible for the developing brain. I remember one anecdote of someone who told me they would get really high when they were 14, and would get so high that they would literally black out, like have no idea what just happened. Probably best to be avoided until adulthood. Nobody when I was in college or older ever experienced anything like that, just the usual report of infrequent users forgetting what they were just talking about or what someone else just said to them, the whole short term memory loss thing.