More or less the same for me, although I find it easier to enjoy in Europe where it's generally not nearly as strong as in the US, and consumed with tobacco or a tabac alternative. Incidentally, there are several shops in my European city that sell mushroom chocolates under the table.
As a therapist, I work with so many young men who got hooked on it in their teens. I can tell you it is dangerous - I've seen what happens. So many studies show its' dangers. The one thing I've really noticed is that it leads to, after more heavy usage, increased anxiety! So glad to hear the conclusions you've reached!
As a youngin’, I was both physically uncoordinated and adventurous. End result, I treated the ER as a weekend getaway for about ten years of my childhood- bashed in teeth, broken bones, pierced feet, slashes, gashes, etc etc.
There is a moment right after getting injured where your body gets flooded with feel-good chemicals, and everything gets fuzzy and buzzy. Sort of a low level hum that drowns out the fact that your arm is radiating pain.
That’s what marijuana does for me. It makes my body feel fuzzy and buzzy. I spent that evening covertly checking my body for stab wounds or broken fingers or what have you, because every other time I had felt this way I’d needed to swing by the urgent care center.
I take a hit after breakfast, and a few when I get home from work. I find any one strain "gets old" after a while and you have to change it up regardless, which is why I hesitate to buy whole ounces at a time, because once I get to the bottom of the bag the fun has worn off.
Thank you for really pointing this out! I used to get high off edibles to watch (some) TV series, because it incredibly enhanced the aesthetic experience, but then, that fixation on flaws and ridiculously self-critical inner monologue started happening. It's certainly a weird effect.
My ending was when I tried delta-8 (a ever-so-slightly different and purportedly legal substance derived from hemp). A friend had started taking it for anxiety, and everything you'll read everywhere about it says it's a very mild high, almost unnoticeable. My friend certainly didn't seem high after taking a gummy. So I took one too...and got higher than I've ever been in my life. So high I considered going to the hospital because everything felt wrong. I appear to be extremely reactive to it.
And ever since, smoking weed has just left me feeling empty. Like "this is it. this is as good as life gets. not very impressive, is it?" So I'm stopping.
I have smoked a lot of weed in my life, and known a lot of stoners. I think it's a significantly riskier and more addictive drug than it's made out to be. There is a low probability but pretty clear link with psychosis. For people who don't have dramatic negative effects, addiction can sneak up on you. It's a weird drug, it's low-risk in so many ways that it doesn't make sense for it to be illegal. But to depict it as harmless medicine seems wrong to me as well -- and I'm concerned that's the message kids are getting. I'm not completely sure what to tell my kids about it when they get older.
My friend teaches high school and has had exactly this problem. Her students don't see anything wrong with showing up to work/school high. They will say that of course it's wrong to show up to work/school drunk or even buzzed, but insist weed is different and is totally safe and doesn't impair them and no one will care (even after a girl at the school appears to have actually gotten weed-triggered schizophrenia).
I had to fire a kid once for being too stoned to make pizzas. I couldn't fire kitchen staff for being high (we wouldn't have any cooks), but this kid was unable to do anything right and it was too blatant to ignore. I felt bad, I liked him, but you have to be able to do your job. No one blamed me for doing it.
100% this. Pot is not a great thing. Legalization is probably better than criminalization, but it's still going to bring problems that I feel are being waved away right now. If you smoke a lot consider stopping. Maybe the most important thing I ever did.
My wife is a psychiatrist, and weed is a huge source of frustration to her for this reason. Her patients think it's completely harmless. Like you said, it's linked with psychosis, and can also cause anxiety and attention problems, in addition to interfering with the medications she prescribes. She also has patients who want to stop but can't.
We both think it should be completely legal as a recreational drug -- in part because once we get rid of the criminal laws, we can have honest conversations about the risks and negative effects. The laws have forced advocates to pretend it's some miracle plant with no drawbacks, but it's not true, and some people have suffered because of this mentality.
I smoked in college (as did my wife) but lost interest after that. I'll probably present it to my kid as similar to alcohol. It's okay to try it, but heavy use is bad for your lungs and brain. Monitor how it affects you, be careful not to overdo it -- and don't drive stoned.
Yeah I think treating it like alcohol makes sense if you are treating alcohol correctly. I know so many people that have a glass of wine every night to relax. Then life gets stressful and it becomes two or three. Then it's a bottle and more. Weed usage sneaks up on you the same way.
I thought illegality made it harder to study the effects. I remember a few people in college insisting that it's not addictive despite seeming to be emotionally dependent on it.
Personally, I'm pretty comfortable living a no alcohol, no weed life.
I've never smoked though I was in a closed room once with a bunch of people who were. Didn't realize I had been affected until I could taste every molecule of cinnamon in the apple sauce I was desperately hungry for.
That being said, I have a remarkable lack of even a hint of addictive tendency. Never had an interest in drugs or drinking. Been drunk a few times but a hangover was enough to put me off for good.
I know two people who may well have been tipped into schizophrenia by it. Apparently it's known that multiple genes are involved in the susceptibility. There almost should be a "don't smoke [lots of] marijuana" genetic test.
I beleive strongly that marijuana should be flatly illegal except by prescription. (I know there is no chance this is going to happen.) Near me (tens of miles) is a large industrial pot growth area, and it has completely destroyed the surrounding town. Fumes are uncontrollable and everywhere in the area. I no longer go anywhere near it. In Colorado post legalization, marijuana related traffic deaths increased 151 percent while all Colorado traffic deaths increased 35 percent. Etc etc etc.
>Some Carpinteria residents are so frustrated with the smell of cannabis in their homes and backyards, they have decided to sue nearby marijuana growers. ... "We’ve been breathing this brew of chemicals for the last two and a half years,” said Greg Gandrud, one of the plaintiffs. “Burning eyes, a lot of respiratory issues. My spouse has asthma that’s been made much, much worse. Sore throats, headaches, coughing. I have difficulty breathing, sometimes.” https://keyt.com/news/2020/02/27/carpinteria-residents-file-lawsuit-against-marijuana-growers-over-cannabis-odor/
>Carpinteria Activists Battle over How to Stop the Cannabis Stink ... “My grandmother, on hospice, complained constantly of the cannabis fumes,” Trigueiro told the commission at its June 9 hearing, fighting back tears. “That’s not right…. We’re regularly subject to fumes that put our health and safety at risk…." https://www.independent.com/2021/06/17/carpinteria-activists-battle-over-how-to-stop-the-cannabis-stink/
Maybe, but those filters have yet to be installed, though they are now supposed to be. Here's the latest, from an article just published today:
"It’s been nearly four years since the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors rolled out the red carpet for the cannabis greenhouse industry in the Carpinteria Valley, and still the community is plagued with the “skunky” smell of pot. It greets people when they open their front doors, closet doors, car doors, and washing machines. It wakes them up at night. It lingers at schools, beaches, and freeway exits. Many say the pungent smell has caused them to suffer headaches, sore throats, nausea, and respiratory problems."
Yeah I feel like all the problems MarkS is citing here should be solved by, you know, actually targeting those problems via regulation, instead of just making weed illegal (again) and going back to ruining people's lives by sending them to jail at 17 for smoking weed with their friends
On behalf of my wife and all prescribers, nooooo. Then you have every stoner in the state fabricating symptoms to get a script. My wife worked next to a college in a state where the only psych diagnosis that qualified for medical marijuana was PTSD, so she had a steady stream of students trying to get a PTSD diagnosis. It was annoying and bad for the treatment relationship (for those who needed actual psychiatric treatment).
Sorry, but I care more about the people killed by stoned drivers (no breathalyzer test) and my neighbors in Carpinteria (see below) having their lungs destroyed than I do about psychiastrists' inconvenience. (And I like my own psychiatrist, who's been treating me for almost 20 years, very much!)
Thanks for saying this. I've worked in many restaurant and service jobs, and the prevalence of weed addiction in my coworkers was close to 100%. It's a terrible drug for young men in particular. Besides the risk of psychosis (and when I read DeBoer say that he started smoking at 16 I felt very sad), there's the risk of doing nothing. Stoners waste time they can't get back later. The stereotype is true. I liked stoners, they were fun to hang out with, but they had zero ambition. Most of them grew out of it, but some didn't.
And of course weed is addictive. Come on. Why is this disputed by anyone? Not everybody gets addicted, but not everyone is an alcoholic.
Is it the worst drug in the world? No. So what? It's still bad for a lot of people. Being legal doesn't make alcohol a force for good in the world. Same with weed.
sometimes, in the right dose and setting, you can have truly profound death of ego experiences on mushrooms, which can be rejuvenating, resetting your entire mindset in a feeling that last a long time after.
Some people do. Some people never want it. A mushroom trip can be very scary, a nightmare you can't escape from for hours. There are no guarantees you'll enjoy it. However, when you do get the experience I'm talking about, even if you weren't looking for it, can be extremely positive. But it's not something I think people should do all the time as a party drug. The clinical trials for medicinal use are looking at things like end of life care, when you're facing definite death from a terminal illness. It helps reorient yourself away from the self that is going away toward the experience of non-self.
Apparently they've found that exact effect of psilocybin may be potentially promising in treatment for major depression, which I find fascinating as a person both battling depression and anxiety since adolescence and deeply creeped out by psychedelics. They combined 2 doses with talk therapy in a small study and it apparently proved much faster and 4 times as effective as standard antidepressants. Might turn out to be a fluke (tiny, mostly white cohort and they don't know how long the effect lasts yet), but still interesting and who knows.
I smoked more and more over several years until last year it was almost every day. Which always made me wanna drink too, so I spent a lot of the year fairly buzzed. I am getting older so that may play into it, but I hit a wall and it was basically ruining everything. I was in a foul mood a lot of time because I felt foul, and getting high would make me feel better, but it was a low bar.
I quit cold turkey and it was a pretty hard first week emotionally and physically, but it got a lot better. My lungs thanked me (eventually), my stomach is WAY better without alcohol and extra food intake from the munchies. I don't get headaches nearly as much. I sleep way better (this is also due to quitting coffee, though I still drink tea).
I get tempted to partake once in a while, but when I do--and I just mean one night--it throws me for a loop and I'm able to see much more clearly how much better I function sober, especially because it takes me the better part of a week to get back to equilibrium. My sleep gets thrown off, as does my attitude. In short, I'm much nicer to myself and others because I feel so much better.
The whole concept reminds me of that scene in Contact when she travels in that sphere that they added a chair to because they thought it was an improvement in the design. I mean, where was she supposed to sit, anyway? But the whole thing shook violently until the chair finally worked itself loose and things smoothed out completely. Lesson: don't mess with the "design", at least if you are someone who has a good balance of brain chemistry to begin with. When you mess with your chemistry for a long time, it's easy to forget what your natural chemistry actually is, and you don't realize that the chemical you're ingesting creates a need for itself, so naturally you feel better when you get it. You think that maybe you really are a better person when you have it. You're not. At least not in the long term. Diet, exercise, sleep. Don't mess with the design!
Thanks for writing this. I got a bit into weed about two years ago at the age of twenty one, fully detaching from my puritan Christian upbringing. I had a healthy relationship with it for 6mo to a year. And as with so many things, then there was the pandemic. I didn't have reasons not to have it every night and I quickly became dependant on it to sleep, and just to feel sane (I'd find my anxieties were still there when high, but that i just didn't care about them, and of course I'd be out like a light when my head hit the pillow, so no ruminating).
Something strange started happening a couple months ago that I complained about to my pothead friends and they didn't identify with at all: I started getting to be relentlessly self critical, just as you say, when I'd get high (and to some degree, it started to be a general disposition sober too, though less intense). Honestly the best term is self-loathing. Not to the point of suicidality, but thoughts like "it'd be better if you were dead" were there. This has informed my decision lately to slow down, though this has been difficult due to its help with sleep. When I had a healthy relationship with it, I found it could quietly nudge you to examine something about yourself or your life that you may wish to change. I liked that about it, but I think it's that same quality that got corrupted to become this self-loathing experience. It's harrowing in a way, even if not a typical weed 'panic'. I, like you, still like it in many ways and want to maintain a casual, healthy relationship with it, but this last year has made me quite frustrated with lots of weed-discourse or the attitudes towards it from most people I know. It's not harmless, it's a drug. It's worth careful consideration for how you should use it. I wish that was a bigger part of the conversation, and I wish someone had said something to that effect to me.
if it's not working, it's not working, and there's no reason to force weed into your life if you don't enjoy it, but I would say that people who get self-critical all the time while high tend to blame the weed, when in actuality, they are just very self-critical people who without weed have developed strong methods of suppressing those feelings, not that the weed made those feelings appear.
"I am a big proponent of vices; I think they make us human, and life is hard enough that we sometimes need to do things that are a little bad for us but make us feel good."
I started smoking cigars a couple months ago. I've been enjoying the mild thrill of trafficking in the illicit, especially now that tobacco smokers are held in lower repute than stoners. Mostly I enjoy the flavor of the leaf and the excuse to sit on the porch with only a wind chime for company.
"These days it’s a sober mind, meditation, quietude in nature, physical exertion, and communing with my dogs that allow me to dial into the infinite."
I so love this.
More or less the same for me, although I find it easier to enjoy in Europe where it's generally not nearly as strong as in the US, and consumed with tobacco or a tabac alternative. Incidentally, there are several shops in my European city that sell mushroom chocolates under the table.
As a therapist, I work with so many young men who got hooked on it in their teens. I can tell you it is dangerous - I've seen what happens. So many studies show its' dangers. The one thing I've really noticed is that it leads to, after more heavy usage, increased anxiety! So glad to hear the conclusions you've reached!
My best friend went through this. Really caused him problems.
So many studies indeed. I hear they made a documentary called Reefer Madness about their conclusions.
As a youngin’, I was both physically uncoordinated and adventurous. End result, I treated the ER as a weekend getaway for about ten years of my childhood- bashed in teeth, broken bones, pierced feet, slashes, gashes, etc etc.
There is a moment right after getting injured where your body gets flooded with feel-good chemicals, and everything gets fuzzy and buzzy. Sort of a low level hum that drowns out the fact that your arm is radiating pain.
That’s what marijuana does for me. It makes my body feel fuzzy and buzzy. I spent that evening covertly checking my body for stab wounds or broken fingers or what have you, because every other time I had felt this way I’d needed to swing by the urgent care center.
Not my cup of tea in the slightest, tbh.
I take a hit after breakfast, and a few when I get home from work. I find any one strain "gets old" after a while and you have to change it up regardless, which is why I hesitate to buy whole ounces at a time, because once I get to the bottom of the bag the fun has worn off.
Thank you for really pointing this out! I used to get high off edibles to watch (some) TV series, because it incredibly enhanced the aesthetic experience, but then, that fixation on flaws and ridiculously self-critical inner monologue started happening. It's certainly a weird effect.
My ending was when I tried delta-8 (a ever-so-slightly different and purportedly legal substance derived from hemp). A friend had started taking it for anxiety, and everything you'll read everywhere about it says it's a very mild high, almost unnoticeable. My friend certainly didn't seem high after taking a gummy. So I took one too...and got higher than I've ever been in my life. So high I considered going to the hospital because everything felt wrong. I appear to be extremely reactive to it.
And ever since, smoking weed has just left me feeling empty. Like "this is it. this is as good as life gets. not very impressive, is it?" So I'm stopping.
I have smoked a lot of weed in my life, and known a lot of stoners. I think it's a significantly riskier and more addictive drug than it's made out to be. There is a low probability but pretty clear link with psychosis. For people who don't have dramatic negative effects, addiction can sneak up on you. It's a weird drug, it's low-risk in so many ways that it doesn't make sense for it to be illegal. But to depict it as harmless medicine seems wrong to me as well -- and I'm concerned that's the message kids are getting. I'm not completely sure what to tell my kids about it when they get older.
My friend teaches high school and has had exactly this problem. Her students don't see anything wrong with showing up to work/school high. They will say that of course it's wrong to show up to work/school drunk or even buzzed, but insist weed is different and is totally safe and doesn't impair them and no one will care (even after a girl at the school appears to have actually gotten weed-triggered schizophrenia).
I had to fire a kid once for being too stoned to make pizzas. I couldn't fire kitchen staff for being high (we wouldn't have any cooks), but this kid was unable to do anything right and it was too blatant to ignore. I felt bad, I liked him, but you have to be able to do your job. No one blamed me for doing it.
100% this. Pot is not a great thing. Legalization is probably better than criminalization, but it's still going to bring problems that I feel are being waved away right now. If you smoke a lot consider stopping. Maybe the most important thing I ever did.
My wife is a psychiatrist, and weed is a huge source of frustration to her for this reason. Her patients think it's completely harmless. Like you said, it's linked with psychosis, and can also cause anxiety and attention problems, in addition to interfering with the medications she prescribes. She also has patients who want to stop but can't.
We both think it should be completely legal as a recreational drug -- in part because once we get rid of the criminal laws, we can have honest conversations about the risks and negative effects. The laws have forced advocates to pretend it's some miracle plant with no drawbacks, but it's not true, and some people have suffered because of this mentality.
I smoked in college (as did my wife) but lost interest after that. I'll probably present it to my kid as similar to alcohol. It's okay to try it, but heavy use is bad for your lungs and brain. Monitor how it affects you, be careful not to overdo it -- and don't drive stoned.
Yeah I think treating it like alcohol makes sense if you are treating alcohol correctly. I know so many people that have a glass of wine every night to relax. Then life gets stressful and it becomes two or three. Then it's a bottle and more. Weed usage sneaks up on you the same way.
I thought illegality made it harder to study the effects. I remember a few people in college insisting that it's not addictive despite seeming to be emotionally dependent on it.
Personally, I'm pretty comfortable living a no alcohol, no weed life.
I've never smoked though I was in a closed room once with a bunch of people who were. Didn't realize I had been affected until I could taste every molecule of cinnamon in the apple sauce I was desperately hungry for.
That being said, I have a remarkable lack of even a hint of addictive tendency. Never had an interest in drugs or drinking. Been drunk a few times but a hangover was enough to put me off for good.
Don't take away my diet mtn dew though.
I love me some artificial sweetener too, but my preferred form are protein bars
I know two people who may well have been tipped into schizophrenia by it. Apparently it's known that multiple genes are involved in the susceptibility. There almost should be a "don't smoke [lots of] marijuana" genetic test.
My suspicion is that schizophrenia might cause weed. Self-medication.
I beleive strongly that marijuana should be flatly illegal except by prescription. (I know there is no chance this is going to happen.) Near me (tens of miles) is a large industrial pot growth area, and it has completely destroyed the surrounding town. Fumes are uncontrollable and everywhere in the area. I no longer go anywhere near it. In Colorado post legalization, marijuana related traffic deaths increased 151 percent while all Colorado traffic deaths increased 35 percent. Etc etc etc.
>Some Carpinteria residents are so frustrated with the smell of cannabis in their homes and backyards, they have decided to sue nearby marijuana growers. ... "We’ve been breathing this brew of chemicals for the last two and a half years,” said Greg Gandrud, one of the plaintiffs. “Burning eyes, a lot of respiratory issues. My spouse has asthma that’s been made much, much worse. Sore throats, headaches, coughing. I have difficulty breathing, sometimes.” https://keyt.com/news/2020/02/27/carpinteria-residents-file-lawsuit-against-marijuana-growers-over-cannabis-odor/
>Carpinteria Activists Battle over How to Stop the Cannabis Stink ... “My grandmother, on hospice, complained constantly of the cannabis fumes,” Trigueiro told the commission at its June 9 hearing, fighting back tears. “That’s not right…. We’re regularly subject to fumes that put our health and safety at risk…." https://www.independent.com/2021/06/17/carpinteria-activists-battle-over-how-to-stop-the-cannabis-stink/
Maybe, but those filters have yet to be installed, though they are now supposed to be. Here's the latest, from an article just published today:
"It’s been nearly four years since the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors rolled out the red carpet for the cannabis greenhouse industry in the Carpinteria Valley, and still the community is plagued with the “skunky” smell of pot. It greets people when they open their front doors, closet doors, car doors, and washing machines. It wakes them up at night. It lingers at schools, beaches, and freeway exits. Many say the pungent smell has caused them to suffer headaches, sore throats, nausea, and respiratory problems."
https://www.independent.com/2021/09/23/partial-ceasefire-in-carpinterias-cannabis-wars/
sounds like we need more regulation! This is not a problem of weed. Beet sugar factories smell terrible too, but we don't ban beet sugar as a result
Yeah I feel like all the problems MarkS is citing here should be solved by, you know, actually targeting those problems via regulation, instead of just making weed illegal (again) and going back to ruining people's lives by sending them to jail at 17 for smoking weed with their friends
What exactly are the fumes?
If it's been bad so long, has anyone had the fumes analyzed?
On behalf of my wife and all prescribers, nooooo. Then you have every stoner in the state fabricating symptoms to get a script. My wife worked next to a college in a state where the only psych diagnosis that qualified for medical marijuana was PTSD, so she had a steady stream of students trying to get a PTSD diagnosis. It was annoying and bad for the treatment relationship (for those who needed actual psychiatric treatment).
Sorry, but I care more about the people killed by stoned drivers (no breathalyzer test) and my neighbors in Carpinteria (see below) having their lungs destroyed than I do about psychiastrists' inconvenience. (And I like my own psychiatrist, who's been treating me for almost 20 years, very much!)
The vast majority of helpful medications (for every medical condition) are available by prescription only. Why does marijuana get a special exemption?
As for black markets, of course they exist for all sorts of things that are bad for society. That in no way implies that those things aren't bad.
Drug legalization has kept hundreds of thousands if people out of jail. That good has to be balanced with the risks.
Why should it be illegal except for a prescription?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6179811/
Thanks for saying this. I've worked in many restaurant and service jobs, and the prevalence of weed addiction in my coworkers was close to 100%. It's a terrible drug for young men in particular. Besides the risk of psychosis (and when I read DeBoer say that he started smoking at 16 I felt very sad), there's the risk of doing nothing. Stoners waste time they can't get back later. The stereotype is true. I liked stoners, they were fun to hang out with, but they had zero ambition. Most of them grew out of it, but some didn't.
And of course weed is addictive. Come on. Why is this disputed by anyone? Not everybody gets addicted, but not everyone is an alcoholic.
Is it the worst drug in the world? No. So what? It's still bad for a lot of people. Being legal doesn't make alcohol a force for good in the world. Same with weed.
Hell yea, we are long past over due to legalize mushrooms.
>I’ll go back up mushroom mountain in a heartbeat, though, if I ever get a chance. That’s a drug you should be able to buy at any grocery store.
I want to hear more about this...yes, psychedelic mushrooms are safe and non-addictive, that's cool, but what exactly is the benefit?
sometimes, in the right dose and setting, you can have truly profound death of ego experiences on mushrooms, which can be rejuvenating, resetting your entire mindset in a feeling that last a long time after.
Do people want that experience routinely, though? Seems like a one-time thing (if you even get that experience on mushrooms, which most people don't).
Some people do. Some people never want it. A mushroom trip can be very scary, a nightmare you can't escape from for hours. There are no guarantees you'll enjoy it. However, when you do get the experience I'm talking about, even if you weren't looking for it, can be extremely positive. But it's not something I think people should do all the time as a party drug. The clinical trials for medicinal use are looking at things like end of life care, when you're facing definite death from a terminal illness. It helps reorient yourself away from the self that is going away toward the experience of non-self.
Apparently they've found that exact effect of psilocybin may be potentially promising in treatment for major depression, which I find fascinating as a person both battling depression and anxiety since adolescence and deeply creeped out by psychedelics. They combined 2 doses with talk therapy in a small study and it apparently proved much faster and 4 times as effective as standard antidepressants. Might turn out to be a fluke (tiny, mostly white cohort and they don't know how long the effect lasts yet), but still interesting and who knows.
"Shaking the Etch-a-Sketch"
John Hopkins now has a Center for Psychedelic Research. You can find many really remarkable studies done recently.
I smoked more and more over several years until last year it was almost every day. Which always made me wanna drink too, so I spent a lot of the year fairly buzzed. I am getting older so that may play into it, but I hit a wall and it was basically ruining everything. I was in a foul mood a lot of time because I felt foul, and getting high would make me feel better, but it was a low bar.
I quit cold turkey and it was a pretty hard first week emotionally and physically, but it got a lot better. My lungs thanked me (eventually), my stomach is WAY better without alcohol and extra food intake from the munchies. I don't get headaches nearly as much. I sleep way better (this is also due to quitting coffee, though I still drink tea).
I get tempted to partake once in a while, but when I do--and I just mean one night--it throws me for a loop and I'm able to see much more clearly how much better I function sober, especially because it takes me the better part of a week to get back to equilibrium. My sleep gets thrown off, as does my attitude. In short, I'm much nicer to myself and others because I feel so much better.
The whole concept reminds me of that scene in Contact when she travels in that sphere that they added a chair to because they thought it was an improvement in the design. I mean, where was she supposed to sit, anyway? But the whole thing shook violently until the chair finally worked itself loose and things smoothed out completely. Lesson: don't mess with the "design", at least if you are someone who has a good balance of brain chemistry to begin with. When you mess with your chemistry for a long time, it's easy to forget what your natural chemistry actually is, and you don't realize that the chemical you're ingesting creates a need for itself, so naturally you feel better when you get it. You think that maybe you really are a better person when you have it. You're not. At least not in the long term. Diet, exercise, sleep. Don't mess with the design!
I see that Robert Sledge liked my comment. As in THE Robert Sledge???
Thanks for writing this. I got a bit into weed about two years ago at the age of twenty one, fully detaching from my puritan Christian upbringing. I had a healthy relationship with it for 6mo to a year. And as with so many things, then there was the pandemic. I didn't have reasons not to have it every night and I quickly became dependant on it to sleep, and just to feel sane (I'd find my anxieties were still there when high, but that i just didn't care about them, and of course I'd be out like a light when my head hit the pillow, so no ruminating).
Something strange started happening a couple months ago that I complained about to my pothead friends and they didn't identify with at all: I started getting to be relentlessly self critical, just as you say, when I'd get high (and to some degree, it started to be a general disposition sober too, though less intense). Honestly the best term is self-loathing. Not to the point of suicidality, but thoughts like "it'd be better if you were dead" were there. This has informed my decision lately to slow down, though this has been difficult due to its help with sleep. When I had a healthy relationship with it, I found it could quietly nudge you to examine something about yourself or your life that you may wish to change. I liked that about it, but I think it's that same quality that got corrupted to become this self-loathing experience. It's harrowing in a way, even if not a typical weed 'panic'. I, like you, still like it in many ways and want to maintain a casual, healthy relationship with it, but this last year has made me quite frustrated with lots of weed-discourse or the attitudes towards it from most people I know. It's not harmless, it's a drug. It's worth careful consideration for how you should use it. I wish that was a bigger part of the conversation, and I wish someone had said something to that effect to me.
if it's not working, it's not working, and there's no reason to force weed into your life if you don't enjoy it, but I would say that people who get self-critical all the time while high tend to blame the weed, when in actuality, they are just very self-critical people who without weed have developed strong methods of suppressing those feelings, not that the weed made those feelings appear.
First had weed at 15, last had it at 60. I have never not had a horrible experience with it. Hate the stuff.
In the footsteps of Thomas De Quincey today.
"best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821)"
"I am a big proponent of vices; I think they make us human, and life is hard enough that we sometimes need to do things that are a little bad for us but make us feel good."
I started smoking cigars a couple months ago. I've been enjoying the mild thrill of trafficking in the illicit, especially now that tobacco smokers are held in lower repute than stoners. Mostly I enjoy the flavor of the leaf and the excuse to sit on the porch with only a wind chime for company.