Salutations,
Marijuana addiction is real. A lot of marijuana addicts refuse to see...
M'well, count me out mister Kevin Sabet doctor!! Thank you.
...
All that I can offer is my own personal experience.
It's never been much different for me neither, so lets find out what reply i can return you!
Many years ago I went through a period where I was smoking large amounts of very strong cannabis... all day, every day.
M'yeah, man walked on the moon many decades ago but the Commonwealth's children still self-poison themselves while sucessions of contemplative governments pass, because for our "elites" it's just more convenient and less risky for their very own image, e.g. self-serving if the voters will "cooperate" (...)!
And it seems the readers of Macleans did just that when told about "Marahuana - The new menace". Hence, actually the "evil" herb once triggered the imaginations of economically wealthy Canuck pioneers with an education in days when electricity was a novelty quite unseen in rural environments...
That's were part of the roots are.
The bigot anti-cannabic prohibitionist movement has no head, no specific identity; it's like a religion capable of surviving generations of humans (unless cannabis is plain de-scheduled and even removed from international UN treaties, which is why Trudeau won't do it). So, how come such omnipotent "elite" manage to continue to fail fixing the consumption method, for starters, if it's not because their bipolar logic only allows total abstaining vs self-vilification, which systematically contaminates "scientific" data pertaining to the noble molecules alone. That's convenient indeed, for them, the bigots and their multiplying hate-lover/love-hater offspring.
Instead or genuine science what we have today is a system quite too satisfied that decent citizens were born and died without ever really hearing the truth about why lives had to be irremediably destroyed, after mis-guided infliction of trauma once caused permanent prejudice, etc., which is wrong beyond words when the victim is those very same vulnerable teenagers the socio-toxic bigots pretend to "save". Leaving kids exposed to the combustion of paper + glue, pesticide lacing as from Hydropothecary vs myclobutanil (a FORBIDEN pesticide NOT approved for smoker use! Though the "black market" hardly cares anyway!), euh... Then there's the ritual focussing on abuse-promoting paraphernalia for long minutes, many times a day, many days per week, many weeks per months, ad viternam: e.g. some cumulative/repeated highlighting effect IMHO!! Oh and lets not also mention THC-centric genetic selection that emerged simply because of "the buzz" dynamic that sells mari-caca to consumers turned into self-destructive automatons.
Etc., euh... By the way, thank you mister Sabet for helping me fine-tune my own conceptions of other cannabis realities.
I definitely felt more depressed and miserable when I ran out...
Hummm... You see i know how that's like when i recall SMOKING hashish. Even worse, this was my consumption tool back then:
The one marked "tokeu". By my present standards this was utterly awful and ugly. Thanks to the superior minds of, euh... self-serving politicians. Many batches of them! Like a population of lemmings in a video game...
8)
...I started smoking it, but to me it seemed like purely a mental addiction...
Does this expression really account for all of the relevant realities? There's the fact that you were SMOKING it, ABUSING it and also Multi-Intoxicating from it...
Now if there was some adversarial circumstances as well this only spells trouble to me, not to mention when dealing with young persons who didn't get an opportunity to learn how to behave much the same way we teach children about alcohol before the very day they hit 18.
I don't remember any physical discomfort, insomnia or anything that I have encountered when coming off of other substances like opioids, alcohol or benzodiazepines.
Personally i'd argue there's trouble when one feels enslaved. Adults being enslaved willingly is one thing, so i say please lets respect them, but then i understand the need to "think of the children". Yet, just not the logic behind a series of UN treaties which also escaped the scrutiny of Louise Arbour, UN insider and once a High-Profile juge at the supreme court, etc., who gave some enlightening speech following UNGASS 2016, demonstrating a few civil servants are out there to really promote higher moral values, In The Name Of Children no doubt.
Today i wish i could go back in time and become my own guide at avoiding the traps left around for us to fall in, because today i DON'T feel enslaved at all, on the contrary - I'M FREE, at last. No thanks to the Liberal party, past, present and future!
I do know of one friend who has been a chronic (no pun intended!) morning-till-night pot smoker all of his adult life, and he claims to get physically ill (nausea, aches, etc.) when he doesn't have it. He's the only person I have ever known to get "strung out" on marijuana though, and I've known a LOT of heavy tokers over the years.
Please pay close attention to the logic in comparing those 2 items here. On one side we got a man who's pre-existing illnesses resurface after stopping treatment, which is hardly equivalent to ADDICTION, DEPENDENCY, SLAVERY and what not. As a chronic user myself i can only admire how flawed that could seem in the real world, much insufficient to support a government that got an unarmed man KILLED by POLICE over 8 oz of cannabis not even his own.
So in my opinion there's tremendous inflation of the "consequences" when it comes to cannabis comparatively to the true dangers in society, or assymetric multi-standard management to say the least. All on planet itnoc.
Your other sample is about ABUSE as you put it yourself: e.g. "HEAVY" + SMOKERS (of what could as well be restricted to THC-centric substances)... So, do i need to develop further, other than to point out perhaps it's ABUSE and Self-Vilification of a noble plant which are the problem after all?...
As mister Sabet argued above, we often see what we expect to find.
I suppose that anything taken to excess can become an addiction, because it all effects our chemistry in some way.
There's a lot more than what meets the eye when it comes to habits which can enslave us. As a hashish smoker i clearly remember i got a cold nose BEFORE actually consuming my hashish in this self-poisoning "tokeu" i showed you. No brain chemistry here, at least *NOT* from cannabis!...
So you see i'm just saying it would be important to at least attempt to separate cannabis-specific effects from the rest imposed to us via the passive attitudes of politicians who can only talk about total abstainance in a drug-free world utopia. Incapable of "saving" anyone, quite on the contrary: these are socio-toxic self-serving agents who sacrifice life like Emily F. Murphy sending young persons to prisons, the "feeble of mind" to sexual sterilization, etc., etc.
Hence that's kind of the reason why i find it's no trivial matter to write about "serious"/"real" ADDICTION to CANNABIS exactly.
Good day, have fun!!