Man I went fucking crazy when I quit. I was completely out of my mind, bat-shit crazy. I would describe it as very intense mania, the opposite of being chill on weed times 100. Also, I puked a lot and it didn't help my recovery process that whenever I tried to eat something healthy, I just puked it out (for the initial two weeks). I was skin and bones by the end of that, and boy was I grateful to be able to eat food again. See, I had been trying to quit weed for years but I kind of need to be able to eat food you know? Especially since I was a gym rat at the time, and also when I quit I didn't get a good sleep for the first month (zero hours at first, then a couple, slowly worked my way back to 7 or 8). I got flamed on this forum a lot, because a lot of people refused to acknowledge that what I was experiencing was a result of cannabis withdrawal. I was attacked and ridiculed and told I was abusing weed as a medication. Well, that just wasn't the case, weed abuse fucked me up big-time. I was quite clearly in a psychotic state, going through hell, a miserable hell beyond description, the worst I have ever felt in my life by far, the rock bottom point of my whole entire life, and I pretty much just got bashed describing my horrific experiences on this forum. I guess people like to stick up for the infinite safety in all cases of smoking a plant habitually over providing advice or support to people who are suffering as a result of addiction to it, but luckily I got a lot of support from my family and girlfriend, as well as medical professionals in my life. It's a far more powerful drug than people give it credit for.
Well, thing is it wasn't just withdrawal I went through. The physical changes to my brain over a decade of constant weed abuse finally caught up with me and I had a full-out mental breakdown. It was the farthest thing from fun ever. It made all the weed I smoked and those good times being high all the time absolutely not worth it in the slightest. The physical withdrawal effects lasted maybe a month. The obsessive cravings, the never-ending thoughts regarding when I would smoke again, how good my next hit would be, lasted 6 months. After that period, I never craved weed again and if I smoked it I would just have an extreme panic attack now, even from the tiniest puff. During those 6 months I thought about barely anything other than cannabis. I was living to see the next day, bedridden with severe rebound depression. Then, came the post acute withdrawal phase. The panic attacks I had been getting since I had quit weed became much worse for a while. They were so severe at one point that I was having them multiple times a day and showing up at the hospital ER begging for mercy, it was truly horrific. I'm still recovering from the extreme anxiety induced by weed abuse 2 years later. But I have more of a generalized anxiety disorder now, as opposed to the full blown panic disorder I had in the early stages. Obviously I am an extreme case, and I have nothing against weed except for the fact that it damaged me very very badly, and I personally didn't think it was possible to be damaged by cannabis. I was blind to the negative effects in a world of denial for so long. The whole thing really shocked me when I realized how addicted I was, but if I smoked weed all day and never ran out then in my eyes there wasn't any problem. Man, did abusing weed ever fuck my brain up at the end of the day. I can't believe that people actually claim it's harmless. That bullshit is what causes people to smoke stupid amounts of it and wind up with addictions and damage. It ruined my youth and now I'm spending my young adulthood slowly recovering from the long term brain damage. I estimate in a few more years I'll be good, but recovery from something like this takes a long-ass time. Honestly though think of the world of drugs, and how weed has somehow found this niche where it is generally viewed by society as separate from all other drugs. Like it's just some magical substance that just can't cause side effects but gets you really high.
For most people it's a pretty easy habit to break, just takes some willpower. For others it's so miserable that they will likely never stop. I don't believe in attributing generalizations to strong drugs which have such a disparity in effects among people who take them, based on the enormous number of variables involved such a dose, frequency of use, different bodies. To find out if it's hard for you to quit, you have to stop using it for a bit and find out for yourself. To me, there is no such thing as "hard drugs" or "soft drugs". I choose to listen to myself and my own body and the way different drugs have pros and cons when I pay attention to the details instead of what the general population agrees is acceptable. I find it ironic that marijuana and alcohol fucked my body and mind up above and beyond the most of all despite my use of many other allegedly more dangerous substances. Luckily I have managed to completely quit both of those things which were evil presences in my life doing nothing but harm and I've seen a lot of improvements since then. Best of luck for anyone trying to quit, I would encourage you to examine closely how weed affects you because society has built up this whole culture around the drug as well as spreading a benign opinion which sometimes doesn't match up with the actual experiences users are having with it.
