I believe that cannabis withdrawal is real, in the full medical sense. If I smoke for a few months daily and quit, I notice DEFINANT symptoms of withdrawal. Some of the symptoms I experience include: “feeling on the edge” (kind of like anxiety, but not exactly), taking much longer to fall asleep, profuse sweating while sleeping, intense dreams, and an extreme inability to eat.
Now I claim to be no expert in pharmacology by any means, but don’t we know that the endocannabinoid system helps regulate appetite, stress, awakeness, and other physical and psychological phenomena? If so, when we take in large amounts of cannabinoid agonists over an extended period of time, then our cannabinoid receptors down regulate. So after you stop smoking, your endocannabinoids have less receptors to bind to, and thus experience withdrawl. For example, you smoke some weed, get hungry, tired, and relaxed. Then you decide to stop smoking for a while, and you experience the opposite, no appetite, inability to sleep, and feeling on the edge.
If I am wrong, please do correct me, but isn’t this the basis of withdrawal? Cannabis works like most other drugs, by binding to neurotransmitter receptors. People using drugs like opiates or benzos experience withdrawal through the same mechanism, but the systems they effect (opioid, GABA), have much more “psychological activity.” This results in a withdrawal, like cannabis, just more intense. Just because you can experience withdrawal from xanax, heroin, and alcohol, doesn’t mean you can’t withdrawal from cannabis, caffeine, and tobacco. The only different is in the intensity of withdrawal.
But yeah crook, I agree with you. Many people don’t care to find out the truth, for whatever reason. Perhaps they only experience a very mild withdrawal, due to the large physiological variance amongst people. So when someone says “hey I am withdrawing from cannabis”, they just pass it off as BS. I have been smoking for a little over a year, and was brought into the culture thinking it’s completely harmless, because I thought I did my research. Unlucky for me, both sides of the argument, pro-cannabis and anti-cannabis, are filled with lies and propaganda to further their position (just like anything in life). What we need is more scientific research into this area… fuck I forgot this shit is illegal for some reason.
I am by no means trying to bash cannabis at all; I will probably smoke it on and off for the rest of my life, but a lot of people are just straight up lying to their selves.
Your understanding of withdrawals is making perfect sense, I'd like to add though that in many cases (=substances) the problem is more complex than simple downregulation of receptors. The result of ceasing to take a substance are withdrawal symptoms which often are in nature "inverse" effects of the drug as you say. It still is a lot more complex than that and not every substance causes such withdrawals. An example would be my complet inability to get proper sleep (past nodding) on opioids and the same phenomenom occuring every time I quit them. Or my munchies when I smoke pot (for short carbs) and my munchies when I quit pot (for long carbs though), that goes past an inversion of effects as well.
