marijuana morning sickness

This is going to be a longish post – sorry!!
I read with interest an article in today’s Australian titled: “Dope can turn your stomach” which in essence reflects one Drs belief that chronic pot use can cause a type of cyclic vomiting syndrome.
My partner of 5 years has been suffering from regular unexplained vomiting for the past five years, he is a chronic smoker (we had thought this was helping the problem but maybe not). He has had every test under the sun and no one can find anything wrong with him. Until now, as it would seem that this looks like it could be his problem. Unfortunately the solution – stop smoking - is not going to be easy as he has smoked every day for at least the last 8 years. This vomiting has forced him to put his life on hold for the last few years, he is on a disability pension and we are unable to make any long term plans – every time we book a holiday he vomits and we have to cancel.
The article in summary “The theory until now has been if you feel sick today and have cannabis, you’ll feel better tomorrow – people with the disorder have three common factors (all of which I can relate exactly to my partner) – chronic long term cannabis use, ongoing vomiting and a need to take repeated showers or baths. In some cases cannabis use has been shown to double the time required for to be digested and in extreme cases this could cause a person’s stomach to shut down.”
More info: [Edit: Cut & Paste link into your browser location bar. BT ]
http:// clinmed.netprints.org/cgi/content/full/2001110001v1?
maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&author1=allen&searchid=
1014249399427_190&stored_search=&FIRSTINDEX=0&fdate=12/1/1999&tdate=
12/31/2002&search_url=http%3A%2F%2Fclinmed.netprints.org
%2Fcgi%2Fsearch
Can anyone else relate to this – suggestions, comments, ways I can support him as it looks like after such a long time he is going to have to quit???
Thanks!!
[ 21 February 2002: Message edited by: BigTrancer ]

Smoking pot fucks with practically everything in your body from eating pattern, sleeping patterns to even sex drive, the only problem is that you don't realise any of this until it's too late and you're addicted. BTW smoking used to fuck round with my guts and i'd feel like puking until i could stomach my breakfast, i know it's gross but it also fucks with your faeces--> no solid logs oh no just broken up turds, that are airated like an aero bar. But anyway, has he been tested for an ulcer (just asking). If pot is causing him this much trouble the simplest thing would be to quit, although saying this is easier than it sounds I have just quit after 4 years of pretty much smoking every day and after 2.5 weeks i'm beggining to see light at the end of the tunnel. However, i didn't have any major health problems to guide to quit, you're bf should use this to his advantage and say this shit is really fucking my health up and now it's time to stop or else i'm gonna die from this crap. I have a friend who puff the green like it was air and he faints everytime it's hot and he smokes. He wakes up and has amnesia for about 4 hours.. like can't even remember his name or where he lives! If that had happened to me i would have quit smoking the very next day. When your smoking not to get high but because you need to smoke to feel normal it's time to quit

I haven't noticed any problems of the sort.

interesting.. when i was unemployed and smoking heavily (all day every day) i would occasionally vomit for 'no' reason.. once i rode a bike to my dealers house and by the time i got back i was hurling chunks everywhere (i wasnt even high). most of the time it would occur within a couple of hours of a bucket load of smoke. during that time i found it hard to eat anything without feeling sick (high or not. my stomach was always hurting.. i thought i had an ulcer. but since i stopped taking hits from the bong these problems have all but disapeared.
i hardly smoke now since i just get paranoid and loose what little short term memory i have left..
[ 21 February 2002: Message edited by: [awake] ]

for the past 3 summers when i'd ve smoking religiously (every day) i've noticed that in the mornings i feel sick, try going to the toilet, nothing...and then not being able to stomach anything until about 2-3 pm
Then being forced into smoking again to bring yourself to eat
still love that gunja

I have been smoking heavily for a few years and ive found that on occasion i have felt nausea and/or rarely vomiting. However i have also come to the conclusion that this is the cause of the smoke getting into your stomach when you rip a bong. This usually occurs because when pulling a cone, particularly a large one some people use their diaphram to get that little bit of extra lung capacity. Im sure at least some of you heavy smokers have had the odd occurence of someone burbing out smoke after pulling a cone. Although im almost certain that this is not the cause of vomiting that pig tails' partner is experiencing, it might have something to do with the sickness/nausea that some of you guys are feeling after smoking.
Please reply if this sounds like absolute crap to you. Thanx guys

^^^
you could have a point there – I do know what you mean about burping up smoke, however it would seem that this is a toxicity issue.
Basically he is allergic to pot.
I am going to be speaking to the Dr who wrote the article later today, I’ll let you know if he has anything interesting to say.
Thanks for your replies!!

I have definitely seen people burp up smoke-its not a myth. And Tabernacle-it sure does fuck with sex drive woohoo Im not saying anything really new here I guess but smoking everyday is just way too much and he should be worrying about more than just vomiting if he isnt going to stop. I dont smoke very often (although being on holidays has picked up its frequency a lot) but the most I have done is 7 days straight- it honestly gets dangerously "addictive" for want of a better word. Start getting that normal when stoned feeling and abnormal when not stoned feeling and that is me smoking 7 days let alone 8 yrs! Yeah anti-drug people exaggerate the problem/effects but on the flipside it is not completely without pretty severe problems. If that sounded like a lecture i didnt mean it to

Hmm Yes. I've burped smoke before.
I believed at a time (and could still be possible) that pot smoke going into my stomach from pulling cones hard/fast caused my ulcerative colitis last year.
Now I just try to breathe it all in like normally breathing air, but find sometimes you have to give it that extra suck pull to pull a packed cone in one go.

thanks for all the replies, i have a bit more information for those interested.
(BTW, the reason I keep on keeping on about this, is that finally after 5 years in and out of hospitals, off to the Dr’s for a shot to stop the vomiting once, twice – sometimes four times a week, having had every test under the sun come back clear, I can’t believe that we finally know what is going on, ie the pot allergy. AND I can’t quite believe that there aren’t others out there suffering from this needlessly, just like my boy) if we hadn’t found this I think that he would have been diagnosed as crazy as no one could find out firstly what was causing him to vomit and secondly why once he started vomiting of a morning, he was unable to stop without medical assistance.
the Dr that I spoke to on Friday said that he thought that for every 100-1000 chronic smokers, there will be 1 suffering from the toxicity build up in the body, that’s a pretty high rate if you ask me!! I hope that this might help someone else out there who is vomiting all the time without explanation.
Now that all of that is off my chest – who can help me to help him - quit after 8 long years of constant smoking – any tips, suggestions or tricks to help would be great (yes he has a big incentive in that it is making him sick and he will get better when he stops, but at the same time he loves to smoke and will miss all the rituals/habits etc)
Thanks again!!
xoxoxoxoxoxox
pt

just curious, but wouldnt the doctors have asked him what he may have thought the problem was? to which he could have said 'smoking'... or even go through a list of questions where they are bound to ask 'do you smoke?' and followed by 'tobacco only, if not waht else?'
i wouldve thought that if i was smoking everyday, even for around a week and i was vomiting for no reason, i would have attributed it to the weed immediately and would have stopped.
or did he tell them he smoked a lot, and they were just unable to figure out why smoking would cause the vomiting?
ive felt sick before after smoking, but its usually to do with eating too much if i felt sick in the morning, it was only a headache from smoking too much in one sitting.

Possibly the vomiting did not begin right away. Chances are he began smoking infrequently, and then eventually increased his dose frequency to a point beyond which his body could eliminate the drug or its metabolites. If one smoked for a year or two prior to slowly increasing the daily dose, then understandably he may have assumed that the vomiting was caused by something else, rather than the smoking which had been a part of his life far before the vomiting.
BigTrancer

I've heard of THC accumulation within the fatty tissues of the body from extended cannabis smoking and the gradual increase in toxicity that accompanies it but always thought it was part of the anti-marijuana campaign played out by politicians--> but your boy seems like he's living proof that it can happen. Tips for quitting- well if he's allergic then i would say a straight cold turkey job is in order, however if he is diagnosed with this accumulated THC poisoning then i would suggest that when he buys his next lot of weed to set the goal that this is the last time he is buying weed. Once all this shit is smoked, he can scab off friends until he is ready for the complete stop- this has the desired effect of functioning on 2-3 bongs a day instead of a gram or two, and makes the complete cessation of smoking less of a giant step. I am assuming he smokes ciggies or at least uses them for mix- if he doesn't then quitting weed is made doubly hard because he is also quitting nicotine as well- i got addicted to nicotine through the tobacco i was using to chop up with. Smoking ciggies fills the need to smoke something (not advocating ciggy use- they're fuckin terrible- but quitting the two at the same time would be extremely difficult). Next thing to do is to escape all bonghead friends for 5-7 days, the temptation to smoke is just hard to resist if your in a roomfull of your friends and they're getting stoned and you just have to sit there and watch--> this comes later after the withdrawal syptoms dissappear. After work, or whatever, he should have a couple of beers and some ciggerettes, makes you feel wonderfully tired. Excercise is also wonderful for making sleep possible. I'd avoid the sleeping pills as you're substituting one substance for another which is pointless, but if you do have to take something, mainly for the placebo effect more than anything else- try a drowsy antihistamine- old type of polaramine or maybe CPM. Night sweats can be countered by sleeping in a really cold room (airconditing preferably). In terms of getting a good feed, well i'm afraid it will taste pretty much like crap- but force it down anyway willpower evapourates suprisingly quikly if you are starving, again exercise is good for building up a good appetite. This helped me to quit hope it does the same for your boy

^ Good advice, nice one.
BigTrancer

Excellent advise Tabernacle – thanks very much!!
Melancholic – it’s pretty much as BT said, he’d been smoking for about 5 years (3 years every day) before he vomited the first time, we had told every Dr we had seen that he smoked, you shouldn’t hide something like that from Dr’s who are treating you, it could be dangerous.
As this all first started just after a big day out, where he had fried himself pretty badly on chems (he hasn’t had any since then, roughly 5 years), his Dr thought that he had damaged the vomit control centre in his brain by taking way too many e’s over a short space of time. Then there were a lot of other things they thought could have been causing it over the past 5 years. When you add this to the fact that he had stopped smoking a couple of times (for a week maybe two – not long enough to discover that this was the cause) and hadn’t stopped vomiting, we hadn’t put the two together until now. So, we really didn’t think the pot was the cause and as mentioned, we thought that it was helping by increasing his hunger and reducing nausea, several Dr’s even told him to keep smoking!! So we really didn’t think that it was smoking pot that was the problem.
Tabernacle, we have made many plans – there is no way he can go cold turkey at this point, his first plan is to get a job and keep busy (he has been on a disability pension until now) so that he doesn’t have to much time to dwell on the fact that he can’t smoke anymore. He used to smoke cigs but now (last 7 yrs) pot spun with tobacco – so yes it’s a bit of a double edged sword, I mentioned that if he felt he had to smoke something that going back to cigs is better for him at this pt – but he says he doesn’t want to swap one addiction for another if he can. He is not a big drinker, after 5 years of nausea you don’t much feel like alcohol. With regard to the eating, I think that because the pot is actually poisoning him at the moment, he probably will feel hungrier and more like eating once he stops smoking. Sleeping is going to be his biggest problem I suspect – not that he sleeps well at the moment anyway.
We plan to change our house around a bit, so that he is not sitting in his smoking seat etc, etc. We bought each other roller blades for xmas, so the exercise thing will also happen which as you said, should help with sleeping and hunger. We have spoken to all our bonghead friends who have agreed to put it away whenever my boy visits to help encourage him. Tonight we are drawing up a reduction plan to slowly phase it out, buying less, smoking less until it is out of our lives altogether!!
Thanks again for all the help – wish us luck!!
xoxoxox

Try the following thread for other assistance too:
Giving up dope - advice PLEASE!
BigTrancer

thanks BT for the link - there was some really good, helpful advise in there.
I am going to do a cut and paste of the best responses in the threads and give it to him to read - hopefully it will help to inspire him!!

I have enbarked on a quit campain myself, first off i have quit smoking thanks to the wonder drug ZYBAN,however i had no intentions of cutting back the ganja, i was quite pleased with my effort to quit smoking and thought the least i can do is knock back a few cones or blunts!!! anyway what happened next blew me away, my workplace gave out these mega huge drug warnings and are now going to do routine, random drugs tests,so what was i left with, an option to loose the best job in the world, or to loose another bad habit, i chose the habit, and i have found cold turkey is the best way, if u can get over the first few days ur in, after about a week, u forget what its like to be stoned! Your temper and attitude changes along with your train of thought. I had my first bong at the ripe old age of 12, discracful isnt it, by 15 i was smoking flat out and im turning 21 soon, so so i guess u could say i have been smoking for 8 years roughly, it feels really good to have stoped, i hope i can continue on my voyage to drug freedom Also might i add life is more precious than any drug!!!!!!
p.s i wish ur b/f luck pigtails
[ 27 February 2002: Message edited by: RuSty ]

You must love your job very much, because it means giving up all drugs except for alcohol, although i'd be suprised if they tested for DXM or LSD, but if this is so all credit to ya Rusty! Marijuana's bad mmmkay! I love having motivation to do the things i want, it's brilliant