weed..
I can’t decide if it’s addiction, or something else. I think not.. I don’t have cravings like I do with cigs. I just genuinely regret giving up something that’s given me much happiness. Maybe I should just give up using it in social situations.. ?
Must think about this.
In the meantime, I think I have a workable Scotty design. Now I just wish those digikey parts would get here..
March 31st, 2004 at 11:07 pm
dont make me get all “if it doesnt hurt anyone” on you….
*laughs behind her hand*
April 1st, 2004 at 10:20 am
Argh. I just posted a reply and lj ate it.
We’ll try again.
I think watering down the definition of ‘addiction’ is a bad idea, as it ultimately means that the word becomes useless.
Lacking cravings or feelings that you *must* have pot to function or to ever be happy again or something like that, it’s not an addiction. In your other post you mentioned that smoking pot slowed down your thinking for weeks afterwards. Are you sure about that? That’s one of those things that are often cited as fact by anti-drug sources, but no research really backs it up (chronic pot smoking can slow down your brain, but it picks back up after 1-6 months off..and that’s chronic like every day, most of the day..not an occasional joint on weekends) and a fair amount of research refutes it. That said, it’s entirely possible you have an idiosyncratic reaction to the stuff. It’s not as if it would be your first idiosyncratic reaction to something. So if that really is the case, you’ll have to do a cost/benefits analysis on it. Just makes sure you’re using real data and not disinformation for that analysis.
Hopefully lj won’t eat this this time.
April 2nd, 2004 at 7:49 am
It’s pretty clear that I’m in no way physically addicted, and that herb is nowhere near as addictive as it’s legal counterpart (cigs). I find that kind of funny..
As for the slowing down thing: I can sense it. It’s not a huge slowdown.. it’s not like I become a gibbering idiiot – it’s just fractions of a percent for each time I smoke. But right now at least I need those fractions of a percent – I’m juggling many projects, almost all of which require me to be smarter than the average bear – and almost all of which require me to be smarter than the average bear in a _different_ category. We’ve got analog electronics, programming, particle physics.. I’m learning large chunks of new material every week, and of course I have to keep working to keep myself fed.
I do think that weed has some long term effects, because all the people I know who have been chronic weed users (read: addicts ;-)) have been noticably slower than other people – and in one case, noticably slower after than before.
Similarly, E. is proported by many studies to be totally harmless – but everyone I know who uses E. regularly seems to have lost 20 points of IQ..
April 2nd, 2004 at 7:49 am
as a side note, I moved this thread out of comments and into its own post ..
April 5th, 2004 at 3:43 am
I don’t know if I’d consider cigs to be weed’s legal counterpart, as cigs don’t cause one to be ‘high’. Maybe alcohol is closer.
Weed definitely has long term effects as long as you are smoking it regularly (regularly enough that your body can’t clear it all out before you load it up again). But every reputable study (meaning, they weren’t ODing the poor monkeys on CO and then claiming it was pot damage) pretty much suggests that once you stop smoking pot, there is no permanant damage and between 1-6 months later (dependant on how much you were smoking, how long and individual metabolism) you should be about where you started before smoking (assuming no other factors intervene). And this is consistant with what I’ve observed — some (maybe most, not all) people who are chronic users take hits in the memory and speed-of-intellect areas, but if they stop it all comes back.
Actually, my analysis of studies of E. has convinced me that it’s a fairly dangerous drug. Granted, some of the horror stories about the deaths it has caused are exaggerated (or death was caused by something else) but some are not. You can kill yourself with pot — you can go driving too stoned and hit something, you can make a rope out of it and hang yourself, you can smother yourself under a ton of it, but to my knowledge no one has died simply from smoking too much pot (lung cancer potentially not withstanding). Besides issues of overdose (which are particularly problematic when you can’t be sure of the strength of what you are taking) it appears that it can ‘exhaust’ neurotransmitters, leading to depression that doesn’t necessarily stop when the person stops taking it. It also may cause brain damage (data is far less clear on this). I don’t think I know anyone who takes it, though.
But yes, if pot is causing you to lose function that you need, then you probably shouldn’t partake at this point. When you can stand to lose that function temporarily it might make sense to smoke occasionally, but that is (of course) your decision.