Marijuana.com

VicFerrari

I really agree with this way of thinking. Of course, any drug or habit is going to have potential for addiction, be it psychological or otherwise. It's really person-dependent. Some people get addicted to caffeine (like me - I'm crabby if I miss my coffee/tea - that's a symptom of withdrawl). Some people get addicted to gambling, some to alcohol, some to eating, etc.
Some addictions might be beneficial - e.g. musical instrument. Some are never good- e.g. heroin.
One real question is to determine whether your habits interfere with your and other people's lives. If not, who cares?
If it is interfering, then you'd probably best find another habit, addicition, hobby, whatever you want to call it. The answer is moderation.

 

Kannibal

What exactly do you mean by psychological addiction? So many things can become psychologically addictive I think.I would think that cannabis could too and most likely in some cases does.I've never gone thru physical withdraws but many a time had a burning desire for a good toke.
I've dealt with it pretty easily though,not something I needed a rehab for before I robbed a bank or rolled a drunk or something.
On the other hand i've gotten up in the middle of the night for a glass of milk to discover it was all gone and went out in a house coat and slippers to the 7-11 to buy some cuz I need my milk.It can get like that with dark chocolate milkyways too.Still,never bad enough to turn to crime for or suffer too badly for.
I did steal all of the milkyways out of my grandson's halloween bag last October.I got to feeling so badly and shameful that I ended up telling him later and he said it was ok and gave me a big hug.
The worst it's ever been for me personally is just 'wishing' I had a toke when I didn't have one.I do that with whitecastle hamburgers too,fresh off the grill,mmmm.I miss the smell of that place with real cravings sometimes.The frozen ones just aren't the same.
I think weed can be psychologically addictive I suppose.I just don't think addiction is the right word for it.I tell you why.I am an ex-cigarette smoker and kicking the habit of nicotine was surprisingly easy as far as the physical withdrawls.In three days that was all over for the most part.The mental habit still haunts me to this day though.It has been over 16 months now and I STILL get these almost uncontrollable urges to light up a cig.I mean I really have to fight the urge.I have stopped smoking cannabis on many occassions for many different reasons and never experienced anything like that of cigarettes.I'm still fighting tobacco addiction and will the rest of my life i'm told.The urge to smoke weed doesn't even come close on the scale as compared to my urges to smoke tobacco.
That's just my personal experience.

__________________
Keep the wall of reality and fantasy high enough not to fall over but low enough to see the other side.

Niteshift

What exactly do you mean by psychological addiction?

Drugs are classified using a schedule. This includes both illegal and prescription drugs. Among the things they look at for scheduling purpose is likiehood of addiction. And they look at physical and psychological addition seperately. That's part of how they determine that one painkiller is a schedule 2 drug and another one is schedule 3.


"Psychological dependence refers to the perceived "need" or "craving" for a drug. Individuals who are psychologically dependent on a particular substance often feel that they cannot function without continued use of that substance. While physical dependence disappears within days or weeks after drug use stops, psychological dependence can last much longer and is one of the primary reasons for relapse/initiation of drug use after a period of abstinence)."


In other words, it's all in your head. Psychological addiction is closely linked to habituation.

I'm just trying to find out if people simply discount it as "a habit", just don't care, or what.

__________________
A burning desire for social justice is never a substitute for knowing what you're talking about. -Thomas Sowell

Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is muzzle flash.

Kannibal

Well as I said,for me personally,tobacco is the worst i've ever experienced.Cannabis doesn't even come close to producing any of those signs of addiction you listed in my experience with it.

A doctor explained to me that the tobacco habit becomes so bad that in reality it programs your brain.The little electrical impulses that send messages all around the brain set up a track to compel the urge to smoke and these electrical impulses become so entrenched that even after years and years of quitting the habit a charge can still be sent along that route to that destination of YOU GOTTA SMOKE A CIGARETTE! Only by disrupting or detouring these little electrical impulses can one begin to de-program the habit and feel happy about not smoking.Smoking tobacco becomes a behavior and for a lot of smoker's an unconcious one.
Tobacco smokers will know what I mean when they think about how many times they have lit a cigarette without even thinking about it consciously.
I have never 'unconsciously' fired up a bowl or a joint.

The more time that goes by without smoking the fewer times the urge may strike an ex-smoker but it is something a tobacco addict will most likely deal with their entire lives.

Cannabis is not addictive in this same way imho.If it is I would think it would be for a very low percentage of users and still I can't see it being worse than tobacco or even close.
I've said it before and i'll say it again.I think people have more of a real chance to get addicted to fastfood,chocolate,caffiene,sex,etc, the list can go on and on, than cannabis.
I would suppose cannabis can become a habit using the same logic as the others but I believe that the addiction of cannabis is far more rare than any of the others I mentioned,from my personal experience using it for 33 years.
To use jack Layton's words," wonderful substance" So yeah people can get attached to it for sure.Medicinal users will depend on it.I don't think that would make them addicts tho.

Niteshift

I'm a tobacco addict.

I quit a few years ago (and resumed again). During the time I quit, I used the patch. That actually did take care of the physical addiction part (and gave me some really cool dreams), but not the mental.

The mental was the worst for me by far. My habit (habituation) had turned into so much of a routine that I didn't feel right and craved the tobacco, despite the fact that I was getting the nicotine via the patch. My mind was so strong in telling me that I was missing something that I'd exhibit physical signs and mood changes. It really doesn't make sense because I was still getting the drug. But I wasn't getting it in the form I wanted or in the bursts that I wanted.

Of course there are many other, non-drug addictions, like internet addiction.

So based on my limited experience, I'd say there is something to idea of psychological addiction.

 

cassiusclay

When we use the word addiction it immediately conjures up a stigma that "good people" don't have "addictions". There is nothing farther from the truth IMO.

Every one of us will hang on to life until it is ripped from us. So do we say that we are "addicted" to survival. I get up every day and go to work because I'm addicted to survival so I guess I consider myself a life addict, but I don't want it "cured".

I'm not meaning to trivialize the idea that mental addictions can be just as powerful, or even more so, as physical ones. My point is that there are differences that aren't addressed by putting everything that a person seems to need regularly into the category of addiction, or by leaving some things out of that umbrella because its "normal".

Normal for me has changed from what it was 20, 30, 40 years ago. My needs change as well. I believe that with the increase in pain, suffering, stress, pollution, noise, electromagnetic, ozone, solar radiation, bacterial mutation, rain forest depletion etc. etc. etc. comes a need to adapt. All these things have been forced upon us by our own greed basically and we have subsequently become addicted to many of them. The balancing factor in my life for all this is MJ. It helps me survive in a world that I know is getting harder to survive in daily.

"Tramp... you can call me that"

iGame3D

Twelve mis-leading questions from Marijuana Anonymous
Ok now replace marijuana with politics, sex, money, food, socializing with your current friends, family life, work, etc. in the questions above.

For instance:
Is it hard for you to imagine a life without water?

When your bank account is nearly empty, do you feel anxious or worried about how to get more?

Does your constitutional right to privacy let you live in a privately defined world?

Do you ever masterbate alone?

Do you write poetry to cope with your feelings?

Has your job/relationship/school related stress caused problems with memory, concentration, or motivation?

Do you plan your life around your access to an automobile?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, you might be have a problem with being modern human being, join homo-sapiens anonymous today!

Niteshift

Is it hard for you to imagine a life without water?

Surely I'm misunderstanding you. You certainly aren't putting a desire to use a drug recreationally on the same level as the need for water to live, are you?

If not, then how is the example relevant?

cassiusclay

I'm not the one who made the water comment but what I was saying was that stress and disease are related. My desire to use the drug is partly because its fun but maybe more importantly because it actually makes me healthier because it reduces stress.

less stress = more health = longer life (or possibly life at all depending on how you respond to stress).

I could only live 3 days without water and I could live an "expected" length of time without pot, but for me personally I'd probably be fat with high blood pressure and miserable. I've always been extremely "sensitive" to my environment so I would not last long on donuts and coffee as my drug of choice. Maybe I'm just not tough enough. Everybody is different with different needs.

Clearly, water is essential to all humans to live, but maybe pot is almost as essential for some to live in a world where its dog eat dog or kill or be killed. People are really more like plants than we let on. If the environment is right we thrive, if not we die.

iGame3D

Likewise if you are victim of cancer or AIDS, cannabis may be the only thing that keeps you from vomitting constantly and the only thing that
stimulates appetite so that you don't waste away.

Swinging off topic here, to clarify why I chose water for that first question.

Not all water is healthy you know. I have hundreds of thousands of gallons of it rushing by my house every day and drinking any of it would cause more illnesses than I could even imagine, its got microbes, lead, fertilizers and dioxin in it. mmm yummy. That river has killed a few people from its current, ages ago when people could swim in it.

Thanks to some nut jobs who introduced Geese, raised in Florida and released into the wild in New Jersey, our drinking water is now over chlorinated to clean out the diseases from these geese (50 pounds of feces per day per goose). It was so heavily chlorinated a few years ago that the town issued a warning to not drink the tap water.

Water is vital to life, but apparently the life of alien geese comes first in the eyes of our local government, its against the law to kill these damn crapping creatures. I can't take my daughter to any park without playing goose crap hopscotch.

Its also slightly possible to overdose on water. Is that withdrawl from a drug? Nope its the symptoms of deyhydration, but sure looks like a typical withdrawl response.

People also die from drowning, and floods, and diseases from mosquitos which breed in water. Note I didn't specify clean water, or how much water in my hypothetical question.

I could have used "oxygen" in my question instead, as you know too much oxygen can kill you, its also explosive!

Basically if you line up those 12 questions around any one substance or activity, you can make it look like the person answering yes has some kind of problem.

Like
"Has having sex stopped being fun?", without sex none of us would be here, but does that mean the person who is bored of it needs therapy?
or
"Have friends or relatives ever complained that your sex life is damaging your relationship with them?" Ask anyone who came out of the closet before the last decade this question. Do they need to go to "homosexual anonymous"? or for the general population might they need "my mom is a puritan who hates pre-marital sex and hates my ethnic girlfriend anonymous".

Those are trick questions, and I would find it much easier trusting the organization if they could nail addiction down to physical addiction, and a better test of "addictive personality" in general without the focus on non-addictive marijuana as their target.

You can quit smoking pot, but if you have addictive personality then you might just become strung out on something else, chemical or not.

Hope all this clarfies what I was trying to say about the 12 misleading questions.

my Favorite one is really this one:
"When your bank account is nearly empty, do you feel anxious or worried about how to get more?" -- because I think most people would answer yes to that, when faced with $15 savings while rent and utility bills are looming like angry thugs.