[HN Gopher] As weed gets more potent, teens are getting sick
___________________________________________________________________
As weed gets more potent, teens are getting sick
Author : actfrench
Score : 182 points
Date : 2022-06-23 14:26 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| Mo3 wrote:
| I live in the Netherlands where there is a "coffeeshop" culture,
| with some of these coffeeshops having a connaisseur-like focus -
| as in, they sometimes even offer extremely exotic strains that
| you've never heard about and aren't even on Leafly etc yet,
| sourced from god knows where 10000 miles away, and then carefully
| and passionately grown and cured - and I can 100% guarantee you
| that people are not necessarily getting sick from more potent
| strains or over-the-top breeding as a direct correlation to
| potency. With good potent strains, cleanly grown, you simply
| naturally smoke less while still enjoying the strains unique
| effect and flavour profiles.
|
| Are there people who get sick from being stupid and smoking half
| a dozen pure blunts in a row? For sure. I once almost hit two
| totally greened out Asian tourists who were vomiting onto the
| bicycle path in Amsterdam, and I've seen people just blacking out
| for a few seconds in the coffeeshops after smoking one blunt
| after another for hours on end. Teens in their endless, hormone-
| guided stupidity are probably getting sick from time to time too,
| and the higher potency very likely does not help, neither does
| having zero tolerance and not being advised about the strength at
| hand.
|
| However, I definitely beg to differ, and to not conclude that
| potency equals sickness. Stupidity or naivety does, and potency
| is definitely not a "public health risk". You probably wouldn't
| call Scotch a public health risk either simply for it being
| stronger than beer. The user determines the risk, education and
| controlled dispensing help mitigate it and even the most insane
| ultra-potent strain will not kill you, only deliver you a 1-2
| hour lesson in personal responsibility.
|
| I don't smoke much any more, but I still like to visit every new
| coffeeshop I see and haven't been at before, so I have probably
| seen and smoked over a hundred different strains by now. They all
| have more or less different effects, flavours, potential medical
| applications, benefits and disadvantages, but exactly nil of them
| have/had a "making sick" property by default. In fact, with most
| of them, you only have to inhale one or two puffs to immediately
| notice how and how strongly they will affect you, and the only
| way to ever get sick is by ignoring common sense and forcing it.
|
| _IF_ there is weed you can actually get dangerously sick from
| these days, it is unregulated and adulterated street weed, which
| is absolutely flooding Europe these days and people are
| consistently dying left and right from smoking it, but even that
| has nothing to do with the weed itself.
| [deleted]
| michael1999 wrote:
| Concentrated liquor is most definitely a health risk! Drinking
| a bottle of whiskey can kill you, while it is almost impossible
| to kill yourself with beer.
|
| Many places tax liquor more than beer, and restrict sales to
| approved liquor stores while beer and wine are sold broadly.
| GordonS wrote:
| Well, yes but most people drink a lesser amount of spirits
| than they would beer. I for one have never poured myself a
| pint of vodka, for example!
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| And some people don't. The story of me meeting my wife
| involves her roommate pouring a pint from the bottle of gin
| I brought as a gift - straight up to the brim.
| GordonS wrote:
| Sure, you kind examples to the contrary for just about
| anything. There are absolutely people who do things that
| are bad for their health, or even downright dangerous.
|
| But this behaviour is an outlier - even these people
| (typically young 'uns, often at college/uni) don't do
| this kind of thing on a daily basis.
| chasd00 wrote:
| College kids will take 10 shots in a row of everclear on a
| dare then die. Same goes for drugs though. What is it about
| college kids and dares that get them killed? Like "I dare
| you to kill yourself!", "ok, watch me!".
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| Would love to see sources on deaths from unregulated weed. Are
| we talking the age old boogeyman of laced weed or something
| else?
| TillE wrote:
| Synthetic cannabinoids ("spice") are a genuine threat which
| have killed people, but they only exist because of a stupid
| legal system. Sometimes media reports will misleadingly
| conflate these designer drugs with natural cannabis.
| Mo3 wrote:
| You are confusing unregulated weed with laced weed. That's
| not really a boogeyman now is it, and I'd be the last person
| to propagate myths to badmouth cannabis lol. Laced weed has
| indeed become a serious problem in western Europe.
| tokai wrote:
| Neve heard of that. Provide a source.
| Mo3 wrote:
| Have you heard about the Google search engine?
| tokai wrote:
| That's not how it works here.
| mettamage wrote:
| Fellow Dutchie here, I completely agree with this. When I
| learned to smoke weed, which was relatively late in my life
| (late twenties), I got sick of weed. I wondered why smoking
| just a quarter of a joint was already too much. Then I realized
| I just need between 1 to 4 inhales and call it a day. The high
| is relatively light and quite nice :)
|
| > sourced from god knows where
|
| Well, that's the illegal part, isn't it? ;-)
|
| It's always illegal until it lands in the coffeeshop! It's
| almost like a game of tag really. I wish Dutch politicians
| would properly legalize it, but the way I sometimes hear them
| talk about drugs is way too out of touch for that ever to
| happen.
| Mo3 wrote:
| Goededag,
|
| > sourced from god knows where
|
| > Well, that's the illegal part, isn't it? ;-)
|
| Ahh, I was referring to certain coffeeshops that carry rare
| strains that have been sourced from very remote places. But
| you're absolutely right as well of course. Not a fan of this
| setup either.
|
| My home country, Germany, is apparently planning on fully
| legalising cannabis - if you thought Dutch politicians are
| out of touch with reality and cannabis, allow me to tell you
| that they seem like the most mentally stable and rational
| humans on earth compared to German politicians (maybe you've
| heard about the drug commissioner over there calling cannabis
| "broccoli" and explaining that "cannabis is illegal because
| its forbidden") - so you can probably imagine how absolutely
| insane it seems for them to be discussing and actually
| planning this.
|
| I have high hopes that neighbouring legalisation will push
| the Dutch, but realistically I think the worst part about all
| of this here is really only the lack of logic. Users aren't
| getting punished, police and prosecution don't have to deal
| with it, the coffeeshops pay taxes, and so on. That's already
| a day and night difference to our direct neighbours.
|
| When I moved here, it was like my brain errored out into a
| bootloop - I was standing outside in the park smoking a
| joint, and could not stop looking around and getting paranoid
| about cops showing up, then remembering it's okay and feeling
| like tons of weight and anxiety had been lifted, then 5
| seconds later getting paranoid again, then remembering again,
| and so on. To this day, I sometimes feel a weird sense of
| unease and.. I guess you could call it internalised shame?
| Living in prohibition really sticks with you.
| mettamage wrote:
| Holy hell, I'm sad to hear that :( I've seen it with
| Swedish people as well, when I was in Stockholm.
|
| Whenever I smoke I feel as safe as drinking alcohol: i.e.
| nothing to fear from law enforcement if you don't go
| overboard with it.
|
| I smoke once every 2 months or so, on average, 1 to 4
| puffs, always in social settings. I'm 30+ years of age. My
| family has a history of drug addiction (all of them). What
| I've learned is that drugs can be healthily managed. If it
| couldn't I'd have gone down the gutter at the age of 28
| since I started to experiment at 27.
|
| My addictions at the moment are: YouTube, WhatsApp
| (friends), coffee, HN (to some extent)
|
| So I'm not without my flaws, but the way society
| criminalizes drugs is beyond me. This is especially after
| having tried all the big names and realizing it's always a
| combination of: having a shitty life + having a social
| circle that heavily enables it + thinking you'll be fine
| and won't get addicted (I'm well aware of how all of them
| lull me into a false sense of security) + starting it at a
| very young age (all family members started around 14 years
| old with at least alcohol, less information means less
| protection).
|
| One other way for me to not get addicted to them is to
| realize two things: (1) how being sober is awesome and
| being able to not be anxious; (2) how to use techniques
| like: meditation, exercise, Wim Hof Method, intensely
| listening to music, and dreaming in order to more or less
| recreate all the drug experiences I've had.
|
| Guess what I started at a young age? Gaming and learning a
| lot of stuff at school. No wonder I love watching
| edutainment stuff at YouTube to the point where it is
| unhealthy.
| Mo3 wrote:
| All good man, whenever I get these feelings now I just
| continue taking puffs and all is good.
|
| My only police encounter was something to remember, too.
| I was sitting in the park at night (because I mostly work
| at night), smoking a doobie and settling in to go to bed
| soon, when suddenly a Politie car came shooting up the
| bicycle path straight towards me. You can probably
| imagine I almost shit my pants.
|
| _They asked super nicely if I need any help because they
| got worried about me sitting there alone at night and
| wanted to check on my well-being_.
|
| No weed that night helped come to terms with the
| mindfuck.
|
| > So I'm not without my flaws, but the way society
| criminalizes drugs is beyond me. This is especially after
| having tried all the big names and realizing it's always
| a combination of: having a shitty life + having a social
| circle that heavily enables it + thinking you'll be fine
| and won't get addicted (I'm well aware of how all of them
| lull me into a false sense of security) + starting it at
| a very young age (all family members started around 14
| years old with at least alcohol, less information means
| less protection).
|
| EXACTLY this. If you ask me, the drug epidemic in the US
| is a perfect example, and when Americans argue about
| prohibition and regulation they almost always do it with
| a completely unconscious bias and not seeing the true
| reasons.
| mettamage wrote:
| > They asked super nicely if I need any help because they
| got worried about me sitting there alone at night and
| wanted to check on my well-being.
|
| Awesome
|
| > when Americans argue about prohibition and regulation
| they almost always do it with a completely unconscious
| bias and not seeing the true reasons.
|
| Haha, I've seen it with some Dutch people who never tried
| drugs but who have seen some people go under because of
| it. I get where they're coming from. I've seen it too.
| I've seen it too many times. And yet, here I am. It can
| be done in a healthy way. It took a very intelligent
| someone to show me how to do it responsibly. I'd have
| rejected such a showcase from almost anyone else, which I
| have done countless of times.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup. The concept in the article shows nothing but ignorance. As
| far as I know, weed has never produced an actual drug overdose.
|
| This is literally something my cat learned by himself as a
| kitten. He was a stray, raised without a momcat, and very food
| insecure when he arrived. When we started feeding him full
| meals, he'd promptly eat as much as he could and about 10
| minutes later barf it all out. He learned to not do that and
| not eat everything he could find on all plates very quickly.
|
| Any not-completely-stupid person could do the same. Sheesh
| tacheiordache wrote:
| > Yup. The concept in the article shows nothing but
| ignorance. As far as I know, weed has never produced an
| actual drug overdose.
|
| While I agree with you and am a casual user myself, there are
| some problems that need to be discussed. Underage smoking can
| stunt brain growth and we'd end up in a dumber society than
| what we already have. Just talking about it may have some
| positive effects.
| toss1 wrote:
| Indeed, discussing things is good, but I generally think
| it's best to start with a basis of reasonable facts, and
| not a "this happens when people are foolish" (esp when
| "foolish" closely resembles eating 10 fast-food hamburgers
| in one sitting - yeah, you're going to get sick).
|
| And that getting sick from foolish use is pretty irrelevant
| to the brain growth effects you raise, which are truly far
| more important.
|
| Why didn't they write about that instead?
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| Would love to see sources on deaths from unregulated weed in
| Europe. Are we talking the age old boogeyman of laced weed or
| something else?
|
| Also, exotic strains you the average user has never heard about
| is a function of a growing market. A proper cannasseur would
| know where the strains (cultivars) are from - who bred them,
| what their lineage is, how they were grown, how long they were
| cured (not fermented), etc.
|
| Completely agree with your point though that out of hundreds of
| strains that I have tried, nil have a "making sick" property by
| default. It only arises when users incorrectly scope the risk.
|
| If anyone reading this experiences cannabis hyperemesis
| syndrome, stuff like fresh air, chewing peppercorns, or a dose
| of CBD sublingually can help.
|
| Very curious to hear more about the adulterated, unregulated,
| non coffee shop world over there! Thanks for your comment.
|
| Source - Recently Certified Ganjier.
| bryans wrote:
| You don't have any understanding of what CHS is or how it
| works, so it's entirely inappropriate for you to be making
| claims about how anyone who suffers from it must be "stupid or
| naive." From behaviors, to how strains work, to how people get
| sick, absolutely none of what you said has any foundation in
| reality.
| Mo3 wrote:
| Listen, if you start to suffer from conditions like this
| after heavy chronic usage, you simply stop using, or you are,
| in fact, stupid. It's not that hard. It's also not nearly as
| common as this article tries to propagate, so my statements
| still stand and I am absolutely certain 98-99% of "sickness"
| is not because of a rare condition that mostly only happens
| to the top quantile of chronic and/or concentrate users. If
| teens actually start to experience continuous adverse
| reactions after years of gigantic chronic consumption they
| have bigger problems than weed.
| bryans wrote:
| Your commentary isn't appropriate for HN, isn't based on
| any actual knowledge of the subject, and the very premise
| is based on information you made up in your head. CHS isn't
| rare and doesn't require extreme dosage, and most people
| don't get diagnosed for years, if ever.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29327809/
| nick__m wrote:
| Your last paragraph is semiwrong. You can absolutely get sick
| with unadulterated cannabis but it's not dangerous just really
| unpleasant.
|
| I speak from experience because I developed the cannabis
| hyperemesis syndrome. It happened when I switched to dry herb
| vaporization and the smoothness of the vapor made me
| unconsciously and insidiously increase the amount of cannabis I
| consumed per puff until I reach the ridiculous amount of .25g
| per puff. I know it was the syndrome and not some adulterated
| weed because applying capsaicin cream on my abdomen stopped the
| nausea.1
|
| When you are affected by that syndrome abstinence is the only
| permanent solution. So if someone like to indulge in cannabis,
| they should avoid to consume frequent concentrated doses.
|
| 1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5758720/
| Mo3 wrote:
| I stand corrected.. so we're back at personal responsibility
| again.
|
| Last I read this was a very rare phenomenon happening mostly
| in chronic users of concentrates. I still fail to see how
| that is valid reasoning for anything else in this article..
|
| Just read your comment again, but substitute cannabis with
| alcohol. You would be dead by now with these dosages, and if
| you go a step further the article would be correlating end
| stage liver disease with teens drinking a beer.
|
| I thought it was common sense that too much of anything is a
| bad idea. A rare phenomenon that mostly happens to the utter
| top quantile of chronic heavy users is absolutely invalid to
| use in that kind of generalization.
| nick__m wrote:
| I agree with most of your post.
|
| However, the article is about teens vaping concentrate that
| can contains as much as 90% THC. The title on HN is
| misleading, the article is not about teens smoking a few
| joints per week.
|
| To reuse your alcohol analogy, the article would be about
| teens drinking undiluted alcohol (94%) and the title on HN
| would be "Teens drinking beer are frequently found dead"
| Mo3 wrote:
| You're right, that one is way better.
| bryans wrote:
| Much like your original comment and despite having zero
| knowledge of the subject, you are arrogantly stringing
| together random words in an attempt to belittle people for
| being "stupid or naive." CHS is not rare, nor does it
| require extreme dosage. It affects approximately 7% of
| smokers.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29327809/
| Mo3 wrote:
| > belittle people for being "stupid or naive." CHS is not
| rare, nor does it require extreme dosage. It affects
| approximately 7% of smokers.
|
| Allow me to quote directly from the article linked to by
| you,
|
| > Patients between the ages of 18-49 years who reported
| smoking marijuana at least 20 days per month. Among 2127
| patients approached for participation, 155 met inclusion
| criteria as smoking 20 or more days per month. Among
| those surveyed, 32.9% (95% CI, 25.5-40.3%) met our
| criteria for having experienced CHS
|
| This puts the initial prevalence at around 2.3%, not 7%,
| but the dataset is also very small. Also, the dataset is
| likely biased because it consists of patients already
| presenting to the ER. There is no further mention as to
| why they presented to the emergency room either.
|
| > Patients were classified as experiencing a phenomenon
| consistent with CHS if they reported smoking marijuana at
| least 20 days per month and also rated 'hot showers' as
| five or more on the ten-point symptom relief method
| Likert scale for nausea and vomiting.
|
| These conditions are very broad and symptoms of CHS match
| closely the symptoms of regular overdose, and most of the
| relief methods are also directly applicable to regular
| overdoses.
|
| I would be _extremely_ surprised if the actual prevalence
| is any higher than 0.5-1% of consumers, and in any case
| this has pretty much only proven my point now. I may have
| little knowledge on some rare edge-case condition, but at
| least I know how statistics work.
|
| For whatever it's worth, the prevalence of CHS seems to
| be lower than the prevalence of allergic reactions to
| alcohol.......
| bryans wrote:
| You're now making inflammatory claims about how you
| understand statistics better than NYU scientists and
| professors. Yet, all you've actually done is invent some
| numbers in your head and call them statistics, while also
| redefining bias. You even conveniently left out the rest
| of the researchers' quote which shows your premise is
| utter nonsense:
|
| "If this is extractable to the general population,
| approximately 2.75 million (2.13-3.38 million) Americans
| may suffer annually from a phenomenon similar to CHS."
|
| There are approximately 35,000,000 regular smokers. 2.75m
| / 35m is 7.8%.
|
| > Also, the dataset is likely biased because it consists
| of patients already presenting to the ER.
|
| That's not how bias works. In fact, you're introducing
| your own concocted bias, because you've limited the
| dataset to the ER visits and not the population. Your
| 2.3% number only represents the number of _undiagnosed
| vomiting cases_ that could be attributed to CHS, which
| has no relevance to the _number of smokers_ who
| experience vomiting. You don 't have any understanding of
| statistics.
|
| > These conditions are very broad and symptoms of CHS
| match closely the symptoms of regular overdose, and most
| of the relief methods are also directly applicable to
| regular overdoses.
|
| You're now suggesting that these situations aren't
| actually marjiuana-related at all, but instead some other
| drug overdose that the ER staff totally missed. So, not
| only do you purport to understand statistics better than
| everyone else, but your medical expertise apparently
| surpasses that of ER doctors. Your trolling is
| outrageous.
| Mo3 wrote:
| My friend, I am trusting academia, but I also know how
| flawed it can be. If anyone has a bias right now, it
| seems to be you and the bias is towards always trusting
| academic research without thinking for yourself.
|
| > "If this is extractable to the general population,
| approximately 2.75 million (2.13-3.38 million) Americans
| may suffer annually from a phenomenon similar to CHS."
|
| Well, it is most definitely not extractable, that's why
| they also wrote "if". The dataset is abysmally small,
| biased and the filters/conditions applied not _nearly_
| strict or valid enough to come to these conclusions.
|
| They are also, at exactly this point, completely
| contradicting their own research and rationale, as well
| as your claims:
|
| > 2127 patients approached for participation, 155 met
| inclusion criteria as smoking 20 or more days per month.
|
| 2127 patients that are already in the ER, for various
| possible reasons. Invalid dataset.
|
| > 155 met inclusion criteria as smoking 20 or more days
| per month. Among those surveyed, 32.9% (95% CI,
| 25.5-40.3%) met our criteria for having experienced CHS
|
| This would mean, by their and/or your logic:
|
| - that out of a "general population" dataset, 7% smoke >=
| 20 days a month, which on a side note absolutely
| conflicts with other statistics on weed consumption
|
| - even if that was the case, there is absolutely no way
| to infer from ER patients back to the general population
|
| - even if that was a valid line of thinking, it would
| imply that: Out of 35 million cannabis smokers, there are
| 23 million that smoke weed more than 20 days a month
| (right..), and since they claim that 33% of them seem to
| have experienced CHS, this would imply that around 7.5
| million of 35 million smokers have potentially
| experienced CHS.
|
| You know what that is? 21% of all cannabis consumers. I
| don't think so. Their logic is flawed. ER patients are
| not a neutral slice of the population. You have
| absolutely no way of inferring back to the general
| population without knowing how and how much the dataset
| is skewed. This also shows very clearly that even if the
| dataset is at least _somewhat_ valid, their pre-selection
| and applied conditions are absolutely bogus and not
| suitable.
|
| > In fact, you're introducing your own concocted bias,
| because you've limited the dataset to the ER visits and
| not the population.
|
| The dataset IS limited to a group of patients in the ER,
| you knucklehead. That's what was used to generate the
| dataset in the first place. A subset of people they found
| in an ER. Exclusively. That's a bias that almost
| certainly invalidates the whole calculation. You also
| have no way of inferring back to the population from it.
|
| > You're now suggesting that these situations aren't
| actually marjiuana-related at all, but instead some other
| drug overdose that the ER staff totally missed.
|
| Because I wrote "overdose", and not "THC overdose" or
| "cannabis overdose"? Sorry man, but.. if anyone is
| trolling here, it must be you.
| abxytg wrote:
| Hyperemesis, as the article says, only effects some users.
| Clearly you are not one. I smoke every day but I can at least
| finish the article.
| Mo3 wrote:
| Yeah.... I don't smoke every day, so that may be the reason
| you didn't get my point, anyway I'd bet a lot of money that
| the "some users" are exactly what I talked about.
|
| I'm not sure how you arrived at the conclusion that I am
| clearly not one of them. I, too, start showing symptoms of
| hyperemesis if I'm being stupid and smoke way too much, and I
| have never met or smoked with anyone who was resistant to it
| and had unlimited tolerance. Sure, there might definitely be
| a distinction between less and more sensitive to it, but
| saying "Hyperemesis effects only some users" is like saying
| only some users get blackout drunk from drinking alcohol.
| AbortedLaunch wrote:
| The hyperemesis described is not an acute OD-like effect,
| but happens to some chronic users. It wanes when cannabis
| use ceases. Very hot baths and showers help suppressing the
| nausea.
| Mo3 wrote:
| Then I stand partly corrected, thank you. I think I have
| heard about this happening before, but read it was a very
| very rare occurrence.
|
| With that in mind, in any case - I can still not
| understand the logic of associating this phenomenon with
| "teens getting sick".
|
| Also, if you cannot handle smoking weed chronically,
| maybe you should just stop. Personal responsibility
| again..
|
| > Very hot baths and showers help suppressing the nausea.
|
| For whatever it's worth, that is also applicable to acute
| overdose.
| abxytg wrote:
| Sorry for the cranky response, I actually agree with most
| of what you said aside from the small misunderstanding
| about hyperimesis vs acute od
| cwkoss wrote:
| hyperemesis can occur acutely. source: myself as a dumb
| teenager, as well as several friends
| nick__m wrote:
| Like i said in another post, where I linked the pubmed
| reference, the most effective way to suppress that nausea
| is to apply capsaicin cream on the abdomen but like you
| implied the only way to completely suppress it is
| abstinence.
| loldk wrote:
| dionian wrote:
| This guy doesn't sound like his problem was weed's potency. I
| don't follow this article's connection between the two.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This line has been reliably trotted out every few years since the
| 1990s at least:
|
| _But experts say today's high-THC cannabis products -- vastly
| different than the joints smoked decades ago -- are poisoning
| some heavy users, including teenagers._
|
| The issue is that people adjust their consumption accordingly,
| just as with alcohol - drinking one liter of beer, everyone
| knows, is not the same as drinking one liter of vodka.
| Concentrated hash products were also widely available in past
| eras. Imagine a headline like "Concentrated alcohol products
| cause vomiting in teenagers! It's not your parent's booze!"
|
| Regardless, THC negatively impairs learning, as does alcohol,
| particular when it comes to memory and retention. People who
| choose to use such substances recreationally should really
| moderate their intake and not engage in daily use.
|
| This doesn't apply to people who use cannabis for legitimate
| medical uses, such as an adjunct to opiates to manage serious
| chronic pain without crossing the addictive threshold with
| opiates (i.e. avoiding opiate tolerance, which leads to opiate
| addiction).
| oh_sigh wrote:
| > Imagine a headline like "Concentrated alcohol products cause
| vomiting in teenagers! It's not your parent's booze!"
|
| During the Gin Craze, sure:
|
| > It is with the deepest concern your committee observe the
| strong Inclination of the inferior Sort of People to these
| destructive Liquors, and how surprisingly this Infection has
| spread within these few Years ... it is scarce possible for
| Persons in low Life to go anywhere or to be anywhere, without
| being drawn in to taste, and, by Degrees, to like and approve
| of this pernicious Liquor.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| > The issue is that people adjust their consumption
| accordingly, just as with alcohol
|
| Eh, I don't believe that. Especially with weed there is not
| much to indicate dosage and the addiction is often to tobacco
| too which motivates people to smoke another joint. It is true
| that plants got more potent too. At least this is the case in
| Europe where weed is a bit different than in the US.
|
| But I guess the most immediate danger is that drugs are
| increasingly being laced with other stuff.
| undersuit wrote:
| I track my cannabis consumption. Every time I buy I record
| the weight, price, date, and strain info. My daily
| consumption in grams per day averages out to 1.5g. Yet there
| are days when I'm consuming 3+ grams, and if you look at my
| spreadsheet you can see that more often then not those heavy
| days fall in a row. I'm not having days where I intake more
| THC, I'm having days where I consume more cannabis than
| normal from an inferior batch that has a property like low
| THC, poor growth, or incomplete curing.
| conductr wrote:
| In the 90s as a teen the height of my pothead days I was
| consuming an ounce a day, that's 28g. I smoked joints like
| a pack-a-day tobacco user.
|
| Now, I consume at most 1-1.5g a day. And that's a high all
| day kind of day for me.
|
| I'd say my tolerance is down because I don't consume
| regularly or nearly as much but the main difference is in
| the 90s I only had access to mexican brick (low THC) and
| now I wouldn't touch that stuff if you paid me. Oddly, I do
| miss the act of just having a long smoking session but
| there's no way at current potency I can even justify
| rolling a joint when 2-3 hits sit me down. So there's
| definitely some substance to the potency being a self
| regulator.
|
| For a time, I grew hydroponically and if anything is making
| people sick, my bet or first inclination would be to see if
| it's the nutrients not being properly flushed before
| harvest. I'm not sure if there are any regs on that stuff
| yet?
| sohdas wrote:
| virtually no teenagers or college students do any of this.
| undersuit wrote:
| I'm in agreement that marijuana use is self limiting.
|
| I'm not arguing that people need or should monitor their
| use like mine; my monitoring is for budgeting reasons
| anyways not managing my use.
|
| Sure an inexperienced user can experience a distressing
| reaction when consuming something too potent, but the
| original article is about daily users.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Great. Are you an outlier or a typical user?
| undersuit wrote:
| I definitely think I'm smoking more than most people but
| I don't think I'm that extreme. Maybe 80th percentile,
| not 99th.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Good question.
|
| I'd also like to ask GP whether they think 1.5-3g a day
| is a low, moderate, or high quantity in a day, in their
| opinion.
| civilitty wrote:
| Not the GP but in my experience that is moderate for a
| habitual user (i.e. "occasional" users do not fall on
| this scale). Averaging an eighth of an ounce of flower or
| a gram of concentrate every day would be considered high
| usage and anything over a quarter ounce flower or two
| grams concentrate a day would be extreme (at that point
| you're getting more than a gram of the psychoactives a
| day, let alone all the other cannabinoids).
| delecti wrote:
| Where does tobacco come into it? I don't have to go out of my
| way to avoid buying weed with tobacco in it, it's simply not
| even an option available to me.
|
| Also, I find it really obvious when I've gotten more high
| than usual, and I find it pretty easy to avoid doing that. I
| can't imagine that's _that_ unusual.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| At least where I live in the US (WA) legal weed goods are
| sold indicating mg of THC and CBD.
| rr888 wrote:
| > "Concentrated alcohol products cause vomiting in teenagers!
| It's not your parent's booze!"
|
| When non-American parents allow their teenagers to drink
| usually its beer/wine only.
| bowsamic wrote:
| The problem is that it's almost impossible to find the "beer"
| of weed now. Almost all weed has been upgraded to be super
| powered. If I want a joint, I have to use tobacco or catnip to
| fill it out unless I want to be steaming.
|
| I also think that the weed culture is hostile against
| suggestions of problems. Almost every time I have spoken about
| possible dangers of weed, even when presenting peer reviewed
| articles or meta analysis, I have been angrily shouted down.
| Unfortunately weed users have been prosecuted for so long that
| they take a dogmatic view about its benefits.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > If I want a joint
|
| Just give up the idea of joints. You don't have to conform to
| weed culture or tradition (or marketing) to smoke weed. As an
| act, smoking isn't particularly pleasurable (although I have
| to admit that smoke is mildly entertaining.) How about taking
| 2-3 hits from a water pipe, vape, or just an old-school pipe,
| and spending the rest of the night drinking something you
| enjoy? Have some tea instead of smoking more pot. Popcorn is
| very good, and fairly low-calorie.
| lolcat_cowsay wrote:
| yeah very high percentage THC in nearly every variant of weed
| these days, for me having a joint with tiny sprinkles of weed
| completely fucks me up, I just choose to have hash with lower
| THC percentage, plus hash tastes nice. I think that the
| really strong stuff should be for medical patients, or people
| with really high tolerance, because for a teenager that
| doesn't know what it can do, it can really ruin them if they
| keep having it, especially since the strong stuff is more
| addictive aswell.
| bowsamic wrote:
| In most countries we don't have such freedom of choice, so
| we only get the high THc stuff
| bryans wrote:
| Your argument ignores nearly all of the factors involved with
| dosage -- most notably tolerance. Tolerance reduces perceived
| effectiveness, requiring increased dosage to achieve the
| desired psychological results. People regulate their
| consumption to that psychological effect, but the negative
| physical effects do not share the same curve.
|
| Not to mention the vast difference between what it says on the
| label and what you may actually be consuming -- the testing and
| labeling processes are rather notorious for being inaccurate.
| Even for an avid smoker, it's virtually impossible to consume
| the exact appropriate dosage, if there even were such a thing.
| There's also social pressures which encourage people to consume
| larger amounts. The list goes on and on.
|
| So, what you're suggesting as being the obvious negator of the
| expert opinions of medical professionals, simply has no
| foundation in reality.
| ineptech wrote:
| Yeah, I'm calling BS.
|
| 1) That line has been trotted out continuously because weed
| potency has been going up continuously. In the late 90s, good
| weed was anything above 4-5% THC; the store near my house
| currently has nothing below 23%. For your beer/liquor analogy
| to work, you'd have to live somewhere where the bottle shop
| only sells triple IPAs and fortified wine, and Coors is in the
| soft drink section.
|
| 2) I don't believe there was anywhere in the US where hash
| products were "widely available" before legalization. And
| believe me, I was looking! Back then, using hash every day was
| an expensive and exotic thing to do, like owning an albino
| tiger. Today it's commonplace and costs less than a dollar a
| day.
|
| 3) You're ignoring the entire point of the article, which is
| people getting sick. I don't think cannabinoid hyperemesis
| syndrome existed a generation ago. If you'd told me in 1999
| that you knew a daily pot smoker who accidentally smoked too
| much and had to go to the ER, I would've said no way,
| physically not possible. Today, totally plausible. If everyone
| just "adjusted their consumption" this would not be true.
| ineptech wrote:
| edit to add: for all that, if we're asking what's changed in
| the last twenty years, I don't think the change in potency is
| as important as the change in cost and convenience. Sure,
| there were people who stayed high all day in the 90s, but it
| was a difficult, expensive, and inconvenient thing to do. It
| just isn't anymore, so it's no surprise that more people do
| it.
| scythe wrote:
| >That line has been trotted out continuously because weed
| potency has been going up continuously. In the late 90s, good
| weed was anything above 4-5% THC; the store near my house
| currently has nothing below 23%. For your beer/liquor analogy
| to work, you'd have to live somewhere where the bottle shop
| only sells triple IPAs and fortified wine, and Coors is in
| the soft drink section.
|
| While there definitely _was_ a crescendo of potency, it
| largely peaked. The plants simply won 't grow beyond about
| 33% THC. But 25% was available eight years ago. One review
| says that seedless marijuana ("sin semilla") averaged 11.5%
| THC as of 1997:
|
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00213-002-1349-y
|
| Still, I've got to figure it's an _advantage_ in terms of
| health to take three hits from a glass bowl instead of two
| dozen pulls on a joint. There 's no real disadvantage to
| drinking beer instead of whisky like there is with weed.
|
| I can't speak to hash. I don't like it.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| > There's no real disadvantage to drinking beer instead of
| whisky like there is with weed.
|
| Lower ABV products generally have more calories per unit of
| alcohol. Getting drunk off of beer every day will give you
| a beer gut. Whisky might not.
|
| Seltzers change this equation somewhat, as most of them are
| essentially vodka sodas with some flavor and artificial
| sweetener.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 1) Concentrated hash was widely available in California in
| the 1980s, and the strength of locally grown strains then was
| little different than it is today. Perhaps this was not true
| in East Coast or other regions of the USA. There was an
| active import market from Asia at the time as well, not just
| from Mexico.
|
| 2) If people want low-concentration cannabis (though why
| anyone would want to fill their lungs with soot and ash is
| beyond my comprehension), it's easy enough to grow your own
| and cure the leaf material for the purpose instead of the
| flower material - the cannabis shops simply don't find this
| profitable, nor do the growers.
|
| 3) Back in the 1980s and 1990s, there were definitely cases
| of people getting sick and having to go to the ER, although
| then it was from eating too many pot brownies. It was
| definitely a fairly common occurence, just the source was not
| gummies or resin from cannabis shops.
|
| Personally I don't think alcohol or cannabis have many
| positives, and I like having a nice clear memory and a fog-
| free thinking process so I avoid them more and more as I get
| older, but these kind of articles are just so reminiscent of
| Nancy Reagan's 'think of the children' pearl-clutching
| nonsense. If people's kids are so pressured that they turn to
| drugs and alcohol for relief as teenagers, that's more of a
| symptom of bad parenting (typically too much high-pressure
| expectation nonsense, if not actual abuse) than anything
| else.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Adjusted consumption is interesting.
|
| Kids get their stomachs pumped from alcohol poisoning all the
| time.
|
| Hardly ever is it from beer. It's almost always from liquor.
|
| Drugs have a delayed response. You won't adjust until you
| start responding - which can be too late.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > Drugs have a delayed response.
|
| You feel the effect of smoking weed pretty much right away.
| As a consequence, it's easier to get sick with alcohol than
| when smoking weed.
|
| > Adjusted consumption is interesting.
|
| Reasonable people do adjust their consumption if they want
| to. You can tell when something is very potent before it
| harms you, whether it's inhaled weed or alcohol.
|
| Now teens don't always behave as reasonable adults. The
| best thing to do is to educate them on the topic of drugs.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's a special case. The sheer volume of beer that it
| requires to give you alcohol poisoning is often larger than
| your stomach. If you're drinking a "lite" beer, you're
| drinking slightly piss-flavored water.
|
| There are no volume issues with pot. You can smoke an
| enormous amount of weak pot or a tiny amount of strong pot,
| and it will take up exactly the same amount of space in
| your lungs: none, unless you forget to exhale.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| All my life the only people I've heard going to the ER for
| weed are the people who got too high (usually via edibles)
| and just freaked out and called 911. I wonder if there are
| any physical indications of this illness, or if it's a name
| they've given to something they can't quite figure out.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Regardless, THC negatively impairs learning,[...] particular
| when it comes to memory and retention.
|
| This is true, and I believed it without caveat until I was in
| my 30s, and met a very productive programmer who smoked when
| they studied. Learning under the influence of cannabis is just
| something that has to be practiced, and since people rarely
| study stoned, they rarely get to that point. After you've
| realized this, cannabis just allows you to study longer and
| more imaginatively.
|
| I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't had the example, and
| the practice that I used was playing the game minesweeper under
| the influence. I do feel that I might have ruined some of the
| joy in being stoned, I never feel as out of control or confused
| as I could feel before, but I'm now of the belief that this was
| weird cultural baggage. When you're intoxicated, society gives
| you permission to be out of control, so you feel that.
|
| I've always known people who drank for the impunity. The kind
| of people who start saying and doing unforgivable shit and
| slurring their speech after the first can of O'Doul's.
| allturtles wrote:
| > The issue is that people adjust their consumption
| accordingly, just as with alcohol - drinking one liter of beer,
| everyone knows, is not the same as drinking one liter of vodka.
|
| It's easy to tell by looking at it that vodka is not beer. In
| fact you can often tell how alcoholic a beverage is just by
| sniffing it. Is the same true for different intensities of
| cannabis? In any case, hard liquor is certainly far more
| dangerous than beer (when you hear about college kids who died
| of alcohol poisoning, it's always from liquor - the physical
| limits of the stomach generally prevent you from getting worse
| than a night of vomiting and a hangover from beer). So I'm not
| sure that the analogy to alcohol is helpful to cannabis.
| runarberg wrote:
| idk. Beer can range from 0.0% up to 12%. 5% Sake is not
| uncommon but you can easily find 20% sake. And then Sake
| bottles are not that much different from Vodka.
|
| I think the difference is more in the consumption. It is hard
| to drink a lot of hard alcohol at once. You usually get more
| drunk over your consumption period. And--barring any behavior
| disorders--you can cease consumption. With weed it is easy to
| smoke a lot of really strong weed not realizing until too
| late that you've had more than you wanted.
| bergenty wrote:
| If you buy it from a store they have THC %s listed on the
| container. Knowing vodka was more potent is a learned
| behavior and there's an entire culture that propagates that
| knowledge. The same can happen for weed.
| allturtles wrote:
| When I was a teen, most alcohol/cannabis I consumed was at
| some social gathering and was procured by someone else.
| Granted that was a long time ago, but I assume that hasn't
| changed.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Many teens vape habitually these days.
| kromem wrote:
| You are wrong.
|
| CBD is a very effective antipsychotic that occurs naturally
| alongside the THC:
| https://academic.oup.com/schizbullopen/article/3/1/sgab053/6...
|
| What percent of products sold for recreational use in
| dispensaries have a 1:1 or greater ratio of CBD?
|
| So no, there actually is a confirmable mechanism by which the
| legal product being sold today is significantly less safe in
| terms of psychosis related side effects than the illegal
| products from years ago.
|
| And everyone is still so sensitive to regulatory overreach from
| those years ago that they are stubbornly turning a blind eye to
| the underlying pharmacological evidence for that danger.
|
| 10mg of THC alone and 10mg of THC with 10-20mg of CBD will have
| very similar euphoric effects. But the latter will be much less
| likely to result in delusional side effects, for which constant
| daily use can build up into a full-blown psychotic episode as
| in the case mentioned in the article.
| jb1991 wrote:
| > The issue is that people adjust their consumption accordingly
|
| That was definitely not true in my case. I used to consume
| pretty high-% THC hash throughout the day. At first it was
| strong and I did it once every day or two. But you get tolerant
| and can handle a lot more. Eventually I was smoking hash
| several times a day and I ended up with a lot of the symptoms
| described in this article (though I am in my 30s). I realized I
| needed to quit, and the off-ramp was terribly long and
| frightening; I was very hooked both physically and emotionally
| and I haven't touched any form of THC since, though it did take
| me close to a year to feel normal again.
|
| Interesting to me that sharing my experience with THC addiction
| has deserved downvotes. Sigh.
| lolcat_cowsay wrote:
| why is this downvoted
| blakebreeder wrote:
| hard to moderate consumption when you're doing dabs...
| asdff wrote:
| I'm currently doing a read of _Manufactured Consent_ and I can 't
| help but imagine these articles are the harbingers of really
| stupid regulations "for the children." Juul was banned today for
| the children in related news, after years of these sorts of pearl
| clutching headlines. All the more motivation to continue growing
| my own removed from potential overreach or all the overtaxation.
| elil17 wrote:
| Over the past century, Americans have switched from eating whole
| foods containing many nutrients in one package to eating
| processed foods where each nutrient is extracted from a different
| plant and then recombined. The resulting food is dirt cheap and
| incredibly appetizing.
|
| Something equivalent is happening in the cannabis industry.
| Cannabis is a mixture of THC and various other compounds which
| potentiate it. Without those other compounds, the THC doesn't
| have the same psychoactive effects. Cannabis producers are
| growing high THC breeds, extracting the THC, and then adding in
| then extracting the other compounds from other breeds, other
| foods, or synthetic sources. The result: dirt cheap drugs that
| are more enticing to consumers.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| You can green out, like notable NYT columnist maureen dowd did,
| but I don't recommend it. You can also do shots of everclear, but
| I don't recommend it.
|
| There's trouble when the marketing and availability of legal
| cannabis in dispensaries is the equivalent to a situation where
| you go to a liquor store or grocery store and you are only able
| to buy 80+proof and the attitude is "well, consumers are smart,
| they'll just water it down at home", and there's probably some of
| that happening.
|
| That said, I've also seen a recent resurgence in THC/CBD mixed
| blends being advertised, specifically, like lawnmower beers are
| -- so certainly there's consumer desire for something that won't
| make you totally zooted, just kind of relaxed. Low-dose and
| mixed-dose gummies and edibles also seem very popular: 5mg
| THC/5mg CBD candies, for example.
|
| Hopefully the market notices.
| rglover wrote:
| > green out
|
| > lawnmower beers
|
| > totally zooted
|
| Oh I like you.
| hericium wrote:
| Those high concentration THC extracts cause huge serotonin
| spikes.
|
| I'm on medicinal 19% THC flowers (190mg daily) and I'm doing my
| best to make it "extended release"[1] by baking edibles[2]
| instead of taking huge bong hits.
|
| Daily irritation of the reward system is a no-no.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_release
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29902972
| d82nsjk9 wrote:
| How did you switch from smoking to edibles? Or was it easy for
| you?
| hericium wrote:
| Haven't switched completely but limited it greatly around the
| time I quit cigarettes (not nicotine) few years ago.
| Havoc wrote:
| >90 percent THC
|
| And here I thought I was being bold ordering 5% CBD oils...
| caymanjim wrote:
| Edibles are a real problem. The potency is completely
| unpredictable. Even the ones from supposedly-reputable medical
| providers are inconsistent at best. Some are total duds, some are
| far too potent for even experienced users. I'm sure some
| manufacturers are using some amount of science and engineering in
| an attempt to standardize, but I don't believe any of it is truly
| pharmaceutical-grade calibrated, or even close.
|
| If we're going to continue this charade of pretending it's
| medicine, then the FDA should be involved to verify the claims
| and improve quality assurance for dosage.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > If we're going to continue this charade of pretending it's
| medicine
|
| I consider them fun! I think edibles have their own audience,
| and the "experienced users" think their tolerance is in one
| place because of the low quality crap they simply used a lot
| off the street, but its really in a totally different place.
| (With other drugs, people often overdose for the same reason
| like they use a scale that was relevant 5 years ago and then OD
| because their tolerance changed and the drug concentration
| changed.)
|
| Edibles are also basically a different drug after it gets
| processed by the liver, I think some additional consumer
| protection should be done
|
| I am also 100% in agreement that FDA-level studies should
| exist, and that it is pathetic we just have random experiences
| from random jurisdictions.
| GordonS wrote:
| I'm a medical user in the UK, which had a highly regulated
| medical system. Potency of medical-grade THC oils here are
| _completely_ consistent.
| fleddr wrote:
| Just adding to the pile of warnings...
|
| About 20 years ago, in the Netherlands, two people from my small
| town. Both were heavy users. They would visit a coffee shop (our
| term for a weed shop) twice a day and stay for some 2 hours or
| longer each time.
|
| Dutch weed was already known to be strong back then, but I have
| no idea how strong. Probably still less strong compared to what
| is described in the article. I would estimate they smoked up to 4
| full joints each day.
|
| Both developed a psychosis.
|
| One would start random fights with people. I saw him get arrested
| and in the police car kept bumping his own head to the door with
| full force. He lost his job and ultimately ended up in a mental
| facility. He had regular paranoia attacks about being followed
| and being hacked, and would ask random people to check his phone.
| He's been bouncing between the mental facility, the police and
| back again ever since. Already at the age of 25, he was a lost
| cause, as he had ruined every single aspect of his life. The
| truly sad part is that life goes on in this miserable state
| probably for several decades.
|
| As for prior conditions: I had known him for a long while before
| his detour. Had a steady job, full of life energy, never any
| aggression, no criminal record, clean as can be.
|
| The other guy started to attend the same prostitute, daily, whom
| he actually believed to be Madonna. The vast majority of his time
| though he spent driving between two specific dutch cities as a
| way to discharge excess electricity he believed to be in his car.
|
| I once was in his home where he picked up one of his mom's books.
| It was a cheesy doctor romance story. He starts reading out loud
| from the book but rather than literally reading the text, somehow
| this text got warped and transformed into his mind, and the
| output was some bizarre prophecy. As if he was effortlessly
| producing a brand new Bible on the spot. One of the strangest
| things I've ever seen anyone do.
|
| I don't know what happened to him, we lost touch.
|
| So yes, getting "sick" doesn't even begin to describe what weed
| can do when not taking care of dosage.
| lacker wrote:
| The real danger with cannabis is not that it'll make you sick or
| have some nasty side effect like this article describes.
|
| The danger is simply that you will like it, you'll end up using
| it every day, all different times of the day, and it won't really
| hurt your health as much as it will make you live your life in a
| somewhat dopey, detached, less-intelligent way. As time goes on
| it won't feel "fun" it'll just feel "normal". And you just won't
| get as much out of your life as you could get, won't achieve as
| much relationship success, professional success, or personal
| fulfillment.
| pojzon wrote:
| But! You will be more likely to accept the world as it is -
| thus making it legal everywhere has great benefits. Mostly for
| ruling bodies.
| INTPenis wrote:
| As a wise person once said; Drugs are amazing, drugs are so
| good they will literally ruin your life.
| worker_person wrote:
| Yep my daughter had a friend introduce her. She spent 5 years
| on it. 100% dependent on it. Entire time swearing up and down
| it didn't affect her. Of course we could all tell.
|
| Only when her finance had a psychotic breakdown and tried to
| kill everyone from it did she finally get off of it. Was 2
| months before he didn't sound like an anime villain who was
| going to take over the world.
|
| She keeps commenting at much more energy and less depressed she
| is, how she isn't always irritated at everything. She had no
| idea it was affecting her like that. For us we have our sweet
| loving and caring daughter back.
| krnlpnc wrote:
| Like anything it's about balance. The same could be said about
| working every day, at all different times of the day.
|
| There is something to be said for turning off the part of the
| brain that worries about being productive all the time.
|
| Claiming a few 4 hour blocks over the course of a week as your
| own time to "zone out" and do whatever activity you like is not
| a bad thing. For some people cannabis helps them get in that
| zone.
| geekbird wrote:
| This. I know a lot of people who need to just ... stop. They
| always have to be busy, doing something "productive" or
| "beneficial". They don't take time to just _be_ , to stop and
| smell the roses.
|
| My problem with sleeping was trying to turn off my geek brain
| long enough to get to sleep and stay 5that way. Weed helps
| with that.
| yourgranny wrote:
| I did this with video games.
| xbar wrote:
| This is an old 4% strength THC I-used-to-be-a-stoner argument
| that is completely irrelevant to the "real" dangers (multiple)
| to teenagers, which include: concentrated THC in teenagers
| causes psychosis; moderate THC in teenagers makes them
| permanently less intelligent.
|
| THC users like to downplay them.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| > This is an old 4% strength THC I-used-to-be-a-stoner
| argument that is completely irrelevant to the "real" dangers
| (multiple) to teenagers, which include: concentrated THC in
| teenagers causes psychosis; moderate THC in teenagers makes
| them permanently less intelligent.
|
| >THC users like to downplay them.
|
| What would you have us do then? There are minimum legal ages
| for using legal cannabis as well as alcohol and tobacco.
|
| That doesn't stop teens from trying it out, nor has it _ever_
| done so.
|
| Archaeologists have documented the use of mind altering
| substances by humans going back at least 8-10,000 years, and
| it's very likely that such usage goes back much, much farther
| (e.g., our distant ancestors getting drunk from eating
| fermenting fruit _millions_ of years ago).
|
| The issue isn't whether or not people should use mind alterng
| substances, we have done so and we will continue to do so.
|
| The advice I gave to those in the younger generation of my
| family is that "we've been using mind altering substances
| pretty much forever. And most people handle it just fine.
| _But_ if using such substances interferes with your goals and
| /or functioning as a person in society, there's likely a
| problem."
|
| Which is why I believe all "drugs" should be legal, with
| purity and dosages regulated.
|
| From an economic standpoint, it makes a lot of sense. We
| _could_ spend a fraction of what we spend on "interdiction,"
| "enforcement," incarceration and lost economic output (the
| result of incarceration and bias against those who have been
| incarcerated) on treatment programs for the tiny proportion
| of us for whom using mind altering substances keep us from
| functioning normally in society.
|
| That makes much more sense to me. Trying to stop folks from
| doing stuff we've been doing since before we were us
| (humans), is a fool's errand.
|
| Let's help those who have issues and leave everyone else the
| hell alone.
| xbar wrote:
| I heard you say "we need to regulate cannabis more
| effectively." I think that makes sense.
|
| I also think we better get used to the consequences of an
| increasingly psychotic teen population.
| solitus wrote:
| Can you provide sources for "moderate THC in teenagers makes
| them permanently less intelligent".
|
| This study implies that it's not really true:
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1516648113#sec-5
| xbar wrote:
| This one comes to the top:
|
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1206820109
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| The solution is simple. Hate what you like.
| m0llusk wrote:
| refer madness 2.0; better let starbucks distribute the
| psychoactives
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| Sounds like reefer madness type claims to me.
|
| You can give someone a hamburger and some people will abuse it
| til they are obese. It's a personality thing.
|
| To me, the most alarming trend I see among people nowadays is
| cell phones - people are checking notifications all day like
| its crack.
| rgbrgb wrote:
| I agree being stoned all the time can have bad effects. Similar
| to video games, TV, instagram, or going out, if you do it too
| much then you might look up after a while and realize that you
| haven't developed as many deep skills or relationships as your
| peers.
|
| However, I've gotten stoned almost every night for the past ~15
| years and I think it's been pretty positive. I actually get a
| low-level pleasant and productive anxiety to create shit. Like
| don't get me wrong I can get stoned and play a game or watch
| TV, but usually it just makes me want to go harder on something
| I'm working on and makes the work more fun. For certain types
| of work (writing product stuff, making music, css polish) I
| find it correlates with small creative bursts or insights. My
| current rule of thumb... only vape [0] in situations where I
| don't have to deal with strangers or kids (only at night these
| days). Like food, alcohol, coffee, being alone, or being
| social, moderation is key.
|
| My point is just that it depends on the person and setting.
| It's not necessarily good or bad, more like a power tool for
| your mind. No panacea.
|
| [0]: https://www.puffco.com
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > The real danger with cannabis is not that it'll make you sick
| or have some nasty side effect like this article describes.
|
| That may be true for the majority of users, but the increase in
| people having significant negative reactions to high-dose THC
| is a real phenomenon.
|
| This new era of extremely potent THC concentrates and other
| high-dose products has opened the door to some people using far
| more THC than previous generations could easily consume. Many
| of these high-dose users are discovering that the old narrative
| that weed isn't "physically addictive" isn't actually true and
| prolonged high-dose usage can produce significant physical and
| mental withdrawal effects. It won't kill you like extreme
| alcohol withdrawal can, but the deep impulse to redose and
| inability to quit easily catches a lot of these high-dose users
| unprepared after they've been told that weed is harmless for so
| long.
|
| Psychosis among high-dose users is also on the rise, though
| harder to pinpoint because the connection is very hard to make
| and quantify in studies. Again, this isn't something people
| were taught to watch out for so you see some of these users
| believing that marijuana is a _treatment_ for their psychosis
| rather than a cause and they spiral further and further until
| quitting.
|
| The old street knowledge about marijuana's biggest downside
| being laziness doesn't really apply to people engaging in the
| more extreme doses and uses heavily processed and concentrated
| products.
| honkycat wrote:
| > As time goes on it won't feel "fun" it'll just feel "normal".
| And you just won't get as much out of your life as you could
| get, won't achieve as much relationship success, professional
| success, or personal fulfillment.
|
| You can form a bad relationship with literally anything. Social
| media, television, video games.
|
| The smartest and most passionate developer I have ever known
| smoked weed literally every day.
|
| There are many musicians who use marijuana regularly. They
| perform, practice, and achieve at a level I can only IMAGINE.
|
| What you are really talking about here is something nefarious:
| Self medication. Personally, I self medicate because I have a
| very busy mind and I need something to slow my brain down at
| the end of the day.
|
| Other people self medicate due to depression. This IS bad. It
| is a way to escape reality because you are unhappy.
|
| Anecdote: I smoked weed in high school pretty frequently. Then,
| I left for college, was super busy, didn't have any money, so I
| didn't smoke weed for almost a decade.
|
| Eventually I moved to a state that has legal weed, and I bought
| a joint, and I smoked it. And I found something: It wasn't just
| youthful rebellion, I enjoy being a little stoned! So now I do
| it occasionally.
| effingwewt wrote:
| This is how I cope. My brain runs away with me, coupled with
| OCD (people love to romanticize it byt forget about the
| obsessive/compulsive part). With that and depression and
| anxiety, the meds prescribed to me were insane, as were the
| side effects (many permanent too- fuck that). Weed was the
| lesser of the evils. I don't drink because aside from the
| fact that I hate the taste of alcohol, what I really detest
| is the loss of self control. I spend most of my waking and
| much of my sleeping time trying to keep one thing or another
| under control. I don't have to fight them nearly so much with
| weed.
|
| I know it's an imperfect solution to myriad problems, but it
| helps me greatly,but I very much realize I am self
| medicating.
|
| When I quit smoking weed it takes me about a year to get back
| to full 'normal'. But I'm also miserable. I can't sleep, I
| wake in the night in the middle of thoughts that are making
| me anxious or whatever. I eat too much, I have less energy. I
| simply become better at hiding my issues.
| honkycat wrote:
| You should look into Zoloft. A lot of my friends and family
| take it for anxiety.
|
| It is a pretty safe, minor, and not intense anxiety
| medication that I hear has a bit of a funky/fun edge to it.
|
| I was gonna start on it next month to try it out.
| surement wrote:
| > I have a very busy mind and I need something to slow my
| brain down
|
| I'm taking this a bit out of context but this is the biggest
| benefit for me.
|
| While sativa can make my mind rush with ideas, it also helps
| slow things down, especially if I'm learning something. It
| gives me the patience to do things at the right pace rather
| than try to rush to get results. This holds for things as
| varied as learning kubernetes (e.g. going back and forth
| between documents to make sure everything makes sense rather
| than only going forward even where there are bits that I
| don't fully grasp) or making sure I have the proper form
| during weight lifting (e.g. using lower weights when I notice
| a discomfort somewhere - I'm much more sensitive to these
| things while stoned - instead of powering through a too-high
| load and injuring myself, thus setting my progress back).
| BobbyJo wrote:
| This isn't really a danger of weed so much as a danger of the
| modern world.
|
| I have given up smoking for long periods at several points in
| my life. Sometimes I filled the time productively, sometimes I
| filled it with TV, video games, the internet, etc. The modern
| world afford people many ways to be happy doing nothing, weed
| just happens to be one of several that are very good at the
| job.
| mistermann wrote:
| > The danger is simply that you will like it, you'll end up
| using it every day, all different times of the day, and it
| won't really hurt your health as much as it will make you live
| your life in a somewhat dopey, detached, less-intelligent way.
| As time goes on it won't feel "fun" it'll just feel "normal".
| And you just won't get as much out of your life as you could
| get, won't achieve as much relationship success, professional
| success, or personal fulfillment.
|
| As a general rule, I don't disagree, although there could be
| other important variables in place here as well.
|
| An alternative outcome is that one spends their time thinking
| about intelligent and important things (that few other people
| think about), except they may not have an easy route to
| monetization (professional success) for various reasons that
| are not the fault of drugs, and in some cases arguably due to a
| lack of more widespread drug usage, or simple diversity in
| thinking and discussion.
| iasay wrote:
| So much this. Lost a couple of friends to it. Their entire life
| is about it. They forgot all the other good things they were
| and did.
| codebolt wrote:
| For a few unlucky people, it really can have disastrous side
| effects as described in this article. At the risk of
| stigmatising myself, I suffered through cannabis induced
| psychosis and lived to tell the tale. And I can promise that
| it's absolutely a real phenomenon, and one that's not
| adequately recognised in 'stoner culture'.
| drekipus wrote:
| I am too!
|
| Had a really large 3 day psychosis (including blabbering on
| Facebook for all to see), and ended up being locked into
| "involuntary mental health" ward in hospital for 2 weeks, 6
| months of recovery with a nurse and 6 years of putting my
| life back together. Started smoking when I was 18 and had the
| breakdown just after 21st birthday.
|
| I feel like weed did help me get me out of my shell at the
| start, but looking back now, I was in a bad place and what I
| needed was a bigger perspective on life. Being high and
| browsing the internet / playing games with friends helped
| that perspective, but it could've came gently.
|
| Now I've got a degree, a good job, a wife and kid :) - not
| many people I knew from the era still talk to me though, me
| going nuts was the last impression they got.
| codebolt wrote:
| I see some parallels but my own problems spiralled a bit
| further than yours. I was struggling with hallucinations
| and paranoia on and off for a period of a few years in my
| early twenties (but luckily didn't leave a trace on social
| media).
|
| It started after a period of habitual smoking and got
| progressively worse anytime I smoked. Mental health ward
| twice (once in a country where I didn't speak the language,
| but that's another story). Haven't had any problems since I
| cleaned up my lifestyle and fully ditched weed many years
| ago. These days I'm also happily married with kids (three),
| a house and a decent career.
| rayiner wrote:
| Saw exactly this happen to a very bright friend of mine from
| high school.
| rs999gti wrote:
| > The danger is simply that you will like it
|
| I like bourbon and gin, but I don't drink both everyday.
|
| As they say, "everything in moderation."
| jayd16 wrote:
| If this is "the real danger" then is the potency issue
| irrelevant? Are we already experiencing peak danger?
| dividefuel wrote:
| Cannabis is the only drug where I struggle to find a healthy
| balance.
|
| Other ubiquitous drugs like caffeine or alcohol are easier for
| me to balance because their drawbacks (dependence, hangovers,
| weight gain) are more obvious.
|
| But cannabis doesn't have those to nearly the same extent, so
| it's easy to rationalize frequent use: on an average night
| without anything planned, it always sounds enjoyable without
| any downsides. But then frequent use eventually adds up and
| starts to cause small issues, like being a little lazier and
| having a slightly worse memory.
| yeahNo88 wrote:
| vladsanchez wrote:
| Same message I told my kids! The danger is that you'll like it
| and you'll end up in a life of misery.
|
| Thanks for sharing your wisdom.
| acchow wrote:
| I've found the secret to marijuana not taking away from your
| personal fulfillment is to limit it to the end of the day
| before sleeping which would already be spent consuming
| passively (such as watching TV).
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| From experience, getting high every night like that is a more
| problematic usage pattern than dosing steadily throughout the
| day and not getting especially high.
| RichardCA wrote:
| The difficulty is how do you separate that issue from the other
| connected issue: Lots of people use weed to self-medicate for
| anxiety. How much anxiety is needed to create a sense of
| motivation and "stakes" in the day-to-day operation of your
| life?
|
| Anecdotally, I've known people who were prescribed
| pharmaceutical anti-anxiety meds and done far worse with that
| feeling of weightlessness and removal of stakes, like you're
| just wandering around in the Matrix until something bad happens
| like a car accident. I mean yes that happens on weed (again,
| anecdotally) but we have no controlled studies about it, and it
| absolutely should be studied.
|
| So yes, valid point, but it's the tip of a much deeper iceberg.
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| I did most and best creative programming under influence, it
| also made me suicidal. I have stopped completely. Do i miss it,
| yes. Will i get back to it, i doubt it but its hard.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Counter point: I am 37 years old. I quit marijuana three or
| four months ago, but before that I was vaping marijuana nearly
| every day for four years. During that time I've achieved more
| success in my career than any other time. I think it was good
| for me to quit. I feel more alert and more productive now. More
| level and less tired. Maybe I would have been more successful
| without it, so perhaps you are right. But then, life shouldn't
| be just about success. And then, I still got where I am today,
| with the best career I've ever had. So it doesn't feel like it
| held me back at all.
|
| Crucially, I used relatively small amounts of pure sativa. I
| wasn't stuck on the couch while I used it. Still, this to me
| suggests self control is more important than abstinence.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Counter point taken.
|
| Follow-on question: have you had similar success in your
| relationships and personal life in the last 4 years?
|
| I was a great student stoned, and a decent heads-down
| coworker. I became a detached boyfriend and family member and
| even more detached friend. I made my world smaller, so I
| could "focus" on work. My time on creative/non-passive
| hobbies fell to zero. I didn't lose friends but I didn't keep
| up with them.
|
| I genuinely hope your experience has not been so
| asymmetrical.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I wouldn't describe my relationship style as detached at
| all. I was attentive and used some of my time in therapy to
| work on issues that came up with my partner and try to
| resolve them. It didn't work out but I think that's due to
| a bad fit. And she smoked a lot of weed (more than I did)
| so we were aligned there.
|
| My creative passions exploded. Personal design projects (3D
| printing, circuit board design, robotics, programming) all
| were off the charts high, as I reduced the number of hours
| I worked at my regular job to under 30 hours a week. It was
| the most productive hobby time of my life.
|
| I think it makes a huge difference that I smoked relatively
| small amounts of pure sativa, and nothing else.
|
| Biggest issue I think was how it affected my sleep. I would
| stay up late getting stoned and designing robots, going to
| sleep around 4 or 5am. I'd wake up at 12 or 1. Made it hard
| to visit my Dad for lunch since he lives a ways away. Now
| without weed I go to bed at midnight and wake up at 8. I
| like that! Much easier to make plans with my Dad and my new
| partner (who is GREAT).
| Shindi wrote:
| I also used to smoke frequently and fully stopped. I think my
| grandparent makes an interesting point about how habit
| forming it is because it's so safe which is a good and bad.
| Wish I had known how habit forming it is before I started.
|
| And to your point, yes life is not just about success, it's
| about so much more like friends and family.
|
| That's why I hate weed. It turned my friends who were
| creative, thoughtful and caring, into people who just wanted
| to smoke and do nothing when they had time off.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| It's funny because I'm extremely creative whether I'm
| smoking or not. Late last year I designed a four axis 3D
| printed robot arm full of custom 3D printed planetary
| gearboxes and brushless motors. I was stoned the whole time
| I was designing it. Early this year I met a bunch of
| skateboarders and we had a great time smoking a bit and
| skating in empty parking lots. I had successful creativity
| and good friendships while vaping. But again I used pure
| sativa that didn't make me want to sit on the couch. And it
| was hard to find! Most weed sold in California stores is a
| hybrid with some of that couch lock feeling. I think some
| stoners just don't realize they can get something that
| doesn't knock them on their ass.
|
| I'm not saying people _should_ smoke or vape. But I do want
| to say that with care and self control it can be a habit
| that doesn't cause serious problems. Though ultimately I
| feel much better having quit.
| lacker wrote:
| _I quit marijuana three or four months ago, but before that I
| was vaping marijuana nearly every day for four years. During
| that time I've achieved more success in my career than any
| other time. I think it was good for me to quit. I feel more
| alert and more productive now. More level and less tired._
|
| Maybe the _next_ four years are going to be the most
| successful four years of your career. Good luck!
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Oh they probably will be! My open source career is blowing
| up. Still while it wasn't said outright, what I read in to
| my parent comment was that using marijuana will make you a
| failure or unsuccessful. Obviously I am reading a lot of
| what my dad used to say in to that comment, which never
| made such a claim. But I wanted to provide my perspective
| nonetheless. Also, thanks!
| wooque wrote:
| I would guess there are people who do cocaine every day
| without trouble. That doesn't mean everyone should do drugs.
| Most people can't handle it.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Most people can handle it. But that still doesn't mean
| everyone should do drugs.
| coding123 wrote:
| You're saying that if everyone in the world started to
| take cocaine daily, a high percentage of people, say
| 80-90% can handle it.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| What does handling it mean if you're taking cocaine
| daily? Taking drugs daily is already likely beyond the
| point of dependence. Regardless of will power, you will
| almost certainly develop some level of chemical addiction
| and tolerance trying to use cocaine, recreational-y,
| daily. I would say the question is invalid.
|
| I meant most people can do cocaine once, or at an
| infrequent irregular frequency without getting addicted
| to it and becoming dependent.
|
| FWIW most means > 50%
| the_gipsy wrote:
| This is debatable. If there is a critical mass of people
| doing cocaine regularly, then more people will get
| addicted with that availability.
| samatman wrote:
| Higher than that I would guess. Bolivians seem to handle
| it at a rate of "all of them".
|
| Of course they're using quids, if they were injectors of
| pure cocaine the situation would be less rosy. But you
| didn't specify the route and concentration.
|
| This isn't a gotcha, it's a habit of daily use by
| millions, all of whom are basically fine.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| the poison is in the dose
| aparticulate wrote:
| cocaine is not weed though
|
| most people cannot do cocaine every day without trouble.
| Coffee? every day is fine
|
| different drugs have different danger
| kens wrote:
| > Coffee? every day is fine
|
| I wonder how people will look back on coffee hundreds of
| years from now. "Almost everyone used to constantly drink
| an addictive stimulant. Shops on every block sold it.
| People stated that they couldn't function (or even talk)
| in the morning until they had consumed the stimulant. At
| work, people needed to take constant stimulant breaks. If
| someone went a day without it, they often suffered
| debilitating headaches." It sounds like dystopian science
| fiction.
|
| (To be clear, I'm not opposed to coffee. It's just one of
| those things that seems strange if you think about it
| from a distant perspective.)
| zinclozenge wrote:
| It only sounds like a dystopian science fiction if you
| describe it as such.
| Taywee wrote:
| Language is really interesting in that way. You can
| positively or negatively frame literally anything without
| actually being untruthful.
| vkou wrote:
| It's even stranger when you look at how I chug decaff.
|
| I hate what caffeine does to me, but I like the taste of
| black coffee.
| throw34 wrote:
| On the other hand, it's not like coffee houses are a
| recent invention.
|
| https://livesandlegaciesblog.org/2017/05/24/coffee-a-
| revolut... https://blog.publicgoods.com/a-brief-history-
| of-coffee-in-am...
|
| Check on the section on WW2, "An average of 20 pounds of
| coffee were consumed a year per adult. ... This amount
| was cut in half to 10 pounds a year, as one pound of
| coffee was allotted to each person over 15 years old
| every five weeks."
| com2kid wrote:
| > Coffee? every day is fine
|
| /r/nootropics, common thread is as follows:
|
| OP: "Help, I have bad anxiety every day, what should I
| take for it?"
|
| re: "Do you drink coffee?"
|
| OP: "Yes, about 4 cups a day."
|
| re: "Stop drinking coffee and come back in a week and
| tell us how you are doing."
|
| 1 week later.
|
| OP: "My anxiety is gone!!"
|
| Caffeine has negative side effects. For some people those
| side effects are really bad.
|
| Also caffeine messes up sleep cycles. After seeing sleep
| study results, I won't touch the stuff after 10am or so,
| if even that late.
|
| Alcohol is even worse in this regard, it will just ruin
| your sleep cycles at night.
|
| Edit: Let me emphasis this for anyone reading:
|
| YOU WILL NOT GET DEEP SLEEP IF YOU HAVE A NIGHTCAP.
|
| Yes, you will get drowsy, drink enough and you will pass
| out. The restorative quality of the sleep you get that
| night will NOT be good. I've seen first hand the sleep
| study results from this. The effect is so obvious that
| even the questionable sleep quality results that wrist
| based wearables give you can easily and consistently show
| this effect.
| koverstreet wrote:
| Even these aren't universal though. For me, with ADD, my
| anxiety goes up when I'm not on stimulants, and the thing
| that destroys my sleep is intensive, creative coding.
| Alcohol doesn't do much to my sleep.
|
| I think the most universal things everyone should be
| doing are: get more exercise, and get more sleep.
| bun_at_work wrote:
| Just piggy-backing on this comment; a great book about
| sleep is Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. The author does
| seem to fall into the "everything is a nail when all you
| have is a hammer" trap, but they do know a lot about
| sleep and the points in the above comment are backed up
| in the book with solid studies and references.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
| com2kid wrote:
| All my knowledge comes from reviewing sleep study data we
| did to train the Microsoft Band on sleep recognition. I'm
| not an expert by any means, just someone who got slapped
| in the face with a bunch of data that loudly screamed
| "THIS IS UNHEALTHY STOP DOING IT."
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Does caffeine have negative side effects, or does
| caffeine, taken in excess, including in late hours of the
| day, have negative side effects?
|
| It's an important distinction to make in this discussion,
| which largely boils down to "off label use", whether
| we're talking about drinking simply too much coffee or
| people with developing brains getting too much thc.
| com2kid wrote:
| > Does caffeine have negative side effects,
|
| Caffeine has negative side effects. It is an addictive
| psychoactive drug. Its effects are mild, but, to repeat,
| it is an addictive psychoactive drug.
|
| Even moderate use can cause sever anxiety in some people.
| L-theanine is a great counter to this. Green tea
| naturally has L-theanine in it and that is likely why
| people who drink green tea do not report anxiety (at
| least in significant numbers) while coffee drinkers do.
|
| FWIW Matcha has even more L-theanine that green tea.
| markdown wrote:
| > It is an addictive psychoactive drug
|
| I just quit cold turkey three days ago and suffered
| through two days of horrible headaches. I don't want to
| ever get hooked again.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Note: L-theanine binds to glutamate receptors and that
| can mess with psychotropic medications like mood
| stabilizers and anti-psychotics.
|
| From personal experience, it caused my medications to
| stop working.
| com2kid wrote:
| > Note: L-theanine binds to glutamate receptors and that
| can mess with psychotropic medications like mood
| stabilizers and anti-psychotics.
|
| Now that I did not know. Given that l-theanine is a
| natural constituent of green tea (though I don't know
| offhand in what amount) I figure there would be more
| mention of this! A casual search doesn't reveal much, and
| even examine.com (https://examine.com/supplements/theanin
| e/research/#pharmacol...) doesn't have anything listed.
| Ugh.
|
| Then again almost no one mentions that 5-HTP can cause
| horrible things to happen to your heart. :/
| bowsamic wrote:
| Most drugs and drug reactions are still very unexplored
| mtnGoat wrote:
| this is rhetorical right?
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Well I certainly wouldn't take the position that everyone
| should do drugs! I guess I'm just pushing back against the
| idea that marijuana use automatically means your life will
| be worse. I think this depends on your personality, use
| habits, and level of self control.
| mtnGoat wrote:
| You dont have to guess, i can assure you these people
| exist. I know a few.
|
| In fact some of the biggest names in tech and other
| industries are definately using drugs, its very possible to
| be a high achiever and be on drugs. in fact, it seems to
| be, that we really don't even call it addiction until it
| ruins your live, otherwise its just called "recreational".
| strange to me.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| As someone who used to be morbidly obese, I can make a better
| argument for banning Mc Donald's.
|
| >And you just won't get as much out of your life as you could
| get, won't achieve as much relationship success, professional
| success, or personal fulfillment.
|
| This applies to being 100 pounds overweight too.
|
| Hell, it can be argued if you cut out beer and switch to
| cannabis your health will improve.
| Agamus wrote:
| Not sure if this is related, but from what I understand,
| cannabis is prescribed medically to treat both anorexia and
| bulimia.
| jdoliner wrote:
| I don't see gp arguing for banning cannabis
| [deleted]
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| As a person living with complex PTSD, my experience is the
| polar opposite of what is described in the parent comment.
|
| I could not have relationships or work at all without medicinal
| cannabis, and there is really no difference between it and
| recreational cannabis in terms of efficacy, as long as the
| strain matches somewhat closely.
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| This has been a serious issue of mine. I have serious PTSD and
| anxiety, and nothing has ever worked like cannabis. Not even
| close. However it has a detrimental effect on my work output.
| semitones wrote:
| I think you are absolutely correct. This is my experience and
| viewpoint as well.
| iamdbtoo wrote:
| This argument always pops up as if there aren't a wealth of
| very successful daily cannabis users.
| akhmatova wrote:
| Sure, we all know a few.
|
| But overwhelming personal observation indicates that in the
| vast majority of cases -- it blunts your game (and if you
| pick up the habit in your teenage years, and don't manage to
| put it behind you -- it can derail your chances at completing
| your education, or maintaining successful relationships
| entirely).
|
| Again, not from the toxicity - but simply from what it does.
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| Probably many more under the radar too.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Yes, many successful (ie rich) people smoke pot and do not
| suffer because of it. Those traits are not related. Rich
| people do not suffer most of the negative social/financial
| side effects of drugs use. That's the great thing about being
| rich. It insulates you against most negative consequences of
| your actions. Normal (ie poor) people do not have such
| protections. They suffer massively.
|
| A 100$/day habit for a wealthy person is nothing and, unlike
| cocaine, that addiction will not ramp up into a 1000$/day
| habit. But for the not-rich that 100$/day is devastating.
| Bud wrote:
| There are certainly consequences to cannabis use, but let's
| not get carried away.
|
| At least for the vast majority of casual users, this isn't
| anything remotely close to a $100/day habit. Common sense
| should inform us of that, even if we aren't intimately
| familiar with how much pot actually costs.
|
| $5-10 a day is closer to the reality for most users.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Flat-out 24/7 high would be 100/day. Pot is a drug that
| successful people can sustain without any financial
| issues. Compare cocaine which can quickly ramp into
| 1000/day and beyond, quickly devastating the finances of
| even relatively wealthy people.
| sleepdreamy wrote:
| This is simply false. I'm not going to discuss pricing
| here but, with Dabs and several forms of in-take you do
| not need to spend 100/day to be stoned all day. I live in
| a recreational state(Lived here for 13 years while it
| could ruin your life).
|
| In the past this might hold true but no longer.
| darth_aardvark wrote:
| At the peak of my own usage, I smoked around an ounce
| every 3 days while (pretending to be) working from home.
| $40/eighth + taxes a pretty average price in the Bay
| Area, so that works out to almost exactly $100/day.
|
| That's pretty extreme, even for heavy smokers, but far
| from impossible.
| sleepdreamy wrote:
| An OZ every 3 days is pretty insane I'm gonna be honest.
| You must've been rolling everything to go through that.
| Using pieces helps a lot. Hope you're doing well
| darth_aardvark wrote:
| I can't even roll a joint. Just bong rips all day.
|
| And yeah, definitely not a sustainable or healthy
| habit...I'm ok now, but my career took a permanent hit.
| Oh well.
| surement wrote:
| I've seen billboards in other states advertising $5
| eighths; probably not the same quality but it's not
| necessarily as expensive as you make it out to be.
| darth_aardvark wrote:
| Yeah, I wasn't spending $100/day because I'd buy cheap
| weed in bulk, look for deals and sales, etc. But if you
| buy 'irresonsibly' and just pick up like an average
| eighth from a dispensary, it can be pricey.
|
| I realize I'm being pretty pedantic here, you're right
| that spend $100/day requires massive usage plus buying
| moderately expensive weed. But it's not, technically,
| impossible.
| gunfighthacksaw wrote:
| Bruh I can cop $99/oz and that lasts me for 2 months. If
| I wanted to be permafried, maybe 2-3 weeks.
| iamdbtoo wrote:
| While this might be technically true, I don't think it's
| the case for the vast majority.
| wazoox wrote:
| I don't know any, but I know a whole lot of dope-heads who
| completely destroyed their lives with daily use of cannabis.
| tboyd47 wrote:
| The scale of human potential is vast. Who's to say that, for
| a given definition of success, a person who's "very
| successful" with one lifestyle wouldn't be 10x or 100x more
| successful in another?
| iamdbtoo wrote:
| Who's to say anything about anyone? We only get one shot at
| this. There's no perfect way to live a life.
| sandoze wrote:
| Who's to say what my full potential could have been if it
| wasn't for all the lead paint in my house as a kid?
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| ..did you eat it?
| cortesoft wrote:
| Are you suggesting we shouldn't remove lead paint from
| houses? Yes, we can't know exactly on an individual level
| what potential was lost to lead paint, but we know it was
| some amount. Can we not act if we don't know the exact
| loss?
| margalabargala wrote:
| That's because the existence of outliers doesn't disprove the
| existence of a trend.
|
| Saying that there are successful daily cannabis users and
| therefore chronic cannabis use doesn't have negative effects
| on one's brain, is similar to saying that you're holding a
| snowball and therefore global warming doesn't exist.
| iamdbtoo wrote:
| > That's because the existence of outliers doesn't disprove
| the existence of a trend.
|
| Yeah, exactly. Either way it proves nothing about a person
| or their life.
| margalabargala wrote:
| It means the person you originally replied to was correct
| to call it a "danger", because while it doesn't preclude
| the possibility of success as you noted, it does make it
| less likely for a given individual.
| iamdbtoo wrote:
| No, it doesn't. It just proves the whole point is
| meaningless. There are successes and failures in both
| weed users and non-weed users, so you can't use that as a
| variable for anything.
|
| Interepting it that way just always casts judgement on
| the user.
| margalabargala wrote:
| > There are successes and failures in both weed users and
| non-weed users, so you can't use that as a variable for
| anything.
|
| That's not how that works. The existence of both
| successes and failures in weed users does not prevent a
| comparison of the rates of successes and failures between
| weed users and non-weed-users.
|
| Making the above comparison and noting that successes per
| capita are lower in weed users of an otherwise identical
| demographic doesn't cast judgement on anyone.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| There are a wealth of very successful alcoholics and cocaine
| users too. On an average, alcoholism and cocaine dependence
| still ruins life. Don't look at the exceptions to define the
| average.
| graublau wrote:
| 2x drinks at a happy hour isn't successful alcoholism,
| that's just a lack of cultural stigma.
|
| I also slightly doubt casual cocaine won't catch up with
| you eventually, might take years. Stimulants are generally
| work friendly anyway, see coffee/adderall.
| bobkazamakis wrote:
| >There are a wealth of very successful alcoholics and
| cocaine users too.
|
| Not for as long of a duration. Apples to oranges.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| There are also a wealth of very unsuccessful people who
| don't partake in drugs or alcohol. These points prove
| nothing
| mesofile wrote:
| I thought the way that South Park put it (in the voice of Randy
| Marsh) many years ago was just about perfect:
|
| "Well, Stan, the truth is marijuana probably isn't gonna make
| you kill people, and ...it most likely isn't gonna fund
| terrorists, but... Well son, pot makes you feel fine with being
| bored and... It's when you're bored that you should be learning
| some new skill or discovering some new science or... being
| creative. If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you
| aren't good at anything." [0]
|
| To be clear, I don't wholly agree, I know too many talented and
| hard-working stoners, but it does sum up the passive danger of
| cannabis rather nicely I think.
|
| [0]
| https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/My_Future_Self_n%27_Me/Scr...
| dfxm12 wrote:
| South Park also put it well when they understood that total
| abstinence is not the only way to deal with the situation.
| Maybe all it takes is a little discipline.
|
| After all, there's a passive danger in _many_ things we do or
| neglect to do.
| seadan83 wrote:
| It all depends on who you are & your physiology, right? I
| was super addicted to nicotine (I can say that nicotine is
| perhaps 500x more addictive than weed, and about 10,000x
| more addictive than coffee, and about 50x more addictive
| than alcohol - all of which I have been addicted to at
| varying times in my life).
|
| I've known people that were fine smoking a cigarette every
| 3rd day. I'm not one and that would put me on a path of
| relapse in a hurry.
|
| I'll agree that avoiding addiction takes discipline, but
| once addicted, it depends to what, and who you are whether
| you need to focus on recurring abstinence or if more
| moderation is the ticket.
| rayiner wrote:
| > South Park also put it well when they understood that
| total abstinence is not the only way to deal with the
| situation. Maybe all it takes is a little discipline.
|
| Exercising a "little discipline" doesn't really work for
| addictive substances. In my experience, high-functioning
| people with tons of impulse control often don't appreciate
| that others around them have more limited capacity for
| that. Despite drinking _a lot_ in grad school, I just
| stopped after my daughter was born. Not out of any problem
| functioning, I was a social drinker and was just too busy
| with a job and baby. But it would be foolish of me to
| assume that everyone can just exercise "a little
| discipline" and go from 5+ drinks a night to nothing just
| like that.
| runarberg wrote:
| The south park's point in that episode wasn't to deny the
| existence of substance abuse disorder. Rather the point
| was that not everyone that does dumb stuff one time while
| drinking has it.
|
| In this episode Randy didn't have Substance abuse
| disorder. He took the kids for a drive after drinking. He
| was caught and the court ordered him to undergo treatment
| despite there not being any proof that he was an
| alcoholic.
|
| This mentality that anyone that does something dumb or
| illegal while drunk has a problem does no service for
| either those that actually have substance abuse disorder,
| nor for criminal justice. You should be responsible for
| your own actions, and if you are sick you need treatment.
| But ordering people to undergo treatment after a crime
| despite no evidence of a disorder is just plain bad.
| mkay.
| INTPenis wrote:
| I'm doing what I love buzzed right now, building a cluster
| for my homelab, creating a hybrid cloud solution to host some
| services and saving on money by leveraging cheap compute at
| home.
|
| But yes, Randy Marsh was absolutely right. I've had periods
| of my life where I've abused it and I regret every one of
| those days.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| > I've had periods of my life where I've abused it and I
| regret every one of those days.
|
| I think I am starting to wake up to this. I do find
| enjoyment in it, and there is such a sunk cost fallacy I
| keep factoring in too.
|
| I mean do I take occasional breaks, but probably not
| enough. It had definitely helped me lower my inhibitions
| enough to introspectively identity some issues that were
| deeply hidden under the surface of my everyday life.
| However, it's killed my motivation and in some ways it's
| starting to negatively affect other areas of my life.
| Regardless of my dependence, I am thankful to not feel
| clinically addicted or anything.
|
| I will say, it wasn't my first choice of treatment. I tried
| the mental/medical health professional route. I'm still on
| that train, and it's been 8 years. Nothing has really
| improved, so I am not sure what else to do and where else
| to go. I adopted cannabis around the age of 29 with very
| limited experience prior. The kind I use is not like the
| variety in this article either. I use 1:1 THC:CBD hemp
| because high thc products are illegal in my area. So maybe
| the damage isn't "as bad."
|
| If all the medical/mental health treatments I tried work as
| well as the medical research and doctors claim then I
| probably wouldn't have ever began to use cannabis in the
| first place. But like I said, what else am I to do? It's
| exhausting and stressful trying to force yourself to be a
| way your body naturally fights against.
|
| It's apparent that I cannot function well without some sort
| of chemical assistance. I guess the only difference is
| where I get it from (doctor vs. plant), the side-effects,
| and the societal views that accompany said chemicals.
| tr1ll10nb1ll wrote:
| Moderation is key here, I believe. If you're looking at
| successful people who get high _all the time_ , it's safe to
| assume they increased their marijuana (or any other
| substance) intake after having a skill they're really good
| at. Most don't and that's why we see a correlation with drugs
| and being not good at much.
| seadan83 wrote:
| Do we see that correlation? Until recently, anyone over 40
| was underground about marijuana usage. It turned out, tons
| of people use cannabis, many executives, plenty of people
| that we view as successful. One problem with black markets,
| it's very difficult to get good data, hence - do we really
| see a correlation? Or do we just perceive a correlation
| (ie: confirmation bias)
| tr1ll10nb1ll wrote:
| I'm not disagreeing and you can be wildly successful with
| or without it, I'm just pointing out heavy usage on a
| regular basis before you ever get to sustain that
| lifestyle can be detrimental to your success. But yeah,
| it could very well just be me perceiving a correlation
| here.
| bennysomething wrote:
| I always remember that quote as well, the bored part of it
| really stuck with me.
|
| Unfortunately I smoked my first joint at 13, I'm pretty
| certain it damaged my short term memory. I think had it been
| legal I wouldn't have got hold of it until much older plus it
| would have lost some of its cool factor.
|
| It was mostly hash in my day, I actually never liked weed ,
| it was all super skunk loaded with thc that caused paranoia.
|
| Alcohol, cocaine and mdma are rough drugs too but there's
| something about weed/hash that makes me think it's overall
| mental effects might be worse. It's odd that it's written off
| as harmless quite often. (Btw I think all drugs should be
| legal, but I also now think they are all horrible and have
| nothing to do with them , well apart from beer and wine!)
| kerabatsos wrote:
| I guess. But anecdotally, I learned JavaScript, read
| philosophical text, organize my goals, play games with my
| children, go for walks outside...while consuming a moderate
| amount of thc. My creativity goes up. Rarely do I just sit
| and do nothing but sometimes that's fine too. Moderation
| works.
| vsareto wrote:
| >If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you aren't
| good at anything
|
| Hah, that's easily done without smoking pot
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I think this is largely the problem with mobile phones as
| well. Like you probably aren't going to go mad or get
| rectangular eyes or whatever, but you can just sort of sedate
| that sensation of boredom with scrolling reddit or facebook
| or whatever, which does all of bupkis for making us happy in
| the long term.
| dbtc wrote:
| phonestoned
| blowski wrote:
| This is the same argument with all consuming vs producing.
|
| It's why there was a moral panic in the 1800s over Jane
| Austen style fiction, in the 1930s over radio, and so on.
|
| Being addicted to cannabis is not really any different to
| playing computer games 12 hours a day, doing endless
| marathons, watching sports, investing, or many similar
| activities.
| beowulfey wrote:
| No, but currently cannabis use is the one exploding in
| popularity compared to those others
| [deleted]
| lostmsu wrote:
| I'd say marathons and computer games (except the
| clickers) should not be on this list due to the
| difference between active vs passive participation.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| Clickers are better than people give credit. Thinking
| about growth curves is an uncommon challenge. Pretty much
| nothing else commonly involves things expanding faster
| than exponentially. You don't actually just click
| mindlessly. You typically need an understanding of the
| system otherwise you're just waiting for infeasible
| amounts of time.
| dTal wrote:
| As far as I'm concerned, the clicker genre reached its
| zenith, its purest expression, in Universal Paperclips.
| In no other game has the "automate exponential growth"
| mechanic been used to tell a story more poignantly, or
| make philosophical points so eloquently. Other clicker
| games use flashy graphics and sound effects to disguise
| their essential emptiness; not Universal Paperclips. Its
| austere plaintext webpage offers only hints and fragments
| of the world the numbers are meant to represent, its
| minimalism a baleful commentary on the subject matter
| itself.
|
| I played it twice, and do not regret it.
| tsol wrote:
| Drugs are functionally different, I'd argue. You can quit
| games any time without pain, given enough mental resolve
| or motivation. No matter how good a reason it is you
| still have to deal with physical withdrawal when it comes
| to drugs
| RajT88 wrote:
| As a (mostly former) distance runner. Running endless
| marathons is most certainly not harmless. You will face
| eventually injuries which affect you for the rest of your
| life.
| ChristianGeek wrote:
| I'm a distance runner too; I try to distance myself from
| running.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Some of those moral panics did lead to action though.
|
| Hard drugs, alcohol, gambling, duels; a lot of this stuff
| is if not banned then at least restricted and regulated.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| That's not a clear win, as in some cases the cure proved
| worse than the disease. And was co-opted for goals around
| discrimination.
| yeahNo88 wrote:
| andi999 wrote:
| Maybe they all were right.
| disqard wrote:
| I'm 90% sure that "endless marathons" referred to
| "watching entire seasons of shows on NetFlix", not
| "running 26.2 miles over and over".
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| Although if you are a good runner, I've heard moderate
| cannabis usage can help bring on the runners high much
| quicker making running more fun.
| nklende wrote:
| I was previously at a place in my life where I
| compulsively did endurance exercise (including 3
| marathons) to keep myself fatigued and numb my feelings.
| It was not too different to how some people smoke weed or
| drink, except that everyone in my life thought it was
| great and healthy. I spent a long time not making some
| very hard but positive life choices, and now my stomach
| lining is shot from pounding NSAIDs to keep exercising
| through joint pain.
| thirtyfivecent wrote:
| Count yourself extremely lucky if you know for certain it
| was caused by NSAIDs. Thats easy to fix compared to a
| bacterial infection. I have done a two week water fast to
| let ulcers in my stomach/gut heal in the past with great
| success.
|
| People claim these systems dont shut down as you are
| still digesting body fat, but they for the most part do
| shut down and somewhere in doing that they heal very
| quickly. I have done it a few times (for NSAIDs and other
| pain killers having done damage to gut and stomach and
| when i get glutened giving me ulcers in my gut).
|
| A benefit is that things like food dont rub against the
| ulcers which are basically like little cuts and that
| helps too heal too during the fast. You can go on having
| pain for months or years trying to deal with them in
| another way. Remember to dose some losalt for potassium
| and sodium ( your electrolytes ) while you fast to limit
| the dizzyness and fatigue. Im not sure magnesium powder
| would be a good idea due to it being tough on the stomach
| normally... it would stop the muscle cramps you will
| get... but it might stop the whole thing working ... i
| never used it while healing ulcers and lining damage ....
| but i have more recently when fasting to lose weight and
| it does make it easier .. magnesium tablets or capsules
| would be a terrible idea though those are really tough on
| the stomach and have a lot of added ingredients in the
| fillers and capsule depending on the company. Smaller
| fasts would also help. Good luck.
| LeSaucy wrote:
| Cannabis and jogging make a lovely combination.
| akhmatova wrote:
| Lovely?
|
| Based on what it's doing to your lungs and circulatory
| system, I'd put it more in the "it rocks, until it
| doesn't" category.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| I'm not convinced the heart agrees (medically speaking).
| Werewolf255 wrote:
| That runner's high is something else after the 104th
| mile!
| akhmatova wrote:
| _Being addicted to cannabis is not really any different
| [from non-chemical habits]_
|
| On a psychological level, perhaps. But it is pretty
| obviously not so when it comes to physical risk (if one
| smokes in whichever form).
| walleeee wrote:
| phones are on a different level than fiction or radio or
| arguably even cannabis imo
|
| you can do something else while you listen to the radio
| or smoke pot (e.g., clean your house, hang out with
| friends or family, with weed you can even read or
| program)
|
| phones and books both consume your attention, but a book
| at least demands a bit of effort to follow and might
| introduce you to new ideas or vocabulary, even if you're
| reading pulp fiction
|
| on the other hand you can scroll twitter or insta or
| watch tiktok absolutely mindlessly, and doing so will
| tend to become a habit all while it chips away at your
| attention span and your willpower
|
| weed can make boredom feel ok too, and can certainly
| affect attention, willpower and memory, but if used in
| moderation it can also magnify your curiosity and sense
| of wonder, help you introspect, etc
|
| cannabis is a powerful entheogen and it deserves far more
| respect and restraint than it currently receives
|
| smartphones give us enormous powers but they can also
| exert massive power over our minds and actions, they too
| should be treated with caution and used with far more
| restraint
|
| cannabis might make you lazy or suggestible, and it can
| even be dangerous for some people or if used
| irresponsibly, but it won't spoon feed you mind-melting
| pablum or ads or propaganda or spy on you
| ruined wrote:
| thanks for reminding me that's enough hn for today
| bennysomething wrote:
| That's a really good point. I never thought of it that way.
| dogman144 wrote:
| agreed. I started bookmarking a specific open source repo
| and automechanic wiki and I'm slowly conditioning myself to
| read those if I want to waste time on my phone. I enjoy
| reading them anyway as much (or a lot more) than Reddit or
| w/e, just needed to make it habitual bc I didn't think
| about going to those as a first stop to get lost in. Def
| helps and returns the joy of having internet access, lot of
| cool stuff to learn.
| gen220 wrote:
| Consider using an RSS reader and bookmarking that! It's
| nice to be able to grow your list of things to "default
| browse" to, over time.
| nabogh wrote:
| Got a link to that wiki? Sounds useful
| esarbe wrote:
| Indeed!
| eej71 wrote:
| This late 80's PSA style ad covers that perspective as well.
| This style of ads were easy to mock even in the 80s - but I
| always thought this one had a point.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwQL9ZzJTX0
| [deleted]
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Can confirm.
|
| Two of my kids use THC pretty regularly and they seem content
| with a life that is paying the bills but not really leading
| anywhere.
|
| The third does not (AFAIK) and is on a much higher
| trajectory.
|
| All had pretty much the same upbringing, rules, experiences,
| and discipline.
|
| I've never used it, so don't have personal experience.
| seadan83 wrote:
| Correlation implies causation here? That is one place where
| and why this is all so tricky..
| lovemenot wrote:
| >> The third does not (AFAIK) and is on a much higher
| trajectory.
|
| Depends on one's definition of _higher_ , I guess.
| Psyonic wrote:
| I have seen this, but on the flip-side, the most successful
| person I know (and they are quite successful) is also the
| biggest stoner I know.
| nshung wrote:
| To me, a life that is in content and has meaning trumps all
| those whatever higher trajectory means. I mean.. isn't
| achieving those higher trajectories the goal of being
| content and having achieve the meaning if it exits at all?
| worker_person wrote:
| Watching your child being content to work at Taco Bell
| for the next 50 years is not something to be proud of.
| Regardless of contentment.
| Taywee wrote:
| I'd be proud of it, if they were a good person, took care
| of themselves, took care of the people around them, and
| were truly happy in their lives. Some people are
| perfectly happy working low-level positions in
| restaurants, sanitation, retail, and the like for their
| lives, and maybe maintaining a few hobbies and
| relationships that give them personal meaning off their
| work hours.
|
| It's only a problem if they aren't actually content. I've
| known tons of people working minimum wage who sneer at
| "elites", don't seek higher things, and get high all the
| time, but really resent the fact that they never did
| anything with their lives. They don't build their
| hobbies, they don't seek higher levels of employment or
| skill, and they constantly talk about how they want to do
| great things that they never do.
|
| There will always be an infinite amount of achievement
| that you never accomplished. There will always be an
| infinite number of things you never did. The best thing
| you can do is prioritize, accomplish the things that you
| really want to accomplish, and try to do your best to be
| happy with what you are able to do. Live your life
| happily, and make the people around you happy.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| You can be proud of achievements.
|
| The harder the achievement, the harder it is to automate
| that achievement, the prouder I will be.
|
| Working at Taco Bell is not that hard to obtain and may
| very well not exist in 10 years.
| blazingfrog2 wrote:
| > I'd be proud of it, if they were a good person, took
| care of themselves
|
| I honestly don't know how anyone (good person or not) can
| properly take care of themselves on a Taco Bell hourly
| salary.
| palmetieri2000 wrote:
| Yes, It is the workers fault that they do not get enough
| funds to properly take care of themselves while working
| full time.
|
| Really dumb take.
| blobbers wrote:
| It is possible that some jobs are meant to be stepping
| stones, not permanent positions (ie: you outgrow them,
| and someone lower on the learning totem pole steps into
| the role for a time).
| palmetieri2000 wrote:
| Absolutely, and you should be paid enough to properly
| take care of yourself while you have those positions.
| txsoftwaredev wrote:
| They wouldn't be able too. It's a great job for a high
| school kid or one with a low IQ that has limited options
| to start with. But it should be temporary to teach you
| how to be responsible, show up on time, do your job
| correctly, etc.
| Miraste wrote:
| > I'd be proud of it, if they were a good person, took
| care of themselves, took care of the people around them,
| and were truly happy in their lives
|
| I'd be happy for them. I wouldn't be _proud_. An infinite
| amount of possible achievements is no excuse not to
| strive for anything.
| Volundr wrote:
| Why not? My first job was Wendy's and honestly... It's
| not the least satisfying job I've had. My unwillingness
| to do it now has more to do with having become accustomed
| to the luxury that comes with a software developer salary
| than anything negative about fast food (same reason I
| won't go back to being a security guard, which was hands
| down the best job I ever had).
|
| I feel like there's a strong argument to be made that the
| person working at Taco Bell and is satisfied with their
| life is better off than a random cube dweller slowly
| losing their soul in the name of material comforts.
| yw3410 wrote:
| What did you enjoy about being a security guard?
| Volundr wrote:
| A bit of context that might be important: Most of my time
| spent as a security guard was spent either taking the
| closing shift at an outlet mall on the outskirts of town,
| or a night or weekend shift at a large office building. I
| rarely did things like work at a busy mall during the
| day.
|
| The best part frankly was that there was so little I
| actually needed to _do_. I filled out a few forms, I
| walked the whole site X times of Y period (usually once
| every 1-2 hours, but depended on the site). Beyond that I
| was largely just expected to be at my post, reasonably
| alert and professional looking. My time was my own to do
| homework, study, read, program, or whatever. I realize
| that a job without anything to do is a nightmare for some
| people, but I 've never had a problem filling my own
| time.
|
| Other pros:
|
| * I knew my regular sites almost like my home. Sure
| during they day there were tons of people, but by the
| night/weekend when I took over, I was basically the only
| person in the building and it felt like it was mine.
|
| * Eating lunch on the roof overlooking the city.
|
| * Some of the chillest co-workers I've ever met, from the
| maintenance crew to the other guards.
|
| * 12-hours shifts meant I was usually only working 3 days
| a week.
|
| * On holidays me and the maintenance guy would have
| private movie showings in the building auditorium.
|
| Cons:
|
| * 99% boring, but when things get exciting they get
| _real_ exciting. Only time I 've had guns pointed in my
| direction, and they were cops.
|
| * I think getting off work and going to bed a 7 a.m. for
| years has permanently kind of borked my sleep.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Maybe you can pull off security guard and software
| development at the same time! It's something I always
| joked about doing - but that was before everyone and
| their dog became remote.
|
| Nowadays software development is so meeting heavy that
| nothing gets done but you're "working" all the time.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| Everyone is focusing on whether being content with
| working at Taco Bell is sufficient in life, but I think
| the more interesting question is whether they truly _are_
| content. That 's not for me to answer, but if the South
| Park quote has any truth (and I think it has more than a
| little), in 50 years' time, they themselves might not be
| happy with how things went in retrospect. In that case,
| it's possible they weren't really content all that time,
| but were using weed to avoid deeply feeling that
| discontent.
|
| I say this as someone with at least a little experience,
| not to be judgmental.
| gowld wrote:
| People who ruined their lives with hard work and stress
| to make a billionaire richer while buying a useless
| polluting fancy car and big house, also have regrets.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| Absolutely! And if we can identify factors which lead to
| us behaving in ways that make us feel such regrets, then
| this can help us lead better lives. Obviously weed isn't
| the only culprit.
| swatcoder wrote:
| > in 50 years' time, they themselves might not be happy
| with how things went in retrospect
|
| There are moments in later life where everyone feels that
| way.
|
| Statistically, some paths might be show up in studies as
| more reliable in terms of late life contentment, but on
| an individual level, we all end up noticing that we left
| a lot of doors unopened, and can find ourselves stuck
| wishing we made different choices or had different
| opportunities.
|
| Innumerable careerists and dedicated parents and globe-
| trotters find themselves stuck discontent, bitter, or
| resentful. And innumerable people of all paths look back,
| wonder what could have been different, and reconcile
| themselves to contentment again. And heck -- some people
| just die before reaching their goals at all.
|
| There's no point speculating whether the chill dude at
| the Taco Bell is doing it right. They know themselves
| better than any of us do, and may easily end up more
| durably content than any of us.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| > There's no point speculating whether the chill dude at
| the Taco Bell is doing it right.
|
| I agree, but I think there is value in speculating
| whether the contentment we feel on weed is really just
| distraction from discontent. This applies to far more
| than just weed, of course, but my own experience is that
| weed is particularly tricky in this regard.
| swatcoder wrote:
| Sure, and you could raise exactly the same question to
| all the people on prescribed psychiatric regimens. They
| all come with tradeoffs and change the nature of how we
| experience our lives. That's the point of them.
|
| I don't have the insight to guess whether George should
| prefer to be skinnier and hornier but too depressed to
| meet his career goals, any more than it's my business to
| guess that Jane should put down the blunts and be more
| tuned in with all the drama in the news.
|
| I'm busy enough trying to make those choices for myself.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| That's fair, and I think it is also responsible to share
| our experiences with these things with others. Mine (and
| friends') is that weed is especially insidious in this
| regard, but it is indeed up to each person to decide for
| themselves.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| > There are moments in later life where everyone feels
| that way.
|
| old Successful Career guy: should have spent more time
| with family and friends <starts sobbing>
|
| old Poor Artist guy: should have worked harder and more
| conservative then I could have afforded a house, now I
| have to rent <gets all whiney>
|
| --
|
| the question is the mental state developed. are you
| somebody who regrets everything and is never happy with
| what you have because you alwaya need more? or are you
| able to be grateful and enjoy calmly small things and
| accept how life is?
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's this kind of motivation that fuels the efforts to
| make sure low-level jobs stay unpleasant, unsafe, and
| uncompensated. It's the "starter job" philosophy, where
| some jobs are only fit for an inferior class of people
| who should have no pride, although they produce and
| distribute almost everything material that we use.
| Children, immigrants, foreigners...
|
| I'm reminded every day that my decision to never work
| with my hands again was a good one. Nobody respects
| people who provide for you, that's slave's work, mother's
| work(, teacher's work, nurse's work.) The ultimate CEO-
| guru would lie on a cushion all day, being washed and
| shaved by his VPs, periodically emitting syllables in an
| unknown language that would be interpreted by other VPs
| as commands to direct the people who actually do the
| work.
| s5300 wrote:
| Why?
|
| Billions across the world would be incredibly happy with
| their kids getting to do something like this.
|
| If you aren't happy with a content child, sounds like you
| had children for all of the wrong reasons & would be a
| horrible, potentially abusive parent.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| I understand the underlying sentiment, but this is an
| awfully aggressive way to get your point across. The
| irony is that we tend to be aggressive when we're
| triggered due to unresolved traumas in ourselves -- which
| we then pass on to our own kids.
|
| I'm not here to psychoanalyze you, but food for thought.
| gowld wrote:
| Fair, but the context was a parent publicly shaming their
| children for living peaceful, eco-friendly, simple lives,
| which is far worse.
| gunfighthacksaw wrote:
| My friend who is a (really smart) SWE in Canada said that
| compared to his own country, he could live here on a fast
| food salary, smoke weed, make music and still have a
| better life than his home country.
|
| We forget that a job where you get free food and a low
| wage for simple work is (historically speaking) extremely
| luxurious.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| not sure what stereotype you have in mind but I don't see
| why this should be something keeping a parent from being
| proud. it's simple, yet honest work and that's about it.
| so what? not everybody wants or has to be a surgeon ffs
| txsoftwaredev wrote:
| But taco bell is the pinnacle of your kid's career
| ambition? I know as a parent I'd be very disappointed.
| namose wrote:
| Not a parent, but I'd personally be more proud as a
| parent of a Taco Bell cook than, e.g. adtech or a high
| frequency trading firm (of course, sometimes these places
| are great for training or getting a name on a resume, but
| if that was my child's career ambition I'd be sad). The
| only issue I would have would be whether they're making
| enough to support their other goals.
| jjulius wrote:
| You're assuming that the two content children work at
| Taco Bell. For all you know they could have a (to
| whatever degree) higher-paying job doing literally
| anything else yet still be content with where they're at.
| plutonorm wrote:
| Of course it is.
| nshung wrote:
| Why not?
| rtp4me wrote:
| Because at some point, the $9.50/hr job at Taco Bell will
| run its course, and your child will end up with severely
| limited resources. Together with a lack of funding and
| poor health care options, your children will probably
| return back home to "evaluate their situation". At that
| point, they will start wondering why they have been left
| behind in society, why the system is rigged against them,
| etc.
|
| As we all know (and frequently discussed here on HN), a
| minimal wage job results in limited housing options,
| limited healthcare options, limited educational options,
| etc. As a parent, it is my responsibility to prepare my
| children to become self sufficient beyond the minimum
| wage job. For the sake of themselves and _their_
| children.
| gowld wrote:
| Why would you want someone to never learn that the system
| is rigged against them? So they blame themselves for
| their oppression?
|
| Millions of people will never rise above minmim wage
| jobs.
|
| Why fix that for one person ,and not for all?
|
| A Taco Bell worker probably has more free energy and
| intrest for tackling big problems like protesting against
| the oligarchs.
| worker_person wrote:
| This is garbage. Work hard, plan hard, save money. Push
| through setbacks. Maybe you won't be a billionaire. But
| you can do pretty well in life. Don't blame others for
| your own laziness.
|
| Just met a guy last month that spent 5 years working at a
| carwash at minimum wage. He saved up money the entire
| time. Got himself a van decked for mobile cleaning. He
| still works hard, but is making some serious money now.
|
| Seen far more that just collect welfare checks, smoke pot
| and play videos or watch tv for 16 hours a day, while
| blaming "whomever" for their situation.
| elif wrote:
| A zen master is alone in his mountain retreat wherever he
| stands. A life spent seeking further material enrichment
| or inner personal development will inevitably build a
| mansion of a self, requiring increasing maintenance and
| becoming even more difficult to live outside of, let
| alone deconstruct.
|
| It is much easier to accomplish a universal perspective
| when you have much less 'self' to suppress. That's been
| the nature of monks of all variety for all of human
| history. I don't think it's a coincidence or disadvantage
| that cannabis enthusiasts have a less-selfish mentality.
| julianlam wrote:
| It's a nice line of thinking, sure--that you can achieve
| happiness and contentment without having to strive for
| the "best".
|
| That's the whole point of the matter though, isn't it,
| that if you don't have ambition, then you voluntarily get
| yourself stuck in a rut of your making. "I'm content in
| that my life is shitty in X or Y way, but cannot do
| anything about it".
|
| There was a time when I found comfort in thinking that I
| would grow up to be "comfortably middle class". My
| parents disabused me of that notion, and now that I am at
| that stage, I feel as though there is so much more I can
| learn and do, instead of clocking in and out day after
| day.
|
| But hey, if you find happiness in working at a gas
| station or something, maybe you are more enlightened than
| I am.
| lovehashbrowns wrote:
| I don't understand the thought process of putting someone
| down based on what they do for a living. Particularly
| when it just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. The world
| around you revolves around people that clock in and out
| day after day. Maybe one day we'll have 7.5 billion CEOs
| in the world, huh?
| blazingfrog2 wrote:
| > I don't understand the thought process of putting
| someone down based on what they do for a living
|
| Discounting the counter productive condescension required
| to be the one putting the other guy down, we should all
| be honest with a simple fact: any typical software dev
| (just talking about what I know) can succeed at a gas
| station job while the reverse is not true. This obviously
| does not afford the software dev the right to be a jerk
| to anybody (up or down the ladder).
| Adraghast wrote:
| I would pay very good money to watch you spend a
| Valentine's Day working at a restaurant.
| gowld wrote:
| Many, perhaps most, software devs, would utterly fail at
| a job that had customers, regular hours, physical labor,
| etc.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| I worked in grocery stores with people that I would argue
| are smarter than many of the devs I have worked with. My
| old manager when I was younger and working in a grocery
| store was on a path to be a medical doctor, but changed
| paths after his friend killed himself from the the stress
| of medical school.
|
| Intelligence is only one of the many variables needed to
| succeed in certain occupations.
| nshung wrote:
| "I'm content in that my life is shitty in X or Y way, but
| cannot do anything about it".
|
| What is "shitty" in this context?
| throw7 wrote:
| > it most likely isn't gonna fund terrorists
|
| Afghanistan?
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I don't know if it is the same in Europe, but Marijuana in
| North America tends to be produced in the country it is
| consumed. In most places where it is legalized in the
| states and canada you can even find out exactly what farm
| it was that produced it.
|
| More than I can say for the food I eat.
| analog31 wrote:
| I had a friend who was a heavy pot smoker, and was insistent
| that there were no health affects. I asked him: "What about
| motivation?"
|
| He said: "OK, motivation."
| babypuncher wrote:
| I think it highlights why we put age restrictions on things
| like this. A developing brain is far more likely to fall into
| this trap than and already functioning adult brain.
| __s wrote:
| clip of that scene:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G83G0EDE2RY
| farnsworth wrote:
| This quote stuck in my brain for a long time and I resonate
| with it and how I used it at a certain period in my life. It
| doesn't have to be like this if you approach it differently
| but in a certain context and state of mind, it's like an
| anti-adderall. Makes the day go by in comfort and nothing at
| all gets done.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Until you train yourself to get more things done when
| stoned which is step 2.
| farnsworth wrote:
| Yes, it just takes the right mindset and some effort (for
| me)
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| I think it's a substance that can lend itself really well to
| the creative aspects if used in moderation and with something
| like taking continuous notes so you don't lose those thoughts
| and ideas.
|
| I've come up with some really great stuff while moderately
| stoned, and while I don't consume it on a daily anymore, I
| can't understate the importance of having some way of
| recording those thoughts as soon as you come up with them be
| it a notepad, notepad.exe or even a voice recorder if logging
| things on paper or text isn't your thing because it tends to
| mess with your short term memory enough to forget whatever
| interesting point of view you've arrived on within a minute
| or so. I think I learned this from comedians actually, George
| Carlin used to work like this. I bet there's plenty of
| writers on South Park and may other comedy shows who do, too.
|
| Obviously taking it on a wake-and-bake basis throughout the
| day is going to give you problems though. Don't use it like
| that unless you're trying to manage serious illness like to
| keep your chemotherapy meds down or arthritis or whatever.
| Hell I don't even drink caffeine on a daily anymore because I
| find WAY more utility out of it once every couple of weeks or
| so. Oh yeah and if I'm going to agree with anything in this
| article it's that extracts are kinda too turbo, but I've also
| tried them in small amounts in drinks (Around 5-10mg) and
| that was pretty amazing compared to smoking in terms of lack
| of side effects from inhaling crap.
| xvedejas wrote:
| Drug use can be a good excuse to put some time aside to let
| your mind wander, so I see why people end up getting
| creative on THC. And if you practice creativity while
| stoned, it makes sense that you'll be more creative while
| stoned. Like my friend who learned to juggle high, and yet
| cannot do it when he's sober.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| I think it's a bit more than that. It makes your mind
| wander in different directions, in a way that lends
| itself to things like writing original jokes or coming up
| with a different angle on problems or ideas that can be
| solved with more 'out of the box' solutions. It does
| something to the associative memory in which it makes
| associations which you wouldn't normally assert (Which is
| where I think a lot of people who don't enjoy it end up
| paranoid - a healthy dose of critical thought and
| reasoning going into these experiences may be helpful,
| along with keeping the dose relatively low).
|
| That said since it does have a thought-scattering thing
| going for it that if you don't bother to try and focus on
| getting those scattered thoughts on to something which
| records them, it's kind of a waste of time if we're
| talking about using it for purely utilitarian reasons.
| sealthedeal wrote:
| I think that the creativity when high is basically the
| stress relief that THC can give. So essentially you are a
| blank slate, no worries, and can put your attention onto
| an issue and ideas seem to just "come from no where". It
| all comes down to stress relief.
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| Actually I'd say its got some sort of anticholinergic effect.
|
| The whitey that people experience, usually first time users
| or infrequent users, is a release of glutathione, and
| obviously its messing with the endocannabinoid system.
|
| Its also got a very potent memory wiping effect, which makes
| it useful for criminals doing stuff to you, like raping you
| in your sleep if you have been spiked with prescription
| sleeping pills and/or off the shelf anti histamines sold to
| aid sleep.
|
| Its a very nasty combination of drugs, when that sort of
| stuff has been done to you in your sleep, and criminals never
| tell you what they plan to do to you!
|
| Dont make it easy for them, the legal system wont help you!
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| weed is a godsend for me. I normally aways feel a bit guilty
| if I'm not doing something productive. To the point where its
| a significant source of anxiety and insomnia. when things
| start getting to hot in the brain, a few puffs and I'm
| content to relax, watch some anime and sleep early.
|
| completely agree with the op in general though. def not good
| of for kids who should be working on establishing themselves.
| ineptech wrote:
| For anyone interested, there's a support community around
| quitting pot at /r/leaves (that name being a humorous
| reference to /r/trees, a large subreddit for pot users).
| daveslash wrote:
| Yeah. I used the same schpeel (or something similar), with my
| kid when we found out she was smoking at 15. You know ~ it's
| not heroine or cocaine, but it can make you content to just
| do nothing, when you'd be happier doing _something_.
|
| Sometimes "do nothing" is exactly what we need in this crazy,
| hectic, busy world. Sometimes it's good to be bored. But keep
| it in check. Also, I have no problem with adults partaking,
| but kids with their developing brains ~ that's another story
| in my mind.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| FYI, spiel :)
| detritus wrote:
| Personally I prefer 'schpiel' :)
| daveslash wrote:
| Thank you.
| davidrupp wrote:
| More info at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spiel .
| Pronounced as you (gp) spelled it phonetically because
| it's borrowed from German.
| gowld wrote:
| It's taken from Yiddish, which took it from German.
| maxbond wrote:
| On and off daily marijuana user.
|
| I don't feel "dopey and less intelligent" when I smoke weed at
| all times of the day. It actually has very little impact on me.
| But it does help me deal with my chronic anxiety issues.
|
| I take breaks regularly. Sometimes I get into a place where I
| can't operate in my day to day life because of intrusive
| thoughts. When I smoke I'm able to break out of cycles of
| repetitive thought and make real progress in my life. I achieve
| so much more and get so much more out of life. I'm able to
| engage with the people in my life better and improve my
| relationships.
|
| You speak with false authority on a matter you cannot possibly
| understand, because you do not share the life experience of
| myself or people like me. It's irresponsible and you should
| desist. If you have relevant experiences, share them and
| explain that this is your conclusion. If you don't have
| relevant experiences, don't include yourself in the
| conversation. Don't speak in generalizations about other
| people's lives.
| mountainriver wrote:
| Agree, also a nightly user and I feel way better doing it. I
| feel more intelligent and better rested.
|
| Also agree that the op shouldn't speak in generalizations
| around this.
| LazyMans wrote:
| Many years ago I was sitting at my computer smoking after work
| like I normally did, and I asked myself, "What would I be doing
| if I wasn't smoking right now" and I couldn't answer it. I
| tapered off pretty easily and began to fill my time with other
| hobbies.
|
| I was never the type of smoker which was "active". I would
| smoke socially and began to hate that I could never remember
| people's names or conversations. It made me fairly quiet and
| anti-social compared to without.
|
| Now I really can't enjoy marijuana, even when buying low THC
| high CBD bud and vaping it, it's still very easy for me to
| overshoot and get into a state I hate. Marijuana turns me into
| a complete idiot and creates a sort of cerebral haze I can't
| stand.
|
| I really dislike the lack of education surrounding marijuana.
| People, especially young people, seem to disregard the impact
| of excessive consumption. You can argue with me all day it's
| safer than alcohol or tobacco, and I agree if we're talking
| equivalent amounts, but I'm not saying you should drink daily
| or multiple times a day for years.
|
| Everybody is different, my experience isn't necessarily
| everyone else's. For those that do fall into the trap of
| spending too much money, time, and failing to understand how
| weed might be holding them back, better education, regulation,
| and support should net society a bunch of happy well informed
| people living their best lives.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| I am in the same boat... there is a serious lack of
| education. It's like the pendulum has swung completely the
| other way from drug abstinence, and now there is tons of
| disinfo claiming weed is harmless and non-addictive when
| that's not the true story.
|
| I'm still in favor of legalization, but cannabis needs some
| of the regulations we apply to tobacco. Producers shouldn't
| be able to make packaging that looks like a bag of skittles
| or a candy bar. There needs to be warnings on the packaging,
| informed consent when purchasing it, possibly even hotlines
| or pamphlets given out to help young people avoid addiction.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Because children will think smoking weed is like eating a
| candy bar?
|
| I don't know of any place that allows selling to minors or
| even allowing them in the store. What good is changing
| wrappers when kids don't shop in those places?
|
| Cannabis has stronger laws compared to tobacco already.
| Plenty of medical and church related pamphlets exist. What
| do you think is missing?
|
| The truth is you grew up and turned into your parents.. it
| happens to many who have kids.
| bowsamic wrote:
| The problem is that the weed community actively silences
| any mention that there might be any danger involved. I've
| had multi hour exchanges where I've sent peer review
| studies showing it is dangerous and been constantly shut
| down as a federal agent or FUDder
| chaostheory wrote:
| > it's still very easy for me to overshoot and get into a
| state I hate. Marijuana turns me into a complete idiot and
| creates a sort of cerebral haze I can't stand
|
| I can only enjoy THC as a sleep aid for the reasons you've
| highlighted above. For me, it feels like mj is underclocking
| my brain. I am aware of it and I hate being slow. It's a
| terrible feeling. I enjoy alcohol much more even though mj is
| safer overall.
|
| The real danger of marijuana is that for a small portion of
| the population it can induce schizophrenia, but it only
| affects a very small segment of the population since I
| believe you have to be in your early 20s or younger and be
| genetically prone to it
| eikenberry wrote:
| Interesting. For me the roles are reversed. Alcohol makes
| me feel dumb, like I can't think as fast or clearly. THC
| has a very different effect. I don't feel slow, I mostly
| feel calm and clear. Sort of in the ballpark of meditating.
| I've done some of my best writing on weed. I've written
| some great code high. I prefer low doses (10mg) of a nice
| hybrid edibles with a decent amount of CBD (1:1 or 2:1) for
| this.
|
| And yeah, the schizophrenia risk would make me think twice
| about it if that ran in my family. Though I'm now at an age
| where that wouldn't matter (schizophrenia almost always
| manifest by your 30s which I cleared a while back).
| geekbird wrote:
| When I was in college I tried weed. It was not a recreation
| for me, it just put me to sleep, a couple hits and I was
| out on the couch. So I never got into it.
|
| Fast forward a few decades. I now have chronic insomnia due
| to things like on-call and anxiety. My brain will not shut
| down enough for sleep. I had tried Ambien, melatonin, blah,
| blah. Nothing really worked. I went to a party, they had
| green brownies. I was on the verge of a migraine, so I had
| a couple. Out on the couch in half an hour. I woke up
| without the migraine.
|
| So now I use THC/CBD to deal with migraines and insomnia. I
| can get a good night's sleep if I take a nice, measured
| dose gummy just before bed. I wake up slightly before my
| alarm, alert and refreshed. This is a big change from
| before. If I feel a migraine coming on I put stuff on hold,
| take a big dose of CBD and some THC and sleep it off. I
| wake up without the post-migraine stupids that Imitrex
| causes.
|
| Used responsibly, in moderation, it can have a life-
| changing benefit - just like other drugs. If it's abused...
| well, alcohol abuse will kill you too.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| >For me, it feels like mj is underclocking my brain. I am
| aware of it and I hate being slow. It's a terrible feeling.
|
| That's funny. I like it because it underclocks my brain.
| It's not as needed these days now that I have meds for
| ADHD, but before I was diagnosed my brain felt like I was
| constantly thinking too fast. While I enjoy that I make
| connections quickly and that I retrain and recall
| information quickly, it's a depressing burden when it's out
| of control. So before the meds weed was the only thing that
| kept me feeling calm, focused and in control
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| Indica or sativa? Most people with complaints as you describe
| are smoking indica, sativa is more appropriate for social
| situations, but can still make you get stuck in your head.
| Most people I know who use sativa find it helps their
| creativity.
| LazyMans wrote:
| If one more person tries to tell me it's strain... Both,
| any mixture, any strain. Edibles, vaping, smoking, all of
| it.
|
| Some of the more pleasant times are when I mix up ABV
| (already vaped weed) into edibles. Those I can get weak
| enough and with only the more stony compounds remaining
| where it can be pleasant, but it still turns me into a
| drooling idiot with absolutely horrific munchies.
| darth_aardvark wrote:
| > If one more person tries to tell me it's strain
|
| It's like telling an alcoholic to try switching from
| vodka to tequila, because vodka makes you angry and
| depressed but tequila makes you a fun drunk. THC is THC,
| and any difference is psychosomatic.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| THC is THC, but there are other compounds in the plant
| that appear important in the texture of the experience.
| Many people report the same, and following the delta-8
| legalization wave they are apparently fractionally
| distilling the plant extract and separating out many of
| the active components.
| darth_aardvark wrote:
| https://bedrocan.com/international-research-shows-no-
| genetic...
|
| > The research shows that genetically it is impossible to
| prove whether a cannabis plant is an Indica or Sativa.
| There is no difference in the genes.
|
| > The overall chemical profile, like the genetics, shows
| no apparent difference between the labels.
| Werewolf255 wrote:
| I mean, this is like saying that sweet onions aren't
| sweet. Yes, it's a regular onion, but growing conditions,
| fertilizers, and in-situ conditions mean that it is, in
| fact, a sweeter onion. Genetics would show that it's not
| different, but it has an obvious difference which is
| measurable through non-genetic means.
| civilitty wrote:
| The GP is talking about the "overall chemical profile"
| that depend on the strain and growing conditions. There
| are over a hundred cannabinoids identified in cannabis
| that have a variety of effects in humans (not to mention
| the terpenes/terpenoids), including several that are
| produced when THC oxidizes so the "overall chemical
| profile" depends on the age of the plant matter in
| question as well as how it was processed and stored.
|
| Whether the Indica/Sativa _marketing_ labels correlate
| with that chemical profile or not is besides the point.
| We know that different batches of the same strain can
| have different concentrations and ratios of all the of
| the relevant compounds because most legalized states
| require testing every batch. I don 't know of any high
| quality research that studies how the subjective
| experience correlates with different doses and ratios but
| given that at least one of the most common compounds in
| cannabis is FDA approved to treat epilepsy (Epidiolex)
| and all the anecdotal evidence, it's really not a stretch
| to see how different strains produce different highs in
| different people.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Drinking beer vs vodka is a big jump. Fruity drinks with
| vodka can leave you trashed because of the high.
|
| If you think all weed produces the same effects then you
| first need to understand it's not all about thc.
|
| First lesson Terpes: https://www.amazon.ca/Primary-
| Terpenes-Cannabis-Marijuana-In...
|
| Next lessons: thc vs thca vs cbd
| s5300 wrote:
| Sounds like something people should be free to choose
| ativzzz wrote:
| The article is opposite of your point- that modern cannabis
| products are much more potent than ever before and that young
| people who consume them regularly are prone to severe
| psychiatric repercussions beyond just "being a stoner"
| drost wrote:
| I'm struggling with this right now. Using during the day is
| still an uncommon occurrence, but it's happening more and more.
|
| The real issue I'm having with it is that I'm using pretty much
| every night. I come from the gym, take a shower, and grab the
| vape pen and sit on the couch. It just makes me so lazy.
|
| I stopped cooking and just eat pizza and ice cream nearly every
| night. Thankfully my weight hasn't taken a hit. But it creates
| this cycle of not cooking, so I don't buy groceries, so I can't
| cook, so I just order in.
| myvoiceismypass wrote:
| I mean, you are going to the gym, and you feel lazy? That's a
| healthier practice than most people I know. Consider it a
| reward? :)
| drost wrote:
| By gym, I mean Jiu Jitsu. But that's really just physical
| entertainment that consumes 1-3 hours an evening. If I'm
| back home by 7, what do I do with the time between then and
| bedtime? I don't know if not smoke weed.
| lacker wrote:
| Yeah exactly. Like a lazy night isn't the worst thing in the
| world... it isn't even all that bad. It's not like you're
| breaking into cars for meth money or drunkenly assaulting
| people. But still, do you really want every night of your
| life to be vape pen, Netflix, order pizza?
|
| I don't really know the best way to kick the habit or to
| reduce it. It seems like different things work for different
| people. Maybe it would help to pick one week to go no-
| cannabis and see if you can do it. Good luck with whatever
| strategy you decide to go with....
| iamdbtoo wrote:
| What's your expience with cannabis that makes you think
| every weed smoker only watches tv and eats pizza?
| deberon wrote:
| They were responding to a weed smoker who claimed to do
| exactly that.
| adampk wrote:
| honestly sounds like you're having a great time lol
| drost wrote:
| It's not a bad time. But I'm doing nothing. I spend each
| night channel surfing between YouTube, AppleTV, Hulu, and
| Netflix. It would be so boring if I were doing it sober.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| I have a similar lifestyle.
|
| I am starting to realize it's not laziness that's holding
| me back. It's full-blown burnout, stress, and anxiety. I
| have realized that I am actively avoiding doing anything
| to make my life better. Upon further inspection, I was
| doing this before I touched cannabis (about 1.5 years
| ago). If anything, cannabis just dulls my feelings down
| enough that I can keep my head above water while going to
| my dead-end and toxic job that I've been at for almost 6
| years.
|
| I know what I need to do and I cannot bring myself to do
| it. I am still trying to figure out why. Again, this
| existed prior to my cannabis usage too.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I would recommend abstaining entirely for 2-4 weeks. See how
| you feel. See how easy it is to do. That you should give the
| perspective you need to evaluate whether it's something you
| want in your life or not.
| pnemonic wrote:
| I can relate to this. My solution was smoke if and ONLY if I
| have already made dinner. Friday and Saturday night are the
| sole exceptions.
| pas wrote:
| it seems the problem is not weed or pizza or lack of cooking,
| but an overall lack of higher level goals. in this regard
| there's no real difference between gym + cooking and pizza +
| vaping. of course if you do have those goals and you are
| making progress, then sticking to cooking seems order for
| order's sake.
| Shindi wrote:
| Just wanted to plug r/leaves . It's a great community that
| helps people figure out their reasons and quit.
|
| Sometimes that means quitting for one week, feeling good and
| going back. But it has helped me quit for good and so much
| happier in life.
| drost wrote:
| Just subscribed. Thank you
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Even _if_ marijuana is 100% responsible for your situation,
| there 's no need to create a moral panic and project it onto
| others, like the parent poster & NYT article is doing.
| dpbriggs wrote:
| What is the purpose of this comment? OP is describing an
| issue they're having with the drug. I imagine it's not an
| uncommon story.
|
| That italic "if" reeks of a certain sort of sensitivity.
| darth_aardvark wrote:
| Take a break before it becomes worse. Get a kSafe and lock
| all your stuff up for a week or two to shake your brain out.
|
| I spent my whole 20s severely addicted to it without even
| realizing, and when I had to stop I felt like I was going
| crazy. Couldn't sleep, couldn't think, couldn't eat. It's
| really better to nip it in the bud.
| nisegami wrote:
| I know this wasn't your intention, but this is the most
| compelling argument to try it that I've ever heard.
| lacker wrote:
| If you are ever going to try any illegal drug in your life, a
| vape pen with cannabis is probably the way to do it. It's
| pretty safe and the effect is really not crazy, it's sort of
| on the order of magnitude of alcohol. And soon it probably
| won't even be an "illegal drug" any more - where I live in
| California it's legal enough that you can simply walk into a
| store and buy some.
| akhmatova wrote:
| You nailed it -- that's exactly what makes habitual use of the
| substance so insidious.
|
| Like, why deal with life (which involves risk and rejection,
| and ick, _work_ ) when you can just blast trippy movies through
| your head all day? (Fun though these movies can be, for a
| while).
| alexk307 wrote:
| Have you ever used cannabis as a medicine or daily for a long
| period of time? Do you think we all just watch movies and act
| like morons all day? Why do you care if other people do or
| don't want to deal with your version of life?
| akhmatova wrote:
| _Why do you care ...?_
|
| I don't. It's just an observation. That doesn't mean I
| care.
| gunfighthacksaw wrote:
| Apologies to mods for low effort reply to low effort post
| but you obviously care enough to have posted and
| responded.
| dhzhzjsbevs wrote:
| Yes. These days I blast educational YouTube tech talks
| through my brain instead.
|
| Can't exactly tell whether it was better before or now.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Yeah, tbh I know it's not particularly healthy, but before
| I was just going to the bar every damn night to stave away
| boredom.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Wait until you find out how many people blast Netflix through
| their head for hours a day while stone sober...
| [deleted]
| tresqotheq wrote:
| >And you just won't get as much out of your life as you could
| get, won't achieve as much relationship success, professional
| success, or personal fulfillment.
|
| So, like being addicted to an Internet connected, social media
| infested smartphone?
| solitus wrote:
| Was a stoner from age 15 to 25 (first joint at 12-13), I
| started smoking less and less at 25 and have recently just
| totally stopped in my early 30s (I might take a puff here and
| there once in while socially, but even then). Most of my
| friends were also stoners, some still are. I cannot stress this
| enough, if you get high EVERY day or EVERY other day from 15 to
| 25 it really does something to your motivation in life.
|
| I still struggle with motivational problems (ADHDish issues),
| but I think I've been lucky. I have friends that will probably
| never achieve anything meaningful in life and that is despite
| having had access to the best education available (private
| schools), parents that were MORE than okay, welp being
| privileged you know... Now some of them cannot stand normalcy
| (i.e.: working).
|
| There is a world of difference between starting weed when
| you're 25 and smoking a little bit VS getting HIGH almost
| everyday from 13-15 onwards.
|
| When we were young we convinced ourselves that weed was not
| dangerous at all...fools.
|
| I'm about to be a dad, I'll make sure my kids know what's up.
| [deleted]
| cupofpython wrote:
| Weed is a tool. it makes you high. that's about it as far as
| generalizations go.
|
| if weed makes someone feel fulfilled, then they can farm a lot
| more feelings of fulfillment by using it than the old fashioned
| way of actually accomplishing things. I think trying to shame
| people away from it is silly. People who use it will very
| quickly realize it isnt bad, and then they dismiss everything
| they heard about it.
|
| There is a monkey paw warning in that it wears off. It wears
| off in short and long terms; it is less effective the more you
| use it over time. So be aware that the spectrum for its effects
| is along the lines of "kind of cool for a little bit" to
| "everything you love slowly being ripped from your hands". the
| latter extreme probably being pretty rare and more applicable
| to heroin.
|
| Otherwise you could make the same 'danger' argument about video
| games, porn, social media, reading books, painting, co-
| dependent relationships, etc. Anything that people use to dump
| their attention / time into rather than deal with anything
| uncomfortable in their life. The vessels people use are a
| matter of preference, and tangential to the underlying problem.
|
| There is always an issue with trying to use 1 tool to fix every
| problem. obsession. Weed usage requires nuance and an
| understanding of what it is you are trying to accomplish with
| it. same as any other drug, same as any other tool.
|
| Honestly, if someone wants to do nothing with their life than
| smoke weed.. who cares? I certainly dont. They might be one of
| the last people I offer any sort of charity to, but that's
| about me not them.
| murat124 wrote:
| The thing with cannabis (with THC) is that it makes doing
| nothing OK so you may realize after some time of daily use that
| you have accepted doing nothing as a legit activity, contrarily
| when not high you'd either do something to utilize that time or
| may feel bad that you have nothing to do (bored). Cannabis has
| not much of physical addiction properties which is great yet
| one day you may find 10 years have got behind you and you have
| done not much. Perhaps no one told you to stop consuming it
| daily or you have just drifted upon losing the handles on your
| life.
|
| If you want to be a daily user, or already are, do try to still
| feel the need to do something when there's nothing to do and
| consume it responsibly. You probably will be fine health-wise
| but remember that doing-nothing-is-ok is not ok especially when
| it's become routine.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| > one day you may find 10 years have got behind you
|
| Is it a bad sign that I heard that in David Gilmour's and
| Richard Wright's voices?
| ctoth wrote:
| I was literally reading with a screen reader and my brain
| stopped listening to the speech after this sentence to play
| that clip of audio. I even got the music.
| barbazoo wrote:
| I can't really relate to this. There is a spectrum of how
| high you get. Maybe we should distinguish between getting
| super stoned, just sitting on the couch watching TV and
| smoking half a joint, going for a walk in nature and listen
| to music or cook or bake.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| With psychedelics some refer to a "museum dose" -- that
| amount you can use that would allow a person to visit an
| art museum and enjoy the experience. There are similarities
| with cannabis and other drugs (including alcohol of
| course).
|
| That said, sometimes a little dab is enough to throw things
| off -- fun story: I was practicing the Filipino Martial
| Arts and my teacher had a hit off a blunt some fellows
| practicing kinda-wushu in the same park were passing
| around. His ability to count out our drills went to hell,
| but in generally all other ways he was fine. It was very
| humorous at the time.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| What about people who use cannabis to work, e.g. people with
| ADHD or PTSD?
| tacheiordache wrote:
| I smoke very little, not enough to get high. This helps me
| practice musical instruments and do other tedious stuff. I
| never ever do nothing when on it, maybe the small quantity
| has the opposite effect, at least for me.
| naravara wrote:
| I can't help but wonder if normalizing regular use of
| increasingly potent weed correlating with dramatic increases in
| anxiety disorders among young people are related.
|
| Yeah there's the general state of the world, economic precarity
| among families, the effects of social media, the education
| system and society in general deprioritizing developing
| resilience and coping skills as part of children's upbringings,
| etc. I'm sure they all contribute, but I have a hard time
| believing the weed is helping.
|
| In most cultural practices that revolve around psychoactive
| substances it's typical to embed them in sort of a ritual
| context. Alcohol is pretty obvious, but even things like tea
| ceremonies or ritual practices around use of hallucinogens
| match. The modern "clinical" approach of just focusing on
| consuming the substance without any social or cultural thing
| around it is probably the wrong way to go about things. We do
| this with alcohol, for example, where we have some socially
| understood norms about healthy and unhealthy ways of using it,
| in particular not drinking alone as a habit.
| globular-toast wrote:
| This is exactly what happened to me. Luckily it was only a few
| months and I identified it quickly enough and stopped using it.
|
| But having said that, I know a lot of people who have lives I
| consider dull but never use cannabis. So it might be nothing to
| do with the drug at all. After all, I was still able to quit
| easily. It wasn't like a heroin addiction or something.
| slg wrote:
| Why is this topic always brought up regarding weed, but nothing
| else? Should we make video games illegal because they can cause
| some people to live a lethargic and less productive life?
| collegeburner wrote:
| Parents have been complaining for literally decades that
| videogames make kids lazy or that "tv rots your brain". And I
| have seen videogame overuse fuck up people's academics and
| careers.
|
| Weed bros get real touchy when anybody suggests something bad
| about it. Inb4 "alcohol is worse". I'm still for legalization
| but people need to stop getting so defensive.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| All people want is for weed to be legal. These arguments
| about wasted lives are used to justify keeping it illegal.
| [deleted]
| anonym29 wrote:
| I'm 100% pro-legalisation, not because I believe cannabis
| is harmless (I got psychologically hooked the exact way
| lacker describes), but because:
|
| 1. Putting people in prison for using it causes more harm
| than the actual usage of it does.
|
| 2. The threat of state force being used to strip people
| of their freedoms is not an effective deterrent. The war
| on drugs is an objective failure.
|
| 3. The war on drugs was nonsensical to begin with. You
| are legally free to drink bleach. You can legally drink
| yourself to death on alcohol. You can legally consume
| enough caffeine to give yourself a heart attack and die
| on the spot. You can legally smoke 100 packs of highly
| addictive and harmful cigarettes a day. But you can't
| legally consume cannabis, which remains a schedule 1
| drug?
|
| Legalisation is of utmost importance not because cannabis
| is good and we ought to encourage consumption, but
| because the alternative (criminalisation) is irrational,
| morally reprehensible, and a costly waste of taxpayer
| resources.
|
| There is no good that comes from criminalisation, only
| more harm, more waste, and more people being stripped of
| basic human rights for no justifiable reason.
| massysett wrote:
| There are gradations between putting people in prison and
| full legalization. Speeding in a school zone is illegal
| but it generally won't land me in prison. I don't favor
| imprisoning drug users but that doesn't mean we need a
| free-for-all with weed stores.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Criminalising the sale just turns what could otherwise be
| taxed and regulated product (tested for mycotoxins,
| pesticides, solvents, heavy metals, etc; ++tax revenue)
| into an unregulated (and thus less safe) and untaxed
| product sold exclusively in illicit markets.
|
| Again, it's not about wanting to encourage the sale of
| it, it's that the alternative (criminalisation) causes
| more harm than good.
|
| To your point, I'm all for having a surgeon general's
| warning on cannabis products, restricting the sale to age
| 25+ (when the prefrontal cortex is much closer to
| finishing development), and other measures that may
| reduce harm, rather than increasing it.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Users of weed do more to keep it illegal by their off-
| putting rhetoric than any Refer Madness propaganda does.
| I've been in favor of legalization for decades but really
| dislike discussing it with users because of their often
| lack of self-awareness and tendency to be just as
| dishonest as those against it.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| What? Like, films such as Reefer Madness were created at
| the height of the anti-marijuana propaganda drive fueled
| by strongly racist rhetoric to stamp out minorities. That
| drive and rhetoric dictated US policy for over 50 years,
| resulted in increasing penalties against marijuana users
| and leads up to the current day where it's still
| classified as Schedule I drug.
|
| Your framing of the situation is just remarkably wrong
| considering the entire legal history of marijuana in the
| US.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Your comment kinda demonstrates his point though. He made
| a comparison, and you pointed out that what he compared
| weed consumption to is crazy. And you said absolutely
| nothing about weed consumption itself which is required
| to understand the validity of the comparison. And not
| providing that part is exactly demonstrating the lack of
| self-awareness.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| His comparison was between your average smoker arguing
| for legality vs an entire institution that was setup to
| criminalize and demonize them for decades, then calling
| them equally a problem. What exactly here would change
| the validity of the comparison?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| "Pot smokers are aggravating" is, frankly, a very stupid
| reason for anybody to support criminalization.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| aparticulate wrote:
| Touchiness is a hangover from the unjust war on drugs.
| Also, why alcohol is worse is so frequently cited. It will
| probably go away as stigma rapidly fades
| com2kid wrote:
| > And I have seen videogame overuse fuck up people's
| academics and careers.
|
| Circa 2005, a non-trivial percent of students sat in the
| back of lecture halls playing WoW during classes.
|
| Games have gotten terrifyingly more addictive since then,
| though you don't hear so much about games ruining lives
| anymore in the news. Maybe it just isn't newsworthy
| anymore?
| teakettle42 wrote:
| Video games don't make you lethargic, less productive, and
| significantly less intelligent for _days_ after playing them.
| coding123 wrote:
| In a round-about-way they do - video games are so fun you
| can end up playing them for days until you get bored.
| jayd16 wrote:
| For _days_? Neither does weed.
| teakettle42 wrote:
| Yes, it does.
|
| Weed has non-acute negative effects on cognition for 7
| hours to 3 weeks after use, dropping off most
| significantly after 72 hours of abstinence.
|
| https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-
| abst...
| ubercore wrote:
| You're really making that study do a lot of work it
| wasn't intended to. Their main conclusion is that the
| effect size on cognitive function was very small, and
| basically disappears after 72 hours.
| [deleted]
| hericium wrote:
| What the hell did you smoke?
| matwood wrote:
| I disagree. I was fully addicted to Dark Age of Camelot
| (DAoC) back in the day. A perfect set of circumstances led
| to me have bit of time to start playing, and it quickly
| turned into 8+ hours/day. Anytime I wasn't playing, I was
| thinking or reading about playing. It ruined some important
| relationships, and definitely stunted my career (I stayed
| at an easy job far too long), and impacted me physically
| (stopped working out, ate like crap, etc...).
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I don't see much support for criminalization of drugs around
| here.
|
| But yeah, we should educate people so they notice if this
| happen due to view games, or Facebook too.
| actfrench wrote:
| The conversation about whether or not we should make
| something illegal is a whole other category. We know that
| alcohol is bad for the brain and has a myriad of health
| effects and destroys lives, but was prohibition the best
| solution to end addiction - the jury is definitely out on
| that one! And don't get me started on the opioid crisis.
| However, I do think information is power. People often see
| marijuana is the harmless, kind drug that gets over-
| criticized. It's important to realize that the impact of
| the drug is not harmless and that it's also changing as
| it's become legalized and people are able to make it more
| potent with higher levels of THC, the impact on human
| health - and also the environment. It's also not being
| sustainably farmed the way it was before.
| bko wrote:
| No one said it should be illegal. It's just dangerous.
| hickimsedenolan wrote:
| I don't think video games fuck up your lungs and kill you in
| the long term, at least in capita.
| jerf wrote:
| It is brought up with other things. Perhaps you are extra
| sensitive about the weed topic for your own personal reasons.
| "Video games" is a particularly bad counter example, there's
| a lot of chatter around video game addictiveness and what it
| can do to vulnerable minds. There's always been some low-key
| discussion of it but the increasing prevalence of "loot
| boxes" and their corresponding mechanics have not just
| increased the volume of the hand-wringing but actually risen
| up to the level of being banned in certain countries. It's
| early days on that and I expect to see more regulation of
| video games over time. As a parent, I can and do directly
| control my children's access to video games. (My children for
| various reasons I'm not sharing on the internet are extra
| sensitive to the issues.)
|
| For example: "The Immoral Design of Diablo Immortal" -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o17lBUZgjTs
| slg wrote:
| You are debating a different aspect of video games. The
| complaint against loot boxes is not that they prevent video
| game players from reaching their true productive potential.
| They don't do that. The problem with loot boxes is that
| they are exploitative.
| wincy wrote:
| Before loot boxes existed you had Diablo 2, which instead
| of your money you were trading your time to get the best
| items. I wasted thousands of hours of my prime years
| trying to gamble my way to the "perfect build". World of
| Warcraft was the same way, only writ large and perfected
| with raids. I've spent literal years of my life playing
| Blizzard games and hate myself for wasting so much time.
| jerf wrote:
| I'm not "debating" anything. I'm pointing out that people
| _have_ been complaining about video games for a while,
| and that the loot boxes in particular have amped that
| debate up. But they did not create it. Video games have
| been accused of rotting brains (the favored rhetorical
| formulation of this accusation for whatever reason) for
| my entire life. I 'm pointing to the existing debates as
| evidence of this.
| slg wrote:
| "Weed is bad" is not what I am arguing against and
| therefore a generic "video games are bad" complaint is
| not equivalent. The question is whether we should care
| that weed makes you a less productive member of society.
| Loot boxes have no impact on a gamers level of production
| so it is an irrelevant argument.
|
| Also isn't the "video games rotting people's brain"
| complaint always laughed at in circles like HN? Is that
| really the parallel you want to make? Plus people
| generally only say that in relation to kids. I'm not
| advocating for kids (or anyone) to use pot. I am saying
| the personal productivity angle is a weak line of
| argument and is usually masking some other objection to
| pot since the same argument is not used in other
| discussions in which it is equally applicable.
| [deleted]
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| That's a gambling addiction you're mentioning here,
| something I feel is a LOT more insidious than smoking a
| joint on occasion
| dfxm12 wrote:
| In their never ending goal to control kids' lives, a certain
| segment of parents know they've lost the war against D&D,
| comic books, rock n roll, TV, rap music, video games, etc.
| This is just the topic du jour.
| habitue wrote:
| Video games are a similar threat to living a fulfilling life,
| absolutely.
|
| Definitely not the exact same kind of threat, since video
| games don't make you dumber like pot, but there is a real
| risk that a person substitutes accomplishing things in real
| life in favor of accomplishing things in a video game.
|
| Your comment is kind of whataboutism. You're not really
| refuting what he's saying, just bringing up a separate topic
| slg wrote:
| I wasn't trying to refute the idea. The idea is true. The
| question is whether we should worry about it.
|
| Using weed is a recreation activity. Most recreation
| activities will have a negative impact on your life if they
| are not done in moderation. I don't think that is
| necessarily a problem and the fact that this generally
| isn't discussed in other contexts might indicate that
| people are subconsciously using this an excuse when their
| true objections to weed originate somewhere else.
| retrac wrote:
| I can't speak for other people, but for me, it's not
| recreational. Not anymore. I need cannabis to simply feel
| normal. I feel high only when I'm sober, because sobriety
| is the atypical state. I can't sleep without it. I can't
| leave the house in the morning without it. After about 24
| hours abstinence, I get debilitating headaches and start
| to vomit, presumably from the withdrawal. It's not fun.
| There's not much fun left in it at all, really. It's just
| an addiction.
|
| Weed may be unique in allowing such a constant level of
| intoxication with relatively mild side-effects. I think
| that's how it gets people. Such addiction is not that
| uncommon and I've watched legalization in Canada with a
| mix of appreciation (I still do believe it should be
| legally available) and apprehension (I think we're about
| to see a small but significant % of an entire generation
| end up in the same place I've been for the last ~10
| years.)
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| > After about 24 hours abstinence, I get debilitating
| headaches and start to vomit, presumably from the
| withdrawal.
|
| Cannabinoid Hyperemesis Syndrome
| coding123 wrote:
| it's just the body missing something it thinks it needs,
| I get the same thing with coffee
| slg wrote:
| I don't know what your usage is like, but that is an
| outlier response that most likely originates from non-
| moderate use. Video game addiction is also something that
| causes severe negative impacts. The existence of these
| outlier responses does not mean either video games or
| weed are dangerous in moderation.
| hosh wrote:
| I think while productivity shouldn't be the exclusive way we
| measure someone's life (and its implicit frame that someone's
| worth is measured by that person's material contribution to
| society), those dialogues hide a more interesting question --
| how _purposeful_ someone 's life is, and whether regular,
| recreational use of marijuana supports or discourages living
| purposefully and meaningfully.
|
| My experiences of marijuna is that it can loosen the societal
| conditioning on "productivity", and reveal the lack of
| purpose and meaning in one's life. It's liberating to realize
| the a lot of the conditioning don't matter as much as it
| seems.
|
| It's at this point, that it's tempting to continue and just
| have fun. Here though, is the space in which one can discover
| one's purpose from within, with societal and external
| expectations muted. It's paradoxically that here, connecting
| with that purpose, brings life and joy outside of the mental
| states that marijuana can bring. When one makes conscious
| contact with that inner, unconditioned purpose, marijuna is
| something that is fun that one can occasionally enjoy, but
| not as a substitute for purposefully living.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| It gets brought up in posts about weed because the posts,
| like this one, are about weed. Similar things are stated
| about other things in posts about those other things. Do you
| believe discussion of the relative pros and cons of weed use
| should be forbidden?
| jcelerier wrote:
| > Should we make video games illegal
|
| Didn't China do almost exactly that?
| s1mon wrote:
| Not exactly. They restricted online gaming. "China Limits
| Online Videogames to Three Hours a Week for Young People -
| New regulation will ban minors from playing videogames
| entirely between Monday and Thursday"
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-sets-new-rules-for-
| youth-...
| usrn wrote:
| Online video games are kind of their own thing. I wish
| normal/local multiplayer games didn't get lumped in.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| It actually can make you feel sick if you smoke too much, there
| is a rare syndrome called Cannabis Hyperemesis Syndrome, and
| it's agonizing.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| The article specifically mentions Cannabis Hyperemesis
| Syndrome so I assume this is the "nasty side effect like this
| article describes." that they are referring to.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| > And you just won't get as much out of your life as you could
| get, won't achieve as much relationship success, professional
| success, or personal fulfillment.
|
| Chicken vs. the Egg.
|
| Perhaps many are drawn to cannabis due to the inability to
| achieve such goals due to whatever individual or societal
| issues/reasons one may have.
| Maursault wrote:
| Weed is harmless, _except for teens_. Weed has _always_ hurt
| teens. The hurt is subtle. It tends to steal their future and
| their ability to support themselves or contribute to society. But
| this really isn 't about weed. It's about bad parents.
| SwanRonson wrote:
| How are "good parents" expected to find this low-odor, marker-
| sized object without deeply invading their child's privacy or
| ruining their bond and becoming "bad parents"?
|
| Gone are the days of finding a smelly bong in the back of the
| closet, this could be in their pocket or purse at all times.
|
| The side effects of weed could be found in every sober teen.
| Hungrier, more emotional, more distant from parents, etc. Are
| good parents supposed to treat their children like criminals
| until they no longer show signs of puberty?
| Maursault wrote:
| For one, Good parents don't submit their children to
| unreasonable searches. Also, if the parenting is good, the
| search is unnecessary, because there is nothing illicit to
| find. I'm not a parent, and I realize it is very hard to do
| well, but my understanding is it has to do with the right
| attention at the right times, mostly just being there, but
| also not shying away from correcting discipline. Parents that
| become their childrens' best friends and never correctly
| discipline them for fear of their hatred only produces
| narcissistic children. I think the family unit must be relied
| upon, separation and sacrifice of duties, with the mother the
| nurturer and the father the "whip," (i do not advocate for
| corporal punishment, whip is metaphore) usually kids turn out
| ok. When roles are mixed or when no one wants to do the hard
| work of being the bad cop is when kids learn they can get
| away with murder.
|
| _the finest day i ever had was when i learned to cry on
| demand_
| status200 wrote:
| I love cannabis, but i acknowledge that almost everyone who does
| dabs / resin / shatter / etc eventually turns into a zombie. As
| with everything, as soon as you concentrate the active
| ingredient(s), you can get way off course.
| ellopoppit wrote:
| Is there any doubt that alcohol, or sugar for that matter, makes
| far more people (teens especially) sick than cannabis?
|
| In fact, cannabis is an excellent treatment for alcohol
| hangovers.
| vkou wrote:
| "Vodka cocktails are bad for you" doesn't logically refute
| "Weed can be bad for you."
|
| Both can be (and almost certainly are) true at the same time.
| AndrewVos wrote:
| There is no doubt. This article is BS. One hundred percent bad
| faith.
|
| Maybe they should think to mention the millions of people on
| cannabis prescriptions who have had massive benefits.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Did they say alcohol and sugar aren't health risks? Are you
| calling them liars for pointing out the struggles of
| teenagers who are taking huge amounts of mind-altering
| substances? Did they say Cannabis doesn't have health
| benefits for people who take it for prescribed reasons? Did
| the article itself advocate or give voice to advocates of
| "re-prohibition" outright?
| bitwize wrote:
| Now that weed has been largely destigmatized if not universally
| decriminalized, it's time for parents to step up and teach their
| kids responsible use, including non-use before a certain age. We
| do this with other recreational drugs like alcohol. Perhaps we
| can gradually introduce them to higher and higher potencies, like
| French parents do with wine.
| kromem wrote:
| It's a serious problem that we're getting rid of the CBD in
| products.
|
| CBD is a natural antipsychotic.
|
| There's some very promising research on it alone as a treatment
| for schizophrenia even:
| https://academic.oup.com/schizbullopen/article/3/1/sgab053/6...
|
| And a large body of research on how it reduces the potential
| psychotic side effects of THC.
|
| But go into a dispensary and ask for a 1:1 or even a 1:2 THC:CBD
| product, and they will look at you like you have two heads.
|
| The plant naturally contains an antagonistic for the psychotic
| effects, we're selecting to eliminate that antagonistic from the
| products, and then have a surprised Pikachu face when an
| increasing number of users have psychotic effects.
|
| It's almost impossible to get cannabis products with a nice mix
| of CBD alongside THC unless explicitly asking for it and possibly
| needing to hit up multiple dispensaries to find it. That's really
| not ideal.
|
| And all too often ratio products dilute the THC per volume
| according to the ratio, which further discourages recreational
| users from selecting for the ratio products. If the THC only
| product has 10mg per serving, the 1:1 and 1:2 should also have
| 10mg THC per serving, with an additional 10 or 20mg CBD alongside
| it. Not 5mg or 3.3mg THC.
|
| This is a merchandising issue.
| monetus wrote:
| To back up your point with another health anecdote - epilepsy
| forces me to take an acute preventative for seizures that cause
| a delirium, drugs like qulipta or a cbd heavy strain/blend of
| marijuana. The cbd is a necessary ingredient, it isn't medical
| for me otherwise.
| efields wrote:
| Louder, louder for the people in the back.
|
| The market controlling genetics in plant propagation has
| consistently lead to favoring bigger, more uniform, more shelf-
| stable, and this has always lead to less nutrition, over-
| consumption, and more waste.
|
| The same thing is happening with BOTH drug cannabis and
| industrial (CBD) hemp. The low threshold of .3% THC for hemp to
| be legal for any grower in the US is an arbitrary ass number,
| so by breeding to it who knows what's getting lost in the
| genetic dustbin.
|
| Growing your own is liberating, if not still legally dubious in
| the US. Repealing the prohibition against growing would likely
| get more people inquiring about their cannabis, just like when
| you go to a farmers market and enjoy substantially better
| quality vegetables. You can learn what went into it.
|
| Of course the dispensary business is on the verge of becoming
| an entrenched lobby, and would likely rebuff any effort to
| legalize growing.
| oblib wrote:
| Teens have always done stupid shit. They'll drink till they puke
| at every party they go to until they grow up and get tired of it,
| or they become adult alcoholics.
|
| When I was a teen I watched my friends having contest to see who
| could take the biggest bong hits and "press" them the longest
| without coughing. I always declined to participate in those
| contests. I was well known to be a "lightweight", but that
| moniker never bothered me.
|
| Those who called me that were the same kids who'd chug whiskey
| they stole from their parents and then hug toilets while puking
| until they passed out on the bathroom floor.
|
| Edibles are akin to taking pills. You don't know how hard they're
| going to hit you until they do, and if it's too hard you're stuck
| with it until it wears off.
|
| Vapes are akin to big bong hits. When I was a teen I saw teens
| puke after taking a few too many giant bong hits. They were
| having bong hit competitions.
|
| It's very easy to regulate the effects of weed by taking a tiny
| puff and putting it down for a few minutes.
|
| So, it's not that weed is more potent. It's easy to sip a bit of
| whiskey too, but you can get just as puking drunk guzzling beer
| as slamming shots.
| officeplant wrote:
| "teens are getting sick vaping the strongest shit we've ever
| created"
|
| Well no shit. I'm an adult that has smoked weed for 15 years now
| and even in my late 30's I can't handle more than a few hits of
| concentrated wax/oils.
|
| How is this any different from 15 year olds sneaking their
| parents everclear to make some strong punch?
|
| Is it the drugs fault or the fact that we suck at keeping
| substances out of the hands of minors.
| alex504 wrote:
| Its the drugs fault.
|
| If the drug causes negative effects on a large subset of the
| people who use them, that is a problem with the drug.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| Despite this, high-concentration cannabis is a huge public health
| risk. The deleterious effects from smoking comes from inhaling
| the smoldering organic compounds in dried plant material. That
| health impact scales with the volume of smoke inhaled.
|
| If you increase the concentration of THC, users can achieve
| equivalent levels of intoxication with substantially less smoke
| inhalation. 30 years ago, THC concentrations were 5% or less.
| Today, legal cannabis tends to average around 25%. That's an 80%
| reduction in smoke-related damage.
| hestefisk wrote:
| Let alone the mental health risk from permanent THC-induced
| psychosis.
| hestefisk wrote:
| Downvote? Seriously, hn? It's a fact that hashish intake can
| cause psychosis.
| mikestew wrote:
| Saying it twice doesn't make it true. Just one URI, that's
| all anyone asks.
| hestefisk wrote:
| https://www.thelancet.com/article/S2215-0366(19)30048-3/f
| ull...
|
| One of many. I have a close family member who developed
| cannabis-induced psychotic disorder in teenage years. It
| is a well known phenomenon. I agree that it can be a
| chicken-and-egg question in some cases but it doesn't
| change the fact that cannabis is generally bad for your
| mind.
| hestefisk wrote:
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15504263.201
| 9.1...
|
| "Results: Consistent evidence, both from observational
| and experimental studies, has confirmed the important
| role of cannabis use in the initiation and persistence of
| psychotic disorders. The size of the effect is related to
| the extent of cannabis use, with greater risk for early
| cannabis use and use of high-potency varieties and
| synthetic cannabinoids. Accumulating evidence suggests
| that frequent cannabis use also increases the risk for
| mania as well as for suicide."
| mikestew wrote:
| Thanks, I'll add that, as well as your other links, to
| the reading list for the evening.
| hestefisk wrote:
| Another one in the Lancet: https://www.sciencedirect.com/
| science/article/pii/S221503661... "The ready availability
| of high potency cannabis in south London might have
| resulted in a greater proportion of first onset psychosis
| cases being attributed to cannabis use than in previous
| studies."
| ryandvm wrote:
| You have any legitimate studies on this or are you just
| regurgitating 70 year old "reefer madness" propaganda?
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| Why is this one drug so special that it cannot possibly
| cause madness? I don't understand the downs either
| GordonS wrote:
| It is absolutely _not_ a fact. There are a slew of papers
| on both sides of the argument, so it 's definitely not
| settled.
|
| People with mental health issues are more likely to use
| cannabis because it helps them with those issues. And
| people with mental health issues are of course at higher
| risk of developing psychosis, so it's a self-fulfilling
| prophecy.
| alexk307 wrote:
| Enlighten us with the facts if that's the case!
| omniglottal wrote:
| Provide _any_ instance of this occurring ever. Go ahead.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Did you read the article?
| akhmatova wrote:
| _Despite this, high-concentration cannabis is a huge public
| health risk._
|
| From the math in the rest of your post, I think you meant to
| say that " _Low_ -concentration cannabis is a significant
| health risk". (I don't think the term "huge" applies in any
| case to a substance whose intake, after all, is optional).
| alexk307 wrote:
| I've heard this many times on the internet but I cannot find
| one source that verifies that folks were smoking 5% THC
| cannabis in 1980 in the United States. It's simply not
| true...and trying to measure it now in a 30 year old sample
| will show that most of it has oxidized into other cannabinoids.
| jtode wrote:
| [an 80% reduction in smoke-related damage] [is a huge public
| health risk]
|
| Interesting.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Keep in mind there are a dozen different ways to consume
| cannabis that do not involve combustion of plant material.
|
| Teens are getting zooted because they are using concentrate
| pens, which are essentially e-cigarrette's but replace PG/VG
| with distillate.
| steve76 wrote:
| snarfy wrote:
| Can't read the article. I'm guessing it's about this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabinoid_hyperemesis_syndro...
| tacheiordache wrote:
| I smoke casually just a tiny bit. I liken it to taking a shot.
| That's enough to get a slight boost of creativity. I hate getting
| drunk or high but just toking works wonders for me. Been doing
| this for 20 years and it hasn't impacted my life negatively at
| all. I actually stopped drinking altogether because of some
| eczema but I'll never stop indulging in pot this lifetime. I use
| a $20 bag for about a couple of months
| jaqalopes wrote:
| Quantity, it's said, has a quality all its own.
|
| Anyone who wants to look at their personal unproblematic weed use
| and conclude that it's totally, universally impossible for
| today's weed concentrates to be a problem for anyone really isn't
| thinking straight. There _is_ a difference between concentrates
| and flower. Once you 're habitually using something that's 50%+
| THC, "normal" weed just doesn't cut it anymore. You need to start
| upping the ante just to feel high at all. People call this
| "tolerance" but IMO that word obscures what's actually happening.
| Namely, you can only put so many feel-good chemicals in the human
| brain before you hit diminishing returns. Trying to keep the good
| times rolling may cause you to blow past your body's ability to
| metabolize the chemicals away without consequences. I've been a
| stoner for 12+ years and have had to learn my limits the hard
| way. I really feel for the girl in this article, and anyone else
| who's struggling with their weed use in a culture that repeatedly
| insists there is "no unsafe dose."
| eesmith wrote:
| The full title is "Teens Are Getting Sick From Products With High
| THC Levels", and NOT "weed" as the HN title uses. Eg:
|
| > This was not your average weed. The oil and waxes she bought
| from dealers were typically about 90 percent THC, the
| psychoactive component in marijuana.
|
| referred to later as "THC concentrates".
|
| BTW, the authorities have been saying for decades that level of
| THC in weed is much higher than it used to be, I believe as a way
| to convince older adults that their personal experience with
| cannabis is not trustworthy.
|
| For example, "Many people who have voted for legalization thought
| they were talking about the marijuana of the 1960s to 1980s when
| the THC content was less than 2%." from
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6312155/ .
|
| But as
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/03/was-m...
| points out, "incomplete government data encourages a pervasive
| pot myth." ... "it's difficult if not impossible to classify
| average potency in a way that can be tracked meaningfully over
| time. So while there's almost certainly more super-strong pot
| available today--if only by the fact that it's now legal to buy
| in multiple states--it doesn't mean that all marijuana is ultra-
| potent today, which is how the narrative about potency is often
| framed."
|
| > But there is little evidence to suggest these specific levels
| are somehow safer.
|
| Likely because of the illegality of carrying out those tests.
|
| > A recent study found that people who used marijuana had a
| greater likelihood of suicidal ideation, plan and attempt than
| those who did not use the drug at all.
|
| As the underlying paper at
| https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
| points out, "Future research is needed to examine the increase in
| suicidality and to determine whether it is cannabis use or
| overlapping risk factors that increase risks for both.".
|
| Eg, people experiencing suicidal ideation could be self-
| medicating with marijuana, and w/o that option would self-
| medicate with alcohol and have a higher risk of suicide.
| parkingrift wrote:
| People should be highly skeptical of distillates, vape
| cartridges, waxes, and edibles. This is a new frontier and
| largely unregulated. You never truly know what you're getting.
| Even at "regulated" dispensaries the QC is garbage.
|
| Dry herb vaporizing is the optimal way to consume. You can pick
| the strain and set the exact temperature with far less ambiguity.
| You can even control the supply by growing it yourself.
|
| It is changing the federal schedule is the best course of action.
| We are not benefitting by flying blind, and consumption won't go
| down simply because people would prefer it.
| Reason077 wrote:
| I dunno. I remember the stuff making me feel very sick when I
| tried it in my teens in the 1990s. Kind of put me off it for
| life, even though I've got plenty of friends who are still into
| it.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| Any reason to believe it wasn't K2? Or...moldy weed?
| Reason077 wrote:
| Well I didn't just try it once!
| mythrwy wrote:
| Only teens it doesn't affect adults? Or is this just "think of
| the kids"?
| actfrench wrote:
| When I lived in NYC almost every single one of my friends
| regularly smoked pot and it seemed pretty harmless to me except
| I'd occasionally have a friend who never really addressed their
| anxiety because pot was their go-to so that anxiety just got
| worse and worse. Years later, I joined Al-Anon because my partner
| was struggling with alcoholism and I was really surprised to see
| so many people there because a partner or child was addicted to
| pot and the very real emotional pain and problems they were
| facing from this. Their loved ones were basically checked out of
| their life and relationships.
| redisman wrote:
| It's a terrible anxiety medicine as probably the most common
| side effect is anxiety.
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| I've come to see cannabis in the way that it _buries_
| anxiety, and this buried anxiety then goes sour. Festers.
|
| There's also a sense that something about cannabis turns
| people's imagination against themselves. Long-term use. At
| first it seems to free up the imagination and enhance the
| sense of meaningful experiences and emotion. Then that slowly
| turns to fog and people tend towards these little micro-jumps
| to conclusions, conclusions which are trite and shallow. I
| speak from experience btw. (My own!) I found the world to be
| stupid. People were stupid. It was just my lack of
| imagination and impeded generation of solutions to life,
| which I imagined to apply to everything but me. It's funny
| and super lame and quite sad imo.
|
| Seen it happen time and time again.
| trixie_ wrote:
| Same here and with many friends. It goes from time slowing
| down, to a few years of fun times, then anxiety, at which
| point many people stop doing it. Though I've seen people
| keep going and develop full scale paranoia, thinking that
| everything is a conspiracy.
| mtnGoat wrote:
| i agree, its a terrible treatment for anxiety. ive had
| friends ask me for strain recommendations to help treat
| anxiety, my advice is always "none of them".
| mpfundstein wrote:
| I agree. We observe this in the Netherlands for quite a while
| already. The solution? Mix it with CBD flower. Unfortunatenly
| most coffee shops don't agree and still sell only high THC
| flowers with 0% cbd...
| elif wrote:
| I wish journalists would learn to use obvious disambiguating
| terms like 'hash' and 'dabs' instead of needlessly conjuring up
| baseless fear about perfectly healthy flower use by lumping
| cannabinoid drugs into one umbrella term.
| standardUser wrote:
| The way most Americans consume weed is basically a guaranteed
| overdose for anyone without a high tolerance. The regular "weed"
| we buy from dealers has been getting stronger for years because
| the consumers spending most of the money on weed demand it be
| strong.
|
| Once retail stores opened where I lived, I started buying weed
| with 10-15% THC instead of the standard 20-30%. It can feel like
| the difference between having a couple beers or 5 shots of
| tequila. Most of us can enjoy a few beers almost anytime, but
| rarely want to get shit-faced drunk. The black market, driven by
| heavy users, has been forcing us all to get far too high on weed
| because dosing a hit of weed at 25% THC is almost impossible. And
| we think this is normal.
|
| Most of the weed in retail stores is still too strong for me, but
| at least now I have options, which for me has been the biggest
| boon of legalization. I can finally enjoy weed again! But this
| same story plays out across many drugs, with consumers facing far
| more danger and uncertainty than is necessary because of our
| spectacularly ineffective drug laws.
| redisman wrote:
| I'm sorry but why don't you just put less weed in if it's too
| strong?
| standardUser wrote:
| Like I said, dosing becomes difficult because the drug is so
| potent. Even if you know you only want the smallest hit, it
| doesn't always work that way in practice (especially if
| you're not a frequent smoker and aren't familiar with using
| pipes and vapes, etc).
|
| Plus, a lot of casual smokers think they're supposed to smoke
| the way they see in movies, or how they did in high school,
| which is usually not a single, carefully measure toke and
| then wait 20 minutes.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| You'd think that would work, but it doesn't and I don't know
| why. Maybe because you still get the same % in the hit but it
| just doesn't last as long? For people that use vaporizers
| like mine, you also need to have a certain amount for the
| vaporizer to be effective otherwise you get nothing out of it
| which leads to inserting _even more_ weed and suddenly you
| have more in your system than you meant to. The higher
| percentage stuff is an instant panic attack for me whereas
| the low percentage allows me to actually enjoy it. I have an
| extreme sensitivity to cannabis though, so this doesn 't
| apply to everyone, but I'm also far from alone on this. I
| personally don't care if they sell high % concentrations as
| long as they make the lower concentrations available too for
| people like me. Unfortunately finding the low-dose stuff
| seems to be very difficult. I ended up growing my own low-
| dose strain though and it's been excellent so far.
| asdff wrote:
| You can actually throw a wad of sterile cotton into your
| vape to fill the chamber. Pax even sells a half pack lid
| for their packs.
|
| For your case you can also cut your high dose stuff with a
| cbd only strain right in your grinder to whatever ratio you
| want. The ground up weed would be no different at all from
| a low dose strain and certainly a lot more accessible.
| flictonic wrote:
| > For people that use vaporizers like mine, you also need
| to have a certain amount for the vaporizer to be effective
| otherwise you get nothing out of it
|
| You probably know this but just in case, some vapes are
| better for microdosing than others and will work with just
| a pinch.
|
| > Unfortunately finding the low-dose stuff seems to be very
| difficult.
|
| What I've been doing is buying CBD flower online (usually
| <$75 per/ounce) and mixing it with a small amount of THC
| flower. I can pack my vape full, still get big clouds, but
| have a tame effect, the only downside is that the flavor
| isn't quite as good.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| Check out Simply Crafted for getting this to your door
| safely at a great price.
| [deleted]
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| The amount of flower doesn't seem to make much difference
| for me; it still produces the anxiety and panicky
| feeling, but doesn't last as long. For example I'll have
| 15 minutes of panic attacks instead of an hour. That's a
| great trick though, so I'll try it out with the CBD
| flower and see how it goes, thanks!
| bergenty wrote:
| It's kind of hard. As some one that used to smoke a lot but
| only smokes maybe once a year at this point, I have to put
| impossibly small amounts of pot in my bowl and it still gets
| me very high.
| mtnGoat wrote:
| FWIW, the idea that weed is getting "stronger" isn't
| necessarily true. There have been growers and strains that
| could get 25%+ since the 70s. Its just that those techniques
| are more widely known/shared and these higher numbers are
| easier to get to for more growers because of this shared
| knowledge.
| Hellion wrote:
| This article makes some incredible leaps. Marijuana addiction is
| an under-recognized problem, but the implication that a kid
| killed himself because he had a weed addiction is incredibly
| misleading.
|
| > After several stays at mental hospitals, the doctors determined
| that Johnny had a severe case of THC abuse, Ms. Stack said. He
| was prescribed an anti-psychotic medication, which helped -- but
| then he stopped taking it. In 2019, Johnny died after jumping
| from a six-story building. He was 19. A few days before his
| death, Ms. Stack said, Johnny had apologized to her, saying that
| weed had ruined his mind and his life, adding, "I'm sorry, and I
| love you."
| escanda wrote:
| I might be biased since I have seen this before, but, the mother
| who lost her son should be ashamed of not doing enough and then
| pretend that the general public shall clap. Most of the time in
| suicide people those around them don't do shit. As harsh as it
| gets.
| trixie_ wrote:
| A lot of people have the exact same story. First few times, time
| slows down. Next few years it's a good time, then after that you
| have a good chance of developing an anxiety disorder from weed.
| At that point people usually stop doing it because it doesn't get
| any better.
|
| If only some research was done on the long term affects before
| legalizing it. Instead now we're doing a population wide
| experiment.
| mandmandam wrote:
| There's quite a lot of subtle, and not so subtle slant in this
| article. If you didn't know the background and the other side of
| the story, you 'd walk away with a very warped impression of the
| scale and scope of this issue.
|
| > Christina Caron is a reporter for the Well section at The New
| York Times, covering mental health and the intersection of
| culture and health care.
|
| Weird - because I've gone back over years of her articles and she
| doesn't talk about the biggest issues affecting mental health.
| It's all fluff. Yet she found the time to do three veiled hit-
| pieces on cannabis so far this year.
|
| If you ever wondered why the impressionable don't talk about
| systemic racism, violence, propaganda, exploitation and poverty
| as being major mental health issues, instead blaming cannabis (a
| great boon to mental health, overall!), or blaming themselves,
| it's because writers like this are given such a major platform.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| While I don't think anything in the article seems outright
| wrong - cannabis for teenagers and its increasing potency are
| things to be concerned about for parents and caretakers - I
| think it's fair to point out that the world is on fire and
| social media is also terrible for ~~young~~ all mental health.
| rgifford wrote:
| Can't help but think of Mac Miller's Tiny Desk performance of his
| song 2009 [1]. Mac started using weed heavily in his teens to
| cope with the stress of touring. 2009 was a big year for him: two
| major mixtapes, the cusp of fame and his intro to harder drugs.
| The song is celebration and acceptance and resignation, and
| totally unapologetic. He died of an OD two months after this
| performance at the age of 26.
|
| 1. https://youtu.be/QrR_gm6RqCo?t=699
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/wb5lB
| akpa1 wrote:
| There's also this excellent browser extension:
| https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
|
| Despite the name, it also works for Firefox.
| linuxftw wrote:
| Or, if you don't want to install sketchy plugins in your
| browser, as soon as the page loads in a new tab, switch to it
| and press ctrl+p, you'll can create a PDF and read the page
| without the block or the ads.
| yuy910616 wrote:
| wow - takes some dexterity. I thought it didn't work
| because I was refreshing the page and hitting ctrl + p. But
| it really is you have to wait for it to load and switch to
| that tab and do ctrl + p. Cool trick!
| slenk wrote:
| Code is open source, you can decide if it's sketchy or not.
|
| It's not BTW, its been around for a bit
| purplerabbit wrote:
| TIL
| makeworld wrote:
| Personally I prefer https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-
| paywalls-firefox-clea...
|
| It's more updated, and it removes Google Analytics and other
| shady stuff from the original extension.
| sushid wrote:
| Is there a Chrome version of this?
| sva_ wrote:
| Yes. Sadly you have to install it via dev mode, and
| chrome seems to deactivate the extension whenever there
| is an update (as it needs more permissions for more
| sites), and I haven't found a way around it yet.
|
| https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-
| clean
|
| Hint: you can use it in Firefox Nightly on Android by
| defining your own extension collection:
|
| https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-
| extensio...
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| Try using ungoogled-chromium or Vivaldi. Both allow any
| crx extension. The only hassle for the former is having
| to download every new browser update manually.
| sva_ wrote:
| I use Vivaldi, actually. It does update the extension,
| but disables it as described, when new sites are added.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| I'll raise everyone that and mention that my favorite built-
| in feature for avoid it:
|
| ctrl+shift+p (firefox) or ctrl+shift+n (chrome/edge)
|
| ctrl+c link
|
| ctrl+v in private window
|
| hax
|
| You can also create a bunch of containers in firefox labelled
| 'Paywall Bypass 1, Paywall Bypass 2" etc
| jb1991 wrote:
| The article link still does not work for me in a private
| window in FF. But what is "hax" ? Whatever that means,
| that's the only thing I'm not doing.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| I dunno I don't read a lot of the NYT, always seems to
| rub me the wrong way, but it works to bypass paywalls on
| most other sites. The container tab trick should work if
| their paywall bypass mitigations are stronger than the
| private window trick
| [deleted]
| Honest_Carrot wrote:
| I can confirm this. I love this extension and am using
| Firefox.
| ssalka wrote:
| I've also had good experience with Behind The Overlay
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/behind-the-
| overlay...
| cpeterso wrote:
| A little self-promotion: for sites that limit the number of
| articles you can read, I recommend the Firefox add-on ("Open
| Page in Private Window") I developed that will open the
| current page in a new private/incognito tab.
|
| The use case: you load a news article, hit a "you've used up
| all your free articles this month" overlay, so you click the
| "Open Page in Private Window" toolbar button to view the
| article in a private tab.
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-page-
| in-...
| cosmiccatnap wrote:
| The NYTimes has a bad habit of hyperbole like this but in a world
| where 200 proof alcohol exists and prescription fentanyl is
| easily accessible it feels pretty well...boomer for lack of a
| better phrase.
|
| Weed isn't an issue and it never has been.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I know a cannabis entrepreneur who makes high-quality gummies
| standardized to 150 mg THC which is, I think, too much. As a
| cannabis experienced user I find these make me feel hosed for six
| hours or so. It may or may not be a good time, but I'm certainly
| not going to do more than lay on my ass.
|
| If I take half of one of those (75 mg) it is a strong
| intoxication, pretty consistently a good time, and I can go for a
| walk, do the dishes and otherwise be able to do most things.
|
| The local health department had complained about very strong
| products being for sale and I've talked with this guy a few times
| about it. He'd say that people can always cut them in half but
| I'd say that a lot of people don't know what they are doing, will
| take the whole thing, and probably have a bad time when they
| could have had a good time and become repeat customers.
|
| Despite the unit economics being worse he's recently come out
| with a 75 mg product.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I get a strong effect from 5mg already. I can't imagine what
| 150mg would do to me
| colordrops wrote:
| THC tolerance makes a big difference. 5-10 is all I need now.
| When I used to smoke a lot I could take much larger doses
| with similar effects.
| redisman wrote:
| I believe it metabolizes differently. Even as an daily
| smoker/vaper at one point who never ate edibles, 10mg would
| get me very high.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I live in Colorado and they limit edibles to 10mg per
| piece/100mg per pack max. 150mg for a single gummy is a bit
| nuts though.
|
| As someone who smokes a _good amount_ of weed, my
| recommendation to people it to always stick to just flower. I
| 've tried it all, vaping, vaporizers (different than vaping,
| you're superheating flower rather than using an extract),
| edibles, and regular pot.
|
| From my personal experience, edibles last the longest but don't
| hit right away, takes about an hour for it to pass through to
| your liver and from there I noticed that it was a "low grade"
| high for a few hours.
|
| Vaping is the polar opposite, the stuff hits you almost
| instantly. You also have to be careful and not puff to much, a
| monster hit will send you to another universe. I've also
| noticed that because of the high THC content (sometimes
| 90-100%) and virtually no CBD content, this is the easiest way
| to have a bad high. This also gives you the shortest high,
| seems to wear off quickest.
|
| Finally you have good ol' flower. This is what I usually smoke
| because it slots somewhere between vaping and edibles in terms
| of how high you get. I almost always smoke flower because I get
| consistent results. If I vape I might have a panic attack, if I
| have an edible it might last too long, but with plain weed I
| know how long I'm going to be up, what the experience will be,
| etc.
|
| Also this is complete pseudoscience but there's something that
| makes me feel better about smoking flower vs the other stuff.
| Vaping and all that other stuff is cool, but there's a certain
| safety in knowing the only modification a flower had was
| trimming the leaves away, no lab equipment, extractions,
| chemicals or any of that.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I don't know how people could regularly consume edibles that
| strong. Absolutely ridiculous.
|
| Edibles in low doses are great, but flower seems to be the
| most natural and safe way to consume it in a predictably
| moderate dose (vs. a huge dose from edibles, or wax, etc.)
|
| As an aside, I tried vapes again recently and they did almost
| nothing for me. Compared to a year ago when I tried one and
| got put on my ass quickly.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| Easy -- amateurs are burning out many of the lower
| temperature compounds during their extraction or cooking
| procedure.
|
| Your 10mg is not the same as my 10mg.
| acchow wrote:
| I also have found vapes to have other adverse effects - some
| psychosis, and worsened short-term memory loss (compared to
| flower). Flower hits different.
| corrral wrote:
| A lot of the concentrates used in edibles and vapes cut
| nearly everything but the THC, which may be part of the
| observed difference between those and flower. "Full spectrum"
| extracts that keep many of the other chemicals seem to hit
| _very_ different for me--I don 't get the stereotypical
| giggly-high effect on pure THC or THC+CBD, mostly just sleepy
| (which is often exactly what I want, so that's fine), but I
| do on full spectrum gummies. Could be psychosomatic, but the
| effect feels pretty different to me.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Also this is complete pseudoscience but there's something
| that makes me feel better about smoking flower vs the other
| stuff. Vaping and all that other stuff is cool, but there's a
| certain safety in knowing the only modification a flower had
| was trimming the leaves away, no lab equipment, extractions,
| chemicals or any of that.
|
| Honestly, that is common sense not pseudoscience. There has
| been way too much shady shit going on especially in vaping
| [1].
|
| [1] https://www.vox.com/2019/10/28/20936888/vaping-lung-
| illness-...
| jb1991 wrote:
| > no lab equipment, extractions, chemicals or any of that
|
| Except for widespread pesticides when growing flower in many
| places, often without much regulation.
| yonaguska wrote:
| I always recommend vaping dry herb with vaporizers over
| smoking because you avoid most of the negative health effects
| of combustion. Obviously inhaling hot air is probably not
| good for your throat and tongue.
|
| I don't think it's very good for the lungs either.
|
| And getting it directly from the flower means that I can cut
| it with high CBD flower depending on what experience I'm
| looking for.
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| Smoking flower has a bigger entourage effect than hitting a
| vape because whatever in the vape is a concentrated,
| processed version of the flower which has lost some
| cannabinoid or terpene content in the process.
| throwaway365435 wrote:
| Personally I find edibles ideal. I love the 1-2 hour come up.
| I love knowing exactly how much I'm taking and what I'm
| getting myself into.
|
| With any form of smoking or vaping I have no idea how high
| I'm going to get. I hate the smoke, the coughing, the throat
| burning and just about everything else. I also hate going
| from sober to high in less that a minute, the come up is my
| favorite part.
|
| I'm not trying to discount your opinion at all. I just found
| it fascinating to have such polar opposite experiences with
| the same thing. I also assumed smoking was so popular just
| because it was the only convenient way to use when it was
| illegal. Now that it's legal I just assumed most have formed
| a habit they haven't really considered or realized.
|
| EDIT: Also just for context, my range varies from 3mg - 15mg
| depending on if I'm going for a little buzz or completely
| stoned
| D13Fd wrote:
| I feel like you are omitting the fact that smoking causes
| cancer.
| tacheiordache wrote:
| One smokes flower on a much lower magnitude. If you were to
| compare it to smoking cigarettes it would be 1 cigarette a
| day vs one pack a day.
|
| Second, stress causes cancer. If one is using just a little
| bit to wean off the stress that'd work out. Also pollution
| causes cancer. I don't see anyone banning cars, not even
| having some regulations for large diesel trucks which leave
| a humongous trail of smoke...
| jb1991 wrote:
| > Second, stress causes cancer.
|
| That is quite a statement.
| [deleted]
| newsclues wrote:
| Meanwhile in Canada the stores only sell 10mg and I need to eat
| a dozen to feel a buzz.
|
| Just give consumers choice
| ecpottinger wrote:
| I have a friend who stopped eating gummies for the same reason.
| They found the chocolate bars easier to break into the smaller
| pieces since they are grooved that way.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| Gummies, being more sugar than fat, metabolize so much
| faster...not always desirable (who wants overpowering effects
| for 30min if they're eating an edible?).
| aluminum96 wrote:
| 150mg THC for a single edible is absolutely bonkers. If you
| only use ~1x per month, around 3mg is a common threshold dose,
| and 5mg can be rather strong. So that's 50x the naive
| threshhold dose!
| llIIllIIllIIl wrote:
| This is messed up. Non-tolerant person dose for "stoned" would
| be like 20-30mg. I take 5 or 10 on a day i need to chill and i
| can feel it already.
| corrral wrote:
| Sweet Christ. 150mg? Goddamn, I hope my tolerance never gets
| that bad. That'd be so expensive. 1/10 that at once is enough
| to get me fucked up enough that, if I had taken more, I'd just
| be asleep.
| tacheiordache wrote:
| 150mg is crazy. Im a causal smoker who tokes just a little
| bit and that not every day. 150mg would send me to ER
| notamy wrote:
| > Sweet Christ. 150mg? Goddamn, I hope my tolerance never
| gets that bad.
|
| It's a nightmare. I'm a medical cannabis patient, so
| unfortunately, proper symptom management means my usage ends
| up being quite high. My tolerance got so high that I barely
| felt anything from 350mg+ in edibles or RSO[0]. Taking a
| tolerance break from that is an awful experience; my
| psychiatrist actually had to prescribe benzos (Klonopin) to
| make it doable.
|
| [0] https://www.leafly.com/news/cannabis-101/what-is-rick-
| simpso...
| geekbird wrote:
| Seriously. I accidentally ate 1/4 of a 100mg THC chocolate
| bar, but it was not the right hybrid to _keep_ me asleep, so
| I was in and out for hours. 25 mg is more than twice my
| preferred THC dose.
| genocidicbunny wrote:
| Back before CA legalized marijuana, thus putting in the
| limits on edibles, you could get some super-strong ones if
| you had a medical card. I recall a friend of mine buying
| 1500mg edibles that would put down most experienced smokers
| for two or three days. Said friend was going through one of
| those edibles per day, but those edibles also cost less than
| a 100mg edible does these days.
| ginko wrote:
| > He'd say that people can always cut them in half
|
| People who want a stronger buzz could always just take two..
| [deleted]
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| The issue then becomes getting diabetes before getting high
| due to the crazy amounts of sugar in these edibles.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Is it really more than a can of coke?
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Is this in the US? What state? I've only seen menus in NJ, IL,
| and most edibles are like 5-10mg per piece and seem to top out
| at 25mg per piece, but those tend to be big pieces that look
| like they are meant to be broken apart (like a Hershey bar).
|
| I think setting national standards around this would be just
| one benefit of legalizing recreational use at the federal
| level.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| NY
| yieldcrv wrote:
| mmm yeah I've seen those in Washington Square in NYC
|
| We don't have anything that high in California
|
| also edibles are practically a different drug after being
| processed by the liver, we should study them completely
| separately
|
| we should have high quality studies for specific use cases,
| just like corporate designer drugs that go through the FDA
|
| but we currently have... whatever this is.
| fuzzer37 wrote:
| Last time I went to the dispensary near me in Michigan, the
| budtender started off with the 100mg gummies when I said I
| was looking for edibles.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I know that michigan has a law that allows for private
| transactions between medical smokers and licensed
| "caretakers". These caretakers are basically unregulated, so
| they can have a huge greenhouse operation with just a couple
| patients. People in Chicago drive to michigan to get the
| caretakers "extra" product.
| yonaguska wrote:
| You can get gummies like this in IL, but just not from the
| dispensaries. Plenty of people make the drive from Michigan
| to sell to their friends here.
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