Is Marijuana Addiction Real?
My brother has smoked marijuana his whole life. I often don't think much of it - it doesn't even seem very strange to me, it's just the way it is, much like how many people grew up seeing their Dad kick back a few beers in the evening.
However, he recently got married and about 6 months after that, fully with the support and perhaps at the pushing of his wife, he decided to go clean. He decided to drop weed out of his life 100%. I thought this was probably a good idea - at the very least, I knew all that smoke against his lungs is certainly no good, especially after all these decades.
But neither my brother, his wife, nor myself were prepared for what happened next.
The withdrawal hit him like a train. And he became a train wreck. The first day after coming home from work, eating dinner, and then not partaking in his evening ritual of packing up his pipe and getting high - well, he was a little cranky that night, for sure. Even scatterbrained, his wife told me.
But by morning, he was a real pisser. He was no fun to be around. Luckily for us, he went to work as usual.
That evening though, and that night, the real fun started. I don't who was more shocked - him or us, but the guy was definitely going through classic withdrawal symptoms from a drug addiction. He was freezing cold, and then, moments later, he'd be sweating and hot. This reminded me a lot of someone with the flu. But on top of that, he was nervous and anxious. He would snap at people easily. He'd lost his appetite and was going through emotional mood swings. He knew all the while that this was just a result from the weed, but, he had no idea it'd be like, and neither did we.
3 or 4 days later, he was basically back to normal.
Now it's been more than a month, and he's clean, and he doesn't have to deal with any of the aforementioned side effects of quitting. They all went away. But holy cow - what a crazy week that was. It made me realize that people truly can become addicted to marijuana, and that the whole concept of marijuana addiction isn't as far out as I'd thought. It's actually intimately real to me now!
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You're totally right. It's too bad that so many pro-marijuana people don't admit that there are withdrawal symptoms from stopping. Chronic use will likely cause a range of things just like you mentioned.
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