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I don't know why you're so angry at r0s; the potential felony really is the thing most likely to fuck up your life with respect to weed.

A half-ounce a week is a pretty hefty habit. I can barely imagine the constant cognitive impairment, paranoia, and anxiety that are likely to come with that on a daily schedule. You aren't using the drug, you're abusing it.

> My body desperately wants pot right now

No, it doesn't. Your mind does. Your situation is not even remotely comparable to an opiate addict going cold turkey.

> Every drug taken to extreme can seriously hurt your life.

The drug isn't seriously hurting your life. You are. The psychological addiction you are experiencing is yours to walk away from - or get medication for, since there are probably serious compulsive or depressive problems in the mix if the hold is that strong. I wish you the best in conquering it and feeling 1000% better - and you surely will - but I really don't see what you're trying to say here, or what everybody else in the thread supposedly has got wrong. Weed is a remarkably benign drug by any measure, and the author of this piece is far too naive of his subject matter for anyone to be thinking too hard on anything he has to say.

What is the difference between a pharmacologically mediated 'psychological' addiction and a pharmacologically mediated 'physical' addiction? It is all physical. Of course marijuana is not identical to heroin, e.g. in withdrawal symptoms. But withdrawal is not the only way that habits are sustained and this does fail to demonstrate that every addiction to a drug other than heroin is simply 'yours to walk away from' or (as other posts have suggested) equivalent to any repeated benign behavior. Even if a drug like alcohol or cannabis is generally benign and can be used in a disciplined way, that doesn't mean every problem involving a substance other than heroin is trivial.

Physical dependence is not caused by cannabis. This is a well known and scientifically studied (well studied, I might add) fact.

> What is the difference between a pharmacologically mediated 'psychological' addiction and a pharmacologically mediated 'physical' addiction? It is all physical.

That's basically nonsense. A heavy weed smoker can stop smoking immediately, and while he will certainly be in anguish, bored and anxious and miserable without it, there remains no true physical component to his 'withdrawal', if that term could even be credibly used in the context of marijuana.

The heavy opiate user has developed a full-blown physical dependence on the drug, and their body will go into excruciating revolt upon it's sudden absence. Most ex-addicts spend years tapering off on suboxone, methadone, etc for a reason.

The point is, hard drug dependence vs soft drug 'addiction' is utterly apples and oranges, comparing them is meaningless. I am not sure why people insist on blurring the lines between these two very different conditions. Like it or not, Bagdar has far more in common with the guy upthread who was talking about cold sweats from ceasing his overeating, than he does a Subutex fiend in Georgia.

> The heavy opiate user has developed a full-blown physical dependence on the drug, and their body will go into excruciating revolt upon it's sudden absence.

Yes. Sudden withdrawal from some substances (alcohol, barbiturates) can cause death because physical addiction is so destructive.

From my personal experience, it takes about 21 days to get rid of the psychological issues regarding to cannabis addiction. Just hang in there, and you will make it.

I understand that cannabis can cause a _real_ addiction, although many people deny this. I've been there. It's not fun, when all you can think of is getting high.

Yoga, swimming and sauna were the savers for me. Without kundalini yoga I would not have realized that I have the power to empower myself, to make myself feel good, without the pot. I would totally recommend to anyone doing some kind of spiritual exercise, where you get your Chi flowing.

Because this is what cannabis does, at least according to my experiences, it makes your life energy or chi flow down to your physical body, it drains it so to speak on the long run. And you start to crave food to replace it, and this drainage also leads to the bad moods and thought patterns of "I need this in order to do this", when truthfully you can do it without the pot also.

Hang in there, you can do it. I've done it a couple of times, from my experience it takes around 3 weeks to get rid of the habit, after this if you continue and just persist on choosing the alternative way, you can make it back to normal life.

Although probably you are going to be bored a lot, so it's important to find some new activities to fill in those blanks.

Anyway, here is also a good text on what cannabis does to us, how it drains our chi: http://pastebin.com/1zKRXDZR.

You might as well have said "As entertainment, food is no worse or distracting than television."

Uh yeah, food is a very common form of entertainment; restaurants, cook-offs, eating contests... it's only when people go overboard that they begin to have a problem.

I'm tired of being too lazy to leave my apartment all weekend, of the food I eat when I'm stoned, of not being present around my friends, family and co-workers

These are all personal choices you made. If you really wanted to spend time with your friends and family you'd just do it. It sounds like you just can't be bothered but smoking pot gives you a convenient excuse to blow off social obligations. I mean jeeze, you're just so addicted to pot, how could you ever find the time to hang out with your friends?

I know, because I've been trying to quit all year. I've failed twice since February and I'm on my third go of it right now. And I only smoked a half-ounce a week for a year or so

Give me a break. Failing to quit pot is in the same category as failing to quit World of Warcraft, it ultimately comes down to the fact that you really just prefer to smoke.

needing to smoke when I wake up because it's so uncomfortable to be lucid.

I don't think pot is the problem.

Do psychoactive drugs affect behavior, or not? If they do affect behavior, then can we say that everything people under the influence do is simply their own choice? At least we must say that it is their choice under-the-influence, which might have been different.

Some people have an easy time quitting tobacco. Others don't. There are real differences in how the drug works on a person and fits into their life which aren't captured by phrases like 'you just can't be bothered'.

Do psychoactive drugs affect behavior, or not? If they do affect behavior, then can we say that everything people under the influence do is simply their own choice?

Caffeine is also a psychoactive drug, but overworked engineers don't blame coffee for 20 hour work days, instead, their coffee habit is understood as a supplement to their chosen lifestyle. Pot functions the same way for someone who decided to sit on the couch and play xbox all day; the pot didn't intoxicate him into playing video-games instead of going to class, if class was important to him he'd just go, stoned or otherwise.

edit: s/weeks/days

>because it's so uncomfortable to be lucid

That sounds very serious, and I hope you get help, but there's no way that's addiction.

my uncle died of a pot overdose :(

edit: look, I'm entirely sorry about the appeal to ridicule. It's a shitty way to get a point across and I just look like an asshole by doing it.

I get that addiction is no joke, however your problem is not the same problem caused by the drugs in the article, and your failure to quit the pot is entirely of your own pattern of behavior. Find another peer group to associate with.

I guess what I'm frustrated with is the on-going prohibition, which was brought about by the same exact type of alarmist bullshit. So you have problems with your choices in life, that does not mean that everyone else has that issue, or even a significant sample.

Let others have the freedom to make their own decisions, the same sort of freedom that was decided during the first great experiment with Prohibition. We all know what happened there. I think people are starting to realize what's happening now.

...seriously? Because as far as researchers are concerned, the LD50 is something like grams of THC/kg before you can die, and that was the drug being injected.

Nope, it's bullshit, just like badgar's half ounce-a-week descent into ruin. I have to doubt its legitimacy because the post reads like a plant by one invested in treatment facilities and private prisons.

If not, then I truly sympathize, but it is entirely incorrect to link a behavioral addiction with a physical addiction such as the one caused by opiates. They are in no way equivalent.

> Nope, it's bullshit, just like badgar's half ounce-a-week descent into ruin.

Excuse me? First of all, nothing I described was "descent into ruin." I said I'm having a hard time not smoking pot and it's affecting many aspects of my life. You have no idea what you're talking about, how dare you say I'm not struggling? Have you ever considered that people have a hard time quitting drugs? That pot might actually harm someone? No, your mind's made up: it's all a conspiracy by the drug companies!

> I have to doubt its legitimacy because the post reads like a plant by one invested in treatment facilities and private prisons.

Fuck you, you conspiracy-minded, condescending prick. I'm having a hard time over here but you think you're so important that treatment facilities and prisons are planting stories on a tiny technology startup forum.

> If not, then I truly sympathize, but it is entirely incorrect to link a behavioral addiction with a physical addiction such as one caused by opiates. They are in no way equivalent.

You don't sympathize, you're busy paranoid that prisons are astroturfing HN. And I thought paranoia was bad when you smoke on the streets. By the way, this entire subthread is talking about marijuana use and affecting career growth. So this entire point is irrelevant.

I fucking hate this site sometimes.

Me too. Will you guys please stop?

I honor your struggle and hope you are victorious over your addiction.