I feel like the canna-positivity needs a bit of balancing with some discussion about the negative aspects. I'm not even going to use the word 'addiction' in this post because then it becomes a semantic debate about what constitutes addiction and whether weed warrants fitting that category. I'd rather just discuss the potential downsides instead of discussing what to call it.
Part of the problem with the negative aspect of weed is there's a psychological component which is highly personal, and there's a tendency to discount someone else's personal experience as being less worthy of consideration than say, the more general harms caused by drugs like heroin or the very specific harms caused by hot stoves. We identify easily with someone else's obvious physical pain & see the harm in heroin because we don't need to rely on reports of their thinking in order to see that the end result of heroin use is almost inevitably bad (loss of money, social fallout, physical effects etc.).
Which isn't to suggest that cannabis is equally detrimental to well-being but just in a different way, but rather it's to suggest that whatever negative impact weed might have is more elusive & harder to relate to than the more obvious & outward harms of hot stoves and heroin.
Cannabis affects the mind & the interaction is unique to each person and where they're at in life, and this is often difficult to convey to other people as a general harmful quality of cannabis; it's regarded as a fault of the person using cannabis rather than something the cannabis does. It's thus tricky to state clearly why cannabis might be harmful, other than maybe to say it has the potential to change the way you think in ways that aren't always fruitful, or that it can be habit-forming in ways we're often blind to whilst in the thick of it.
In discussing the harms and how I've perceived them specific to me, anecdote is required. So here's two ways in which I've noticed a negative impact.
1.) The thought changer
This is something I noticed when I was smoking daily for a decent chunk of time. And what happened is I spent so much time high, that the kinds of thoughts (about the world, about self etc.) that occurred whilst high were so maintained & reinforced by being persistently high, that they eventually bled over into non-high life & found expression there. If I tended to over-analyze social interactions when high, there was a tendency for that to start occurring even when I wasn't high. And because I was high so often, the thought pattern was reinforced and it's as if it had no choice but to persist and find expression at all times; to become my normal way of thinking.
The cessation of such habitual use often means walking away with a changed brain and a reason I'd be very cautious of regular cannabis use younger in life when the mind is very malleable. We don't carry with us snapshots of previous brain-states that we can revert to after extended periods of drug use, when you stop using a drug you have a potentially changed brain and can only more forward from there and attempt some conscious course-correction.
2.) The illusion of change
This is something I've noticed when using cannabis occasionally, like only over the weekend. I tend to get introspective and very positive about life when I'm high, as though I know just what to do to make positive changes in my life. And so I end the weekend feeling wiser, but then fail to make any real change during the week, and in fact if I peeled away the noise it would be as if I was just waiting to get to the next weekend again, so that I might escape into a puffy cloud of introspection and positivity: A loop from which I don't escape. This is another kind of habitual behavior.
I'll break my own semantic rule here and suggest that in my case, I feel a sense of being addicted to the weekend-high brain state; a state in which I'm positively overwhelmed with thoughts I believe to have positive value, but thoughts which seldom make it past the confines of that smoke session. There's a sense of deluding myself but being giddy at the process of delusion.
Obviously these might not seem like problems to you. Or they might not seem even remotely relatable. There's no telling how a drug that interacts with your mind will affect you, and all the shared experience in the world might seem miles apart from your specific case and thus easy to dismiss as 'other people's problems', easy to dismiss as other people having an already broken brain predisposed to being affected. But I think we're more cognitively frail than we imagine: We're often ill-equipped to sufficiently temper even our own anger & frustration and how those thoughts cause us to speak to people, and yet we assume a kind of mental fortitude in the face of regularly using a substance that affects the mind.
Pay attention to your thoughts whilst high.
Pay attention to why it is you need / want to alter your mind with such regularity.
This is not a finger pointing, but a question I also ask of myself. If I've had the thought that my use is too much and I choose to ignore the thought...that behavior seems problematic and I should make an effort to listen to my intuition rather than listen to suggestions that weed isn't harmful.
There's this 'it's natural, it's all good' narrative surrounding cannabis that's nonsense. There's a lot of natural poisons we don't ingest. Your mind and the substances you ingest have an interaction that's positive or negative based on chemical and psychological qualities that have nothing at all to do with whether the substance is 'natural'.
Of course I'll keep on using cannabis. This isn't a binary world in which I need to love or hate something. There are many positive qualities to weed and ways to use it but...finding balance is important, and in seeking such balance it's good to occasionally peek at the other side of the coin.
Part of the problem with the negative aspect of weed is there's a psychological component which is highly personal, and there's a tendency to discount someone else's personal experience as being less worthy of consideration than say, the more general harms caused by drugs like heroin or the very specific harms caused by hot stoves. We identify easily with someone else's obvious physical pain & see the harm in heroin because we don't need to rely on reports of their thinking in order to see that the end result of heroin use is almost inevitably bad (loss of money, social fallout, physical effects etc.).
Which isn't to suggest that cannabis is equally detrimental to well-being but just in a different way, but rather it's to suggest that whatever negative impact weed might have is more elusive & harder to relate to than the more obvious & outward harms of hot stoves and heroin.
Cannabis affects the mind & the interaction is unique to each person and where they're at in life, and this is often difficult to convey to other people as a general harmful quality of cannabis; it's regarded as a fault of the person using cannabis rather than something the cannabis does. It's thus tricky to state clearly why cannabis might be harmful, other than maybe to say it has the potential to change the way you think in ways that aren't always fruitful, or that it can be habit-forming in ways we're often blind to whilst in the thick of it.
In discussing the harms and how I've perceived them specific to me, anecdote is required. So here's two ways in which I've noticed a negative impact.
1.) The thought changer
This is something I noticed when I was smoking daily for a decent chunk of time. And what happened is I spent so much time high, that the kinds of thoughts (about the world, about self etc.) that occurred whilst high were so maintained & reinforced by being persistently high, that they eventually bled over into non-high life & found expression there. If I tended to over-analyze social interactions when high, there was a tendency for that to start occurring even when I wasn't high. And because I was high so often, the thought pattern was reinforced and it's as if it had no choice but to persist and find expression at all times; to become my normal way of thinking.
The cessation of such habitual use often means walking away with a changed brain and a reason I'd be very cautious of regular cannabis use younger in life when the mind is very malleable. We don't carry with us snapshots of previous brain-states that we can revert to after extended periods of drug use, when you stop using a drug you have a potentially changed brain and can only more forward from there and attempt some conscious course-correction.
2.) The illusion of change
This is something I've noticed when using cannabis occasionally, like only over the weekend. I tend to get introspective and very positive about life when I'm high, as though I know just what to do to make positive changes in my life. And so I end the weekend feeling wiser, but then fail to make any real change during the week, and in fact if I peeled away the noise it would be as if I was just waiting to get to the next weekend again, so that I might escape into a puffy cloud of introspection and positivity: A loop from which I don't escape. This is another kind of habitual behavior.
Obviously these might not seem like problems to you. Or they might not seem even remotely relatable. There's no telling how a drug that interacts with your mind will affect you, and all the shared experience in the world might seem miles apart from your specific case and thus easy to dismiss as 'other people's problems', easy to dismiss as other people having an already broken brain predisposed to being affected. But I think we're more cognitively frail than we imagine: We're often ill-equipped to sufficiently temper even our own anger & frustration and how those thoughts cause us to speak to people, and yet we assume a kind of mental fortitude in the face of regularly using a substance that affects the mind.
Pay attention to your thoughts whilst high.
Pay attention to why it is you need / want to alter your mind with such regularity.
This is not a finger pointing, but a question I also ask of myself. If I've had the thought that my use is too much and I choose to ignore the thought...that behavior seems problematic and I should make an effort to listen to my intuition rather than listen to suggestions that weed isn't harmful.
There's this 'it's natural, it's all good' narrative surrounding cannabis that's nonsense. There's a lot of natural poisons we don't ingest. Your mind and the substances you ingest have an interaction that's positive or negative based on chemical and psychological qualities that have nothing at all to do with whether the substance is 'natural'.
Of course I'll keep on using cannabis. This isn't a binary world in which I need to love or hate something. There are many positive qualities to weed and ways to use it but...finding balance is important, and in seeking such balance it's good to occasionally peek at the other side of the coin.
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