[shoefly]

A great article. There is one thing the author got wrong. Pot IS addictive. My brother can't go more than 3 hours w/o smoking it. If he does, he starts to sweat like crazy. He once went an entire weekend without it and he had a very rough time.

[Broken_Hippo]

Pot isn't physically addictive, though. Those things are his brain causing the symptoms.

Seriously. I've smoked heavily for years, with sudden breaks, and at most I get a couple days of off appetite and bad sleep. No big deal.

I've met exactly one person that had withdrawals from pot: In his case, he was self-medicating with it. It wasn't that he got withdrawals from pot, but that mental illness simply reared its head more when he stopped.

[random_upvoter]

TBH I never understood this "it's not physical" subtlety. Last time I checked, the brain was a physical entity with physical processes running around in it.

If it looks like addiction, walks like addiction and quacks like addiction, then it is addiction. And it exists in marijuana users.

[Broken_Hippo]

The difference is in the way the body acts - and the treatment is completely different for the two. I'm not a doctor, so do a bad job of explaining the difference between the two, but the general gist is that with physical addiction, your body needs the drug to function correctly.

People who want to live die from physical detox.

It isn't that psycological addiction doesn't have physical symptoms: Indeed, many psychological problems have them - anxiety and an upset stomach, depression and aches. Not to mention panic attacks. But the treatment isn't the same at all. You don't actually have to wean someone off of something psychologically addictive - that's why folks aren't weaned off of gambling, for example. And they won't die if they don't have it (suicidal is a different issue).

Pot generally has mild withdrawal symptoms. I'm pretty sure a few get in a bad situation with it - just like folks do with anything else - but underlying psychological problems kind of mess that stuff up.

Yeah, the sweating? Could be anxiety as well, for example. And to the layperson, it would seem like withdrawal symptoms instead of the anxiety coming back. Before his diagnosis, my ex would use about anything to get the voices inside his head to shut up. Friend of mine? Had a lot of trouble not smoking, but also was a bit... off. Brain damage from a car accident + a few psychological issues to boot. In all my years, I've never seen this sort of stuff from a reasonably balanced person.