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by Sahbak 1053 days ago
You can and will die if you quit cold turkey from certain drugs. That is the difference.
3 comments

I don’t think that is the difference, since a fair few drugs we universally agree are addictive don’t do that.
It's not that you will die but your body will react adversely. Like with alcohol if you quit cold turkey you can get tremors and seizures. Even with caffeine you get brain fog and hardcore headaches.

Basically with hard chemical dependence there will be some kind of adverse body reaction. With marijuana that doesn't exist or is so vanishingly small that you don't feel anything.

Which is it? Is it absent or “small”?

I believe it is rather established that cannabis has withdrawal symptoms in the form of sleep and mood impairments. That would qualify cannabis as physiologically addictive, as indeed would be any drug with physical withdrawal symptoms.

Granted, they may be lesser than other drugs, but they are still there.

> With marijuana that doesn't exist or is so vanishingly small that you don't feel anything.

What? For many, many users this is just completely not true. Insomnia, headaches, nausea, irritability are all common symptoms of weed withdrawal.

Ok there are symptoms but my understanding is for many people they're negligible. Also I'd be interested to see the symptoms related to actual chemical dependency on marijuana-specific chemicals, versus generic withdrawal symptoms from denial of expected dopamine release, which you could get by changing how you game, work out, have sex, eat, whatever.
Like alcohol. Heroin, however, will not kill you, but I doubt anyone argues that it is not addictive.
I don't think anyone has ever died because they stopped smoking tobacco. Is tobacco not "physically addictive"? If it's not, this only underscores the point that physically/psychologically addictive distinction is not all that useful. And if it is, that only underscores your explanation isn't a very good explanation of the differences.