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This is why I quit smoking pot. I realized I had really bad depression and I started searching for a connection between my depression and pot, wondering if I was making it worse by smoking pot. I was horrified to find all the connections and personal stories on forums and blogs. On the above link I must have read out to at least 10 pages of Google results.
A week later I threw away all my pot and I've never smoked it since. I recovered from my depression about a year or so later.
Perhaps your own mental weakness and depression were exacerbated by marijuana use. Think of pot as an amplifier. If you send a crappy signal to an amplifier, well, that doesn't help.
Perhaps your own mental weakness and depression were exacerbated by marijuana use. Think of pot as an amplifier. If you send a crappy signal to an amplifier, well, that doesn't help.
That was my point in the post you quoted, and I wrote a much longer post on the same subject earlier in the topic.
I wouldn't call it a weakness, I'd call it a predisposition. Let's be polite and not discuss it in negative terms. My point is that nobody knows if they have a predisposition to marijuana causing or contributing to depression. If you ever had a history of depression that would be a big red flag.
If you are currently smoking pot and no depression that does not make you home free. You may go for quite a long time and smoke pot with no depression, and then one day some event in your life may trigger a depression. That is what happened to me. My life went south, and finally I succumbed to depression.
That was when I did my research on the Internet. Note this is not scholastic research, it is merely a sampling or sifting of what other people like me have posted about their individual experiences. At least my opinion is that yes, smoking pot can cause or aggravate depression in some people. What really disturbs me is that nobody has any way of telling this may happen until it actually happens.
I'm posting on the subject merely as friendly advice. I just want every to be aware of the possible connection and risk of pot leading to depression. (And there is also the gateway drug theory which I will not address at this time.)
To be blunt I have no agenda on whether you smoke pot or not. You can't do it in my house, you can't be my friend if you use drugs, I'm not interested in hanging out with drug users of any kind even just pot. Partly, I want to keep it out of my life because I don't want the temptation that might cause me to resume using pot. But I have absolutely no problem with other people smoking pot as long as they don't drive after smoking pot.
Trust me on this, I've been there, I've done that, I know everything about the subject, I've enjoyed the highs, I've suffered the worst period of my life when for a year I had major depression. You should at least read what I've written and think a little bit on the message I'm trying to send everybody.
Then either smoke it or not. It's up to you. Other than warning everybody, that is my only agenda.
I have friends who smoke pot and they are usually sending messages online and in person to me about the wonderful things marijuana can do and why I should be smoking pot. "Marijuana is safer than..." I hear everyday ranging from Diet Pepsi, McDonalds, a candy bar, riding in a car or even our cat. Once I was telling a friend because of my job I can't smoke it but he was all set to contact a lawyer and sue my employer for my right to smoke pot. Now I don't have a problem with pot being legalized but that is where marijuana ends with me. Why do so many pot smokers want me to be smoking pot too ????
Is it like alcohol that some people don't like to drink alone ??
They need someone to co-sign their BS so they can feel alright.
Their inner debate is not quite as resolved as their external persona.
I quit smoking pot when I was 23, it was time to grow up, took another 20 yrs to do that but there ya go.
Just to add, the statistics prove that some percentage of pot smokers turn to stronger drugs. Nobody knows who, not until it happens. I hear that some of the strongest abuse drugs, one hit can addict you. That scares the hell out of me.
By the same token, dihydrogen monoxide is the ultimate gateway drug. 100% of hard drug addicts have consumed dihydrogen monoxide, most of the in the recent past
By the same token, dihydrogen monoxide is the ultimate gateway drug. 100% of hard drug addicts have consumed dihydrogen monoxide, most of the in the recent past
By the same token, dihydrogen monoxide is the ultimate gateway drug. 100% of hard drug addicts have consumed dihydrogen monoxide, most of the in the recent past
I am well familiar with the dangers of DHMO. In fact an overdose can cause almost immediate suffocation! -- Heh, LOL, I've teased my friends about the danger of DHMO!
But the ultimate gateway drug is human milk. No kidding. Virtually all addicts started out on human milk as their first addiction.
OP: If your *friends* are insisting that you smoke, drink, commit a crime or pee on command they are not your friends.
This is related to something I've been discussing elsewhere: toxic people. You have to get rid of the toxic people in your life because of their toxic influence on you. Keep them around and they will influence you into behaviors that lead your life in a bad direction.
I believe this is the topic where I described one of my BFFs who I visited one day and discovered he and two neighbors were shooting cocaine (and worse, sharing the same needle). I had previously smoked pot with BFF and sometimes with his neighbors too, but the whole shooting cocaine thing freaked me out. I had never seen people actually inject drugs, not before and not since then. I had seen them snort coke but at the time snorting cocaine was more or less accepted behavior by my peers and by culture, sort of like a champagne type drug enjoyed by the affluent pot heads. But within a short period after the shooting cocaine incident I had weeded these toxic people out of my life. I never regretted getting myself away from them and their influence. My life was more important to me than remaining friends with my BFF so being friends forever turned out to be a sham. There are lines that must not be crossed, and when your friends cross these lines you have a serious choice: be like them and condone the behavior, or remove them from your life and go what you perceive is the right way. (If the parties I referred to above continued their overly permissive drug use I'd be surprised if any of them are alive today. What was the logical next step after they accepted and liked shooting cocaine?)
By the way, this is a real life example of pot being a gateway drug to harder, more dangerous drugs. Hang around with pot smokers and eventually you'll meet more extreme pot users. This topic is discussing, "Come on, try some pot, you'll like it." When you are smoking pot with those friends, how long will it take until you meet some more extreme ones who think shooting cocaine or some other more serious drug use: "Come on, try a hit of this cocaine in your vein, you'll like it!"
What many don't understand is that in using marijuana you have taken your first step onto a slope, and you never know how slippery that slope is. You'll meet casual pot smokers like yourself but you'll also meet people farther down the slope--how will they influence you? Peer pressure is a strong thing. You are risking sliding farther down the slope, and who knows when it gets slippery? Who knows where the slope increases and becomes too steep to turn back?
Or like me you can get yourself back to level ground and stay away from drugs and the people who use them. The safest thing to do for yourself is to isolate yourself and seek people who do not have these habits, who don't use drugs. Not using drugs never hurt anybody. It's the smart way to go if you want to have a good life.
And besides, and I know from experience, smoking pot is just a big PITA. Quitting it means not needing any more "product," not needing any papers, no bong, no vape e-cig. You don't need all the things to assure that you can have your next fix when you want it because you are free, you're not a user. You never run out and you never need to maintain your supply line. And another nice part is the money you'll save without the habit.
Peer pressure from so-called friends turned me on to tobacco cigarettes and alcohol but no one ever tried it with pot. If they had tried it, they would've failed. For some reason I've always been afraid of recreational drugs. Some guys tried to get me to use "red devils" and "yellow jackets" (some sorts of narcotic pills) but they failed. Shucks, even when the dentist prescribed something he called "twilight sleep" after yanking four wisdom teeth in one sitting, I threw the prescription away.
Shame I didn't have the same attitude toward tobacco.
Peer pressure from so-called friends turned me on to tobacco cigarettes and alcohol but no one ever tried it with pot. If they had tried it, they would've failed. For some reason I've always been afraid of recreational drugs. Some guys tried to get me to use "red devils" and "yellow jackets" (some sorts of narcotic pills) but they failed. Shucks, even when the dentist prescribed something he called "twilight sleep" after yanking four wisdom teeth in one sitting, I threw the prescription away.
Shame I didn't have the same attitude toward tobacco.
I presume you are still a smoker. It's never too late to quit. I hear that smokers who quit have their mortality rates drop until something like 10 years later ex-smoker mortality rates are indistinguishable from the never smoked rates. I may have the wrong # years but the rest is a fact.
To quit smoking I recommend a combination of Zyban (bupropion) which is also marked as Wellbutrin for use as an anti-depressant. The same drug has been shown to lead to some weight loss and it can be concluded that the drug has beneficial effects in loosening entrenched behaviors and making it easier to cease them. I said combination, and the other aid I recommend is nicotine patches. Even better, none of these aids require to quit smoking immediately. They work on aiding you in quitting and reducing your need to smoke. If they are working they will reduce your desire to smoke tobacco and you will probably respond by smoking less and less until one day you may just entirely quit and toss that last pack in the trash. (see below*)
Interestingly (I hope) I've been told by an authoritative source that ex-pot smokers pot caused symptoms (smoking pot DOES affect your brain and can lead to a small but measurable IQ loss), pot caused symptoms return to baseline non-user within a year or 2 years at worst. -- There's another reason to not smoke pot. There are clinical studies that show the effects of using pot way longer than your high lasts, and some them are impaired mental function. One thing that is insidious about pot's active ingredient THC is that it is fat soluble and your body has a lot of fat to absorb any THC floating around in your blood stream. This is why it takes weeks after smoking pot before you can pass a drug test panel that includes testing for marijuana.
* I just wanted to add this advice for quitting any kind of drug habit whether it's tobacco, marijuana or liquor. An important step you should take to improve your chance of success is that you should avoid areas where your drug is being used, and avoid people who are still using your drug.
If you are quitting pot, you can invite your pot smoking friends to your home and ask them to leave the pot at home. It used to be that smoking was allowed in bars, so when I quit tobacco I had to quit visiting bars for quite some time. By the time smoking in public places was outlawed it had been 1-2 decades since I quit tobacco. And of course if you are quitting alcohol you want to avoid bars entirely, although restaurants that serve liquor are probably okay as long as nobody at your table orders liquor.
In extreme cases you will have to just quit being friends with people who continue using the drug you are trying to quit.
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