[gunsle]

I think weed is actually far more insidious than most drugs, because it’s incredibly easy to be a functional stoner. The downsides don’t start to appear until you’re years down the road, and often the marijuana haze keeps you from fully evaluating just how detrimental those downsides have been on you. At that point, you’re legitimately addicted, and your brain begins to sweet talk any attempt at rationality.

For me, the downsides manifest as drarticlsly increased anxiety (I naturally have next to none), extremely poor sleep - I sleep but the sleep is so low quality it begins to feel like my brain barely works right, and the obvious one, the effects on your motivation. I naturally tend towards ADHD style dopamine chasing, and weed makes that about 100x worse. Instead of getting my work done, I will procrastinate with any number of cheap dopamine hits such as video games, internet sleuthing, etc.

[projectazorian]

> At that point, you’re legitimately addicted

You can just stop. Really. Go take a long trip somewhere weed is illegal (eg. Japan) and throw out your stash on the way out the door. You will be fine, maybe a little irritable for a couple days, but the trip will distract you and it'll be indistinguishable from typical jet lag symptoms. There is no biological dependence, unlike with most legal drugs such as alcohol, tobacco, benzos...

[stingraycharles]

So this part is not true at all. When I was at my worst, I remember staying somewhere I couldn’t smoke, and I was sweating terribly all night several nights. This is known and documented.