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This is misleading. There is no evidence of cannabis or THC being physically addictive. Like anything else, if you enjoy it you might develop a psychological a

This is misleading. There is no evidence of cannabis or THC being physically addictive. Like anything else, if you enjoy it you might develop a psychological addiction. Like video games. Or running. But that is not addiction like your other examples of nicotine or caffeine. > What I really want is for there to be a ban on public use of the stuff Public intoxication laws exist. But it's legal to smoke cigarettes outside (in most places) so why should smoking legal cannabis be different?

pclmulqdq 2y ago
It's true that it is not addictive through the traditional channels in the brain that tend to create addiction in other drugs. However, there are other physical pathways through which cannabis might be physically addictive, and it's clear that it is very addictive and tens of millions of users per year are addicted to the level that it affects their daily life. Several public health departments are now saying that marijuana is physically addictive, with hypotheses of new chemical pathways. No shade to any users, but this is a drug and it has the standard downsides of all drugs. The general misinformation is not helpful. It will neither turn you into a murderous zombie nor have zero effect.
- voisin 2y ago
  > tens of millions of users per year are addicted to the level that it affects their daily life Source?
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
    [dead]
- quesera 2y ago
  > it's clear that it is very addictive and tens of millions of users per year are addicted to the level that it affects their daily life That is not at all clear. By "affecting daily life", do you mean negatively? What is the effect and who is evaluating its positive or negative measurement? It remains my understanding, and you have not contradicted it with your statement, that there is zero evidence of physical addictiveness of cannabis or THC. There can certainly be a cannabis use disorder, but the same applies to any activity of choice. Some people definitely have addictive personalities and find things they like, and allow them to disrupt their lives. > No shade to any users, but this is a drug and it has the standard downsides of all drugs This does not make sense. Anything you ingest or inhale or inject is a drug, and there is no such thing as a standard downside. "Drug" is not a magic word that makes a thing bad. You seem to have fallen into that semantic trap, which makes it impossible to reason about objectively.
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
    > This does not make sense. Anything you ingest or inhale or inject is a drug, and there is no such thing as a standard downside. I'm sure you would agree that lettuce and carrots are not drugs. It sounds to me more like you are trying to confuse the semantics because you don't like the conclusion. Marijuana appears to be as bad for you as alcohol, tobacco, or excess sugar consumption. And yes, there is plenty of recent evidence of physical addiction. Here is the Canadian health department on the subject: https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/drugs-medication/cannabis/health-effects/addiction.html https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/drugs-medica...
    - quesera 2y ago
      Tolerance is not addiction. And government health recommendations are not medical research. (And, uh, historically not at all trustworthy in this area!) The ingestion of carrots causes a distinct biological reaction. Carrots are absolutely a drug, or a cocktail of drugs. Lettuce is basically water and cellulose, so I'll mostly give you that one. Chocolate? Absolutely a drug. Sugar? Yep. Coffee? Yep. ...for any meaningful definition of "drug". > Marijuana appears to be as bad for you as alcohol, tobacco, or excess sugar consumption You made that up. The personal and social harm index for alcohol is absurdly high and well beyond the rest. Tobacco is mostly personal harm, and reasonable to compare to smoked cannabis (so don't smoke cannabis). Sugar is an active area of research, but yeah it looks bad. Cannabis (ingested) would index well below any of the above.
      - pclmulqdq 2y ago
        > And government health recommendations are not medical research. (And, uh, historically not at all trustworthy in this area!) You can literally Google this and find studies on it. You can also look at the sources the Canadian health department linked to. My guess is that you did neither. The scholarship on this is actually mostly recent, so if your reading on the subject happened more than 5 years ago, you are behind the times. Also, Canada is pretty good on the subject of drugs - the US health department is hopelessly biased. More broadly, this tactic of trying to demand higher and higher levels of proof is called "sealioning" and is a classic form of bad-faith argument. I understand it's common on the internet, but it's really a bad practice if you want to convince people of things. > You made that up. The personal and social harm index for alcohol is absurdly high and well beyond the rest. Tobacco is mostly personal harm, and reasonable to compare to smoked cannabis (so don't smoke cannabis). Sugar is an active area of research, but yeah it looks bad. You made all this up, too, especially the "comparative" nature of personal and social harms. Let's not forget the made-up fact that carrots are a drug, too. Who is to say that the loss of intellect that is well-documented to follow long-term cannabis use isn't a "social" harm?
roughly 2y ago
Physically addictive is one thing, but it's a mood altering substance, and if you tell me you don't know people who overuse it because of that, I'm gonna call you a liar. All of this "Weed isn't physically addictive" stuff is biochemically accurate and yet everyone who's been around enough smokers knows someone who smokes entirely too much for their own good and behaves like an addict to any other substance would. This is one of the areas where the legalization movement's going to hang itself - if we can't have a serious conversation about the risks involved and the real actual effects it has on some people, we're going to cause a lot of harm both to the movement and to the people we keep telling this is harmless who wind up learning we're lying. Yes, it's not physically addictive; yes, overuse is a symptom of other mental health issues, but this country's got a mental health crisis with no effective treatment system and we're advocating for the widespread availability of a powerful psychoactive substance. We're going to get people hurt if we don't start acting like grownups. And, to head off the obvious rebuttal: Yes, Alcohol is worse. That doesn't mean staying high all day is healthy behavior.
- quesera 2y ago
  I don't care about comparing cannabis to alcohol. Yes the world would be a better place if all alcohol users switched to cannabis, but that's not my area of interest. I don't care about cannabis either. I'm neither a user nor an advocate. I do care a lot about the right of competent adults to make their own choices about private matters. And when I was a teenager and discovered the immense systemic dishonesty around several big bad drugs and the war thereon, I learned a lot about systems and means of control. This is my only interest in the matter here, but consequently I find myself defending drugs and drug users, sometimes. Your points are reasonable. But they miss the fact that anything pleasurable can be psychologically addictive. Cannabis is not special. It should not be treated specially. That said, cannabis is treated specially, because of its legacy of dishonest representation by bad or ignorant people. So I take your point that it's important to acknowledge the "risk" of cannabis being the indulgence of choice for a segment of the population who find pleasure in it, to excess and to the detriment of other parts of their lives. See also: video games, sex, television, internet, wikipedia, partying, procrastination, etc. If we can treat cannabis as one of many possible diversions from a person's real priorities in life, I'm 100% in support. If we demonize it and pretend that it's different in some way, we are giving it magic powers that can never be properly treated, nor treated properly.

pclmulqdq 2y ago

It's true that it is not addictive through the traditional channels in the brain that tend to create addiction in other drugs. However, there are other physical pathways through which cannabis might be physically addictive, and it's clear that it is very addictive and tens of millions of users per year are addicted to the level that it affects their daily life. Several public health departments are now saying that marijuana is physically addictive, with hypotheses of new chemical pathways. No shade to any users, but this is a drug and it has the standard downsides of all drugs. The general misinformation is not helpful. It will neither turn you into a murderous zombie nor have zero effect.

voisin 2y ago
> tens of millions of users per year are addicted to the level that it affects their daily life Source?
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  [dead]
quesera 2y ago
> it's clear that it is very addictive and tens of millions of users per year are addicted to the level that it affects their daily life That is not at all clear. By "affecting daily life", do you mean negatively? What is the effect and who is evaluating its positive or negative measurement? It remains my understanding, and you have not contradicted it with your statement, that there is zero evidence of physical addictiveness of cannabis or THC. There can certainly be a cannabis use disorder, but the same applies to any activity of choice. Some people definitely have addictive personalities and find things they like, and allow them to disrupt their lives. > No shade to any users, but this is a drug and it has the standard downsides of all drugs This does not make sense. Anything you ingest or inhale or inject is a drug, and there is no such thing as a standard downside. "Drug" is not a magic word that makes a thing bad. You seem to have fallen into that semantic trap, which makes it impossible to reason about objectively.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  > This does not make sense. Anything you ingest or inhale or inject is a drug, and there is no such thing as a standard downside. I'm sure you would agree that lettuce and carrots are not drugs. It sounds to me more like you are trying to confuse the semantics because you don't like the conclusion. Marijuana appears to be as bad for you as alcohol, tobacco, or excess sugar consumption. And yes, there is plenty of recent evidence of physical addiction. Here is the Canadian health department on the subject: https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/drugs-medication/cannabis/health-effects/addiction.html https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/drugs-medica...
  - quesera 2y ago
    Tolerance is not addiction. And government health recommendations are not medical research. (And, uh, historically not at all trustworthy in this area!) The ingestion of carrots causes a distinct biological reaction. Carrots are absolutely a drug, or a cocktail of drugs. Lettuce is basically water and cellulose, so I'll mostly give you that one. Chocolate? Absolutely a drug. Sugar? Yep. Coffee? Yep. ...for any meaningful definition of "drug". > Marijuana appears to be as bad for you as alcohol, tobacco, or excess sugar consumption You made that up. The personal and social harm index for alcohol is absurdly high and well beyond the rest. Tobacco is mostly personal harm, and reasonable to compare to smoked cannabis (so don't smoke cannabis). Sugar is an active area of research, but yeah it looks bad. Cannabis (ingested) would index well below any of the above.
    - pclmulqdq 2y ago
      > And government health recommendations are not medical research. (And, uh, historically not at all trustworthy in this area!) You can literally Google this and find studies on it. You can also look at the sources the Canadian health department linked to. My guess is that you did neither. The scholarship on this is actually mostly recent, so if your reading on the subject happened more than 5 years ago, you are behind the times. Also, Canada is pretty good on the subject of drugs - the US health department is hopelessly biased. More broadly, this tactic of trying to demand higher and higher levels of proof is called "sealioning" and is a classic form of bad-faith argument. I understand it's common on the internet, but it's really a bad practice if you want to convince people of things. > You made that up. The personal and social harm index for alcohol is absurdly high and well beyond the rest. Tobacco is mostly personal harm, and reasonable to compare to smoked cannabis (so don't smoke cannabis). Sugar is an active area of research, but yeah it looks bad. You made all this up, too, especially the "comparative" nature of personal and social harms. Let's not forget the made-up fact that carrots are a drug, too. Who is to say that the loss of intellect that is well-documented to follow long-term cannabis use isn't a "social" harm?

roughly 2y ago

Physically addictive is one thing, but it's a mood altering substance, and if you tell me you don't know people who overuse it because of that, I'm gonna call you a liar. All of this "Weed isn't physically addictive" stuff is biochemically accurate and yet everyone who's been around enough smokers knows someone who smokes entirely too much for their own good and behaves like an addict to any other substance would. This is one of the areas where the legalization movement's going to hang itself - if we can't have a serious conversation about the risks involved and the real actual effects it has on some people, we're going to cause a lot of harm both to the movement and to the people we keep telling this is harmless who wind up learning we're lying. Yes, it's not physically addictive; yes, overuse is a symptom of other mental health issues, but this country's got a mental health crisis with no effective treatment system and we're advocating for the widespread availability of a powerful psychoactive substance. We're going to get people hurt if we don't start acting like grownups. And, to head off the obvious rebuttal: Yes, Alcohol is worse. That doesn't mean staying high all day is healthy behavior.

quesera 2y ago
I don't care about comparing cannabis to alcohol. Yes the world would be a better place if all alcohol users switched to cannabis, but that's not my area of interest. I don't care about cannabis either. I'm neither a user nor an advocate. I do care a lot about the right of competent adults to make their own choices about private matters. And when I was a teenager and discovered the immense systemic dishonesty around several big bad drugs and the war thereon, I learned a lot about systems and means of control. This is my only interest in the matter here, but consequently I find myself defending drugs and drug users, sometimes. Your points are reasonable. But they miss the fact that anything pleasurable can be psychologically addictive. Cannabis is not special. It should not be treated specially. That said, cannabis is treated specially, because of its legacy of dishonest representation by bad or ignorant people. So I take your point that it's important to acknowledge the "risk" of cannabis being the indulgence of choice for a segment of the population who find pleasure in it, to excess and to the detriment of other parts of their lives. See also: video games, sex, television, internet, wikipedia, partying, procrastination, etc. If we can treat cannabis as one of many possible diversions from a person's real priorities in life, I'm 100% in support. If we demonize it and pretend that it's different in some way, we are giving it magic powers that can never be properly treated, nor treated properly.