wardcleaver

Any time I stop smoking
pot my **** gets hard as a rock
for days. It's weird.

I would class myself as a heavy user, and have consistently had
problems with stopping marijuana usage. I am very prone to anxiety and
depression, as well as insomnia, especially when I haven't used
marijuana. One thing I've never understood is, at what point does
physical withdrawal turn into psychological cravings? I smoke
cigarettes, so the withdrawal I'm feeling definitely isn't from the
nicotine in the tobacco. I've also heard that it isn't possible to
become physically addicted to cannabis, so is there any physical
withdrawal at all? I hope someone will be able to shed light on this.

name

bunnyfish@gmail.com schreef:

If cannabis was addictive, it would be possible demonstrate this by
administering
cannabis to animals and monitoring their neurophysiological processes
upon abrupt abstinence. Similarly to how this has been demonstrated in
the case of nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, cocaine, etc..
As far as I know the nazi prohibitionists have never succeeded at this,
despite considerable efforts in that direction and hence it can be
surmised that anyone claiming to be addicted to cannabis is simply
confused by anti-drug propaganda. If the government would consistently
claim that water was addictive, we could expect people to claim being
addicted to water, because of the placebo effect associated with
misinformation dispensed by authorities. If a doctor gives you a pill
containing no pharmaceutically active ingredients and claims it will
cure your headache, chances are you will find some relief from your
headache upon using it based on your trust in the authority of the
doctor.

So no one knows if it's physical or psychological withdrawal, then?

name

bunnyfish@gmail.com schreef:

Pseudoscientific narcofascist propaganda has certainly obscured and
distorted the facts and mingled them with myths, which makes it very
hard to establish the truth about cannabis objectively and impartially.

Compare contradictory claims on the following webpages for instance:

http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/ongoing/marijuana.html
http://www.erowid.org/plants/cannabis/cannabis_myth.shtml

My gut feeling is that the DEA are a bunch of hypocrite fascist
s***bags. But then again, I'm a cannabis user, so perhaps I'm not
exactly impartial to judge this issue either.

rubin

From everything I've read on the subject it must be psychological
because physical withdrawal has never been demonstrated.

phil stovell

As I've continually pointed out, I get mild withdrawal. Sweats and weird
dreams, which lasts at most 2 days. I don't get cravings to skin up,
though.

--
Phil Stovell, South Hampshire, UK

"They said I should not take him to the police, but rather
let him pay a dowry for my goat because he used it as his wife"

name

Phil Stovell schreef:

But how can you be sure these are actually withdrawal symptoms? Maybe
it's just things
that you normally experience but fail to notice and that are suppressed
by using weed. Then when you quit weed you notice these symptoms coming back.

phil stovell

We've discussed this at length before and I'm not alone in having these
symptoms. It was certainly nothing like the withdrawal I got when I gave
up smoking cigs, which was agony. As I said, it doesn't involve craving
for THC so perhaps it isn't withdrawal in the normal sense. Anyway, it
doesn't bother me very much and I know that many people have no symptoms
whatsoever. But I can understand that some people may get it far worse.

I first smoked herb in 1972, in case you don't know me.

--
Phil Stovell, South Hampshire, UK

"They said I should not take him to the police, but rather
let him pay a dowry for my goat because he used it as his wife"

name

Could you please refresh my memory and point me to a reference on the
groups.google archives where we have discussed this specific aspect
before (withdrawal symptoms potentially being mistaken for a rebound
effect of something being suppressed by cannabis use)?

Sure, but that doesn't mean that these effects could be something else
than withdrawal. I've also noticed more intense dreaming when I abstain
from pot, but that sort of seems to be related to the virtual absense
of dreaming (or recalling one's dreams) during a period of heavy usage.
If there was no such absense of dreaming during cannabis usage, I think
it's more likely it could be considered a genuine kind of withdrawal
symptom when most people report that abstinence seems to result in more intense dreaming.

I think I've encountered you many times during usenet discussions
regarding cannabis. I'm just puzzled what is meant exactly by
'withdrawal symptoms' and it seems to make sense to distinguish between
rebound effects resulting from something being suppressed during
regular (cannabis) use and withdrawal symptoms that are a direct
consequence of abstinence. For instance, headaches as a consequence of
abstaining from regular coffee usage don't seem to be a kind of rebound
effect where head-aches are suppressed by regular coffee use and
suddenly resurface when people abstain from coffee use. I think
headaches occur equally frequently regardless of regular coffee use.
But upon abstaining from coffee use, many people experience headaches.
This seems to qualify it as a proper withdrawal symptom and eliminates
the possibility that the headaches are simply a rebound effect of
suppressed headaches during regular coffee use.