A Hard Time to Quit Marijuana
The burgeoning cannabis industry and the struggles of sobriety
Lately I’ve been conflicted about my marijuana use. It’s a drug that I got introduced to when I was still fairly young, and it’s one that I have a conflicting relationship with. I owe both a lot of good and a lot of bad to marijuana. It helps with pain and insomnia and even the creative process, but at the same time, I fear that it’s begun to effect my memory.
The older I’ve grown, the more aware I’ve become of its side effects. I’ve learned this about the plant, not only through personal experience, but through the ever-expanding amount of literature available on the subject. Throughout much of marijuana’s history in the limelight, it’s remained illegal, labeled inexplicably as a Schedule 1 narcotic alongside drugs like heroin.
As tides have begun to turn and we’ve slowly entered into a new paradigm in what it is to be a marijuana user, it’s no easy time to break an addiction. With the number of states legalizing marijuana, both medically and recreationally, the news about the dangers of marijuana is nowhere near as prevalent as it once was. Long gone are the fears of “Reefer Madness,” or other conspiracy-based marijuana related maladies.
These days, doctors give out Med cards with the long-overdue nonchalance with which they used to prescribe pain killers and sleeping pills. Now people who’ve never smoked marijuana a day in their lives can walk into dispensaries and be bombarded with a hundred different strains for each of the many methods of consumption.
What started humbly for me as water bottle bongs in the woods, and dime bags of weed from tardy dealers, has burgeoned into a sprawling marketplace with enough options to overwhelm even the most seasoned of cannabis users. For those who remember what the industry used to look like, these newly opened dispensaries are enough to make kids in candy stores out of the most bleary-eyed and couch-locked of stoners.
From edibles and tinctures and capsules to cartridges, vaporizers and concentrates, the world of cannabis has expanded into something few could have predicted when they first began loading the sticky green plant into their pipes. We’ve learned a hairsplitting sea of detail about each of the different cannabinoids that contribute to the varieties of highs we can experience. With the ability to quantify the concentrations of the THC, CBD, CBN, and even CBG of the different plant varieties, the smoking process has turned into something nearly scientific for many of us.
Where traditionally, Delta-9 THC is what’s associated with the marijuana high, we’ve even begun to explore some of the chemical analogues of the substance. Both Delta-8 THC and Delta-10 THC have begun to rise in popularity in recent years, and because the two substances aren’t federally illegal, they don’t even require medical cards to be purchased in most states.
To browse a dispensary menu is to look through a thousand oddly named items that each offer staggeringly varied chemical makeups. Less variety can be found in your local super market. Between the Purple Monkey Balls and the Alaskan Thunderfuck and the Unicorn Poop and the Bob Saget Shnazzleberry Kush Surprise Supreme #4 (Okay, I may have made that last one up), each with a cartridge, flower, concentrate and capsule variety, it can leave even the most informed of cannabis users standing behind the counter stupefied with delight, a growing line of patient potheads slowly lining up behind.
But in a way, the attraction is part of the frustration. It’s part of the challenge around abstaining. Because there are such an unthinkably huge number of different strains of cannabis to choose from, we end up in some pretty silly situations sometimes. For example, and for some inexplicable reason, Candy Cookies and Kandy Cookies are two entirely separate strains. One is Girl Scout Cookies crossed with Candyland whereas the other is Girl Scout Cookies crossed with Candy Kush. Depending on where you look or what budtender you ask, though, that information may vary.
Other people on the other side of the country have probably crossed those two strains and named them something entirely different. And that child is probably named as the parent to twenty more strains by now. It’s all just one happily conflated genetic hierarchy more complicated than Nick Cannon’s family tree.
But a little incest or inbreeding here and there isn’t to say that these substances don’t help people, only that parsing between which ones work best for which ailments can sometimes seem like a lifetime’s endeavor. As the substance continues on the pathway toward nationwide acceptance, it’s hard to imagine we won’t continue to cross strains with strains with strains and adding more and more pages to the ever-growing number of dispensary menus.
Today, we’re even studying the psychoactive properties of the terpenes in our marijuana, the chemicals responsible for their flavor and odor. Even fruits and vegetables contain terpenes, so the research being done here could be invaluable even outside of the world of cannabis.
But with the proliferation of all the different variety of cannabis products available, and with all of the enthusiasm surrounding each new medical application we discover, it can sometimes leave one with the illusion that these plants are panaceas of nature.
In the same way that bars existing on every urban street corner can have a normalizing effect on the drug alcohol, marijuana’s growing availability has begun to have a similar social effect. And while marijuana is dramatically safer to consume regularly than alcohol, that doesn’t mean it’s so safe that it can be used daily for years on end without consequence.
While weed may not be physically addictive for everyone, there are exceptions. Even for those whose struggle with the substance never rises to physical dependance, though, it still breeds a far greater psychological craving than most like to admit. And my addictive personality is something I struggled with before I ever even discovered psychoactive substances. Moderation is something that I’ve never quite managed to achieve with this plant. It was love at first cough. While I like to think that my relationship to weed isn’t a detriment to my life, if I’m smoking at all — I’m typically smoking everyday.
I’ve managed to quit marijuana before. I’ve even gone entire months without it. But each time I return again to it, I’m reminded of what I always valued so much about it. I’ve jumped full speed ahead back into substance addiction as if it never left me. While I’m glad it’s not alcohol or cocaine or opioids I’m addicted to instead, I’m not sure I can go through life with a bong by my side.
The challenge in quitting isn’t only in turning down the sheer variety of THC products that are available, and spending less time with those who I’ve always enjoyed using them with, but setting aside everything that I’ve learned about the plant. I like being an expert, and I feel as though part of what it is to understand marijuana is to be able to know and differentiate between so many of the different gradations of it that are available. There’s a joy, too, in being able to understand the ways in which the concentrations of cannabinoids and terpenes in each of our strains directly correspond with the feelings they provide.
Weed has also begun to play a creative role in my life that it never used to for me when I was younger. It’s become a powerful part of the creative process for me and, as strange as it is to say, there are entire pieces of writing that owe their existence to marijuana highs.
Quitting is a challenge, too, when there are so many middle grounds available. I could just smoke weed that’s less potent. Or I could smoke CBD weed. Or I could vaporize my weed at varying temperatures in an attempt to isolate certain cannabinoids and simply try not to get so stoned off of the products I’m buying.
Now that I’m getting a little older, though, I’m feeling that quitting is likely what’s best for me. I’m concerned this addiction might be starting to catch up with me in noticeable ways. In the past few weeks, I’ve felt what seems like a sudden downturn in my mental acuity.
It’s possible that my memory at 27 shouldn’t be quite what it was at 25, but the sudden onset of this lapse in recall has left me almost beside myself. My memory for details, both short term and long term, has begun to fail me in ways that were unfamiliar to me even last month. Names that I should know are growing harder to grasp.
Whether it’s the weed or not that’s responsible here is unclear, but it appears a likely culprit. So I think it’s time to begin testing the variables. I may not be a totally responsible adult just yet, but I value my brain cells. Whether I value my body enough to stop eating metric tons of sugar each day is a different story. But we can only tackle our vices one at a time I suppose.