Some Kid in SoCal Writing About His Pot Addiction

[Zeedler]

Hey guys,

I just found this rehab group a few minutes ago. I was starting to feel like this was never going to end but a lot of people are saying withdrawal symptoms only last two weeks. Thank god!! I hope that's true for me!

So, a little about my addiction. I started smoking weed almost four years ago now and I can hardly believe how long it's been affecting my my decisions, my attitude, my cognitive ability, my love-life, my relationships with my family and friends, and every other aspect of my life and my being. I've known that I've wanted to quit smoking weed for something like 18 months now. Of course, the hardest part about abstaining from MJ is that even when you want to quit, you don't want to quit. **** (can I say that on this site?), I LOVE WEED! But I hate it. It's taken control of me. I'm bound by it. All of my life I have considered myself an advocate of freedom above all else and now I have become a living effigy to myself.

Today is day five if I'm not mistaken but I don't know if I can even count it as such. I've been smoking something called 'spice.' I'm sure some of you have heard of it - it's the synthetic MJ that was outlawed a year or two ago. There's one smoke shop that I know of where they still sell it and I picked up a gram on day two and another on day four. The stuff tastes like shit and it can burn me out fast if I smoke too much but it offers a lighter high than weed and it doesn't last more than an hour or two so maybe it's a good step on the road to full-recovery. What do you guys think? Now don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to advocate it, I know I shouldn't be smoking anything. I'm just some kid writing about his experience with pot-addiction like the title says.

It's not like the last five days have been a total failure. I've made some progress. I went from smoking 1-2 grams of mid-shelf ganja on a daily basis to only 3-5 bowls of this disgusting fake weed crap. Well, here's my problem. I'm far, far from being out of the woods. I wake up every morning with the most horrendous stomach pain I've ever experienced. I used to deal with that by toking up like a mad-man until it was gone but now I'm making myself make breakfast instead which is always hard to eat regardless of how delish I make it but it helps the stomach pain temendously. The pain is on/off through the day and always peaks when I'm hungriest and subsides the most after I eat. IF ANYONE KNOWS ANYTHING TO HELP WITH THIS PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE LET ME KNOW!!!! I'm also extremely irritable. Everything and everyone pisses me off. I knew that would happen and I'm fighting it by trying to make my life as enjoyable as possible while my symptoms are at their worst but that's not easy because I have to work and I'm a college student still trying to put together last-minute summer classes and I have 7 days to find a place to live and move out of my current residence. STRESSSSSSSSSSS

Bla, what can you do? At least I can avoid the brunt of the withdrawal symptoms from hitting during the school-year. I'm pre-dental so I have to get VERY good grades in VERY difficult classes. That's an enormous part of why I cannot be addicted to marijuana. I am barely getting through my classes with a 3.0 and I'm a hopeless applicant without a solid 3.7 or better in my next two years. That means I have to be on top of my shit. That means I can't be zonked out during class. It means I can't get these stomach aches every morning. It means I can't depend on pot to be my best friend.

I go to a great university in the best city in southern CA. The weather is perfect, the girls are sexy and plentiful, the parties are abundant, and I'm a good-looking, outgoing guy. There's only one problem with my life and it's that in this world of plentiful opportunity and excitement there is plenty of weed as well and time after time I abandon my desires to socialize and have fun like a normal college kid so I can get high and be alone in my room and get depressed and eat ****in kit-kats and cheesecake because that's all I've got anymore because I'm pushing everyone away and isolating myself because I can't ****ing think anymore! I can't ****ing put thoughts together and form sentences and be clever and charming and funny and cool because I'm too goddamned high all the goddamned time and it sucks!!!! I hate it!!! I"m soooo soooo soooo sick of living like this!

Here I am on day five and I'm told it's a two-week stretch (maybe 3 for me because I smoked A LOT) and I'm already thinking about which dispensary I should hit for a good deal on a small sack. WHAT THE **** IS WRONG WITH ME??? I have refused to deal with 2-3 weeks of discomfort for four years and the sacrifice has been my livlihood and my happiness and my ability to appreciate beauty and art and love and life. I started smoking weed to open my mind (yeah, I was a dumb kid) and now I am nothing but emptiness and sorrow and a perpetual craving to get high. Well, in a lot of ways the person I'm describing is who I was about 3 months ago. I was living downtown by myself and all I had, I mean all I had in the world was marijuana and chocolate. LOL. I gained 20 lbs in 6 months but since I left that place 3 months ago I've gotten back to exactly the weight I was before I really hit rock-bottom in that apartment. I'm in a much better place now but I know exactly where this addiction wants to take me. It keeps pulling me in that direction. It tells me I can't do it. It tell me I am weak and worthless and I'm just like my drug-addict, piece-of-shit mother who has been the pinnacle of disappointment in my life. I don't talk to her anymore nor do we live in the same state. Still, I should mention her because although I started smoking weed to open my mind, I kept smoking weed because I was an emotional train-wreck and I was an emotional train-wreck because she was a piece of shit. My dad died when I was 2 so she raised me herself. I'm an only child. I moved out of her shit-hole apartment 6 years ago when I was 16.

In addition to the horrible stomach pain and the irritibility (I punched my car stereo into pieces while stuck in a traffec last time I really made a push to quit) I am also prone to getting depressed during abstinence. It's a habbit my mother taught me very early in life and there were several years of my life during which I was chronically depressed. However, as an adult I've found some success in coping with that. Now, it seems that my depression is triggered soley by marijuana use. I start feeling alone, I toke up, then I don't want to be around anyone becasue I know I'm not myself, then I'm depressed as hell because not only am I lonely but I've sealed myself into being lonely for the remainder of the night. Then I do it again and again and again and again and again and dagain aandad adfkjald;kfj;aljkf;alkdjf .......... you get the picture.

I'm getting hungry. I'd ignore it to keep writing but I can feel my stomach starting to secrete acid or hellfire or something evil like that into my intestines. It'll subside with a sandwich.
This has just been a rant - just a quickly drafted little blurb that may or may not ever been read in its entirety by anyone but before I stop writing I'll make this one promise to myself and to the community on this site. Even if I smoke more spice bullshit tonight I WILL NOT SMOKE MARIJUANA TONIGHT. That I swear. I won't do it because if I do I fail. One bowl makes day 5, day 0. I want to make it to day 6. I wonder if I'm even getting closer to being over withdrawal or if the spice has been keeping me at day 0 all along. I hate smoking. I smoke cigarettes too. That will stop when weed stops I have no doubt. I think I need coffee and a sandwich and some time in a coffeeshop with my journal. Thanks for hearing me out! I'll post again I'm sure and I very much appreciate any insight that anyone may have for me. Feel free to write me a rant just like this if you feel so inclined, I dare say it helped.
Thanks!

- Zeedler

[lexicon]

Hi zeedler,

First of all well done for making the step to writing out your situation and story. We all have different reasons why we have come on here but I think the goal for all of us is pretty much the same, to remove the dependence we feel we have for weed.

You've written a lot so forgive me for only giving you a more generalised answer.

You said that you have stopped the weed but carried on with the legal stuff. We do have those here in the Uk and they seem to be very popular but I am very ignorant to these other types of drugs so I could be spouting crap but I personally feel that they are possibly more risky than the weed. I only say this because people have been smoking weed for years and generally we know more about the long term effects of what this stuff does to us and our bodies whereas these legal highs are really new and are pretty chemical from what I can gather, I would really be concerned about what this stuff actually if and what it's doing to my body. You mentioned that you have these terrible stomach pains, could these be coming from the legal highs you've been taking. I have heard of people here getting pretty sick from taking them so it may be worth a thought.


The one thing that I think a lot of us have in common is how much weed can interfere with many aspects of day to day life such as motivation, careers, friendships, family etc and how we can end up being a bit of a recluse that just waits for the next hit. That's certainly what happened to me and although I've always been successful in what I do, my social life outside of weed is pretty non existent. It only really gets worse rather than better and you're at an age, I presume, where you can address it sooner and get back to where you could be. I've been smoking 16 years and have tried to give up many times but just enjoyed weed too much to do it properly plus I got really bored without it and restless and everything just seemed really dull. I'm only a couple of weeks in now so hardly an expert but I am already seeing that that is all bullshit and actually it's just the short term symptom of coming off the weed until your brain readjusts itself. I am now not bored in the evening, not restless and am sleeping better most of the time.

I also used to listen to a lot of music whilst smoking and hearing different music used to be a trigger for me but for some reason now I can listen to that music and enjoy it without it being an immediate trigger to want to smoke. I guess I have never pushed through past the first week before so never realised that it does actually change beyond that.

My advice to you would really be do you need to have is other legal stuff? I would seriously consider what it is and what it may actually be doing to you now rather than say 10 years down the line. I think if you want to stop then you should just stop both of hem together. You have already come a long way stopping Weed for the last five days as they have so far been the hardest for me but if you continue to do the other stuff then you may just be delaying the whole process and in a way potentially making it harder for you in the long run.

Everyone is different and I know for me it's either an all or nothing approach and I've had to just go cold turkey this time. I think If I dabbled every week then I would just keep getting back into it as I would effectively be trying to give up each week as I practice abstinence and that would make it harder.

If you can, try and stop the other stuff and see if it sorts your stomach out, you may find that whatever it is is causing problems. It is def worth it in the long run and you will rediscover yourself again.