I pretty clearly have an addiction to marijuana. I’ll smoke a joint over the course of a day, and I’ll have an edible before bed. When I go a day without weed, I get irritable. I fail every time I decide to quit. I tell myself that pot addiction isn’t nearly as harmful as an addiction to opiates or even alcohol. Hell, I’m pretty sure pharmacology says it ain’t even a real thing.
But it is cool that I get to experience what addiction is like: the denial, the furtiveness, the dismissing as not at all a problem. Indeed, I don’t think it’s a problem. I really don’t.
I credit weed for my creativity to the extent I have any. Yet, I would be mortified if how much I use was known by my friends and family. Deep down, I know it is a huge problem derailing my life and I’m too weak to fix it. How conflicting. And how reminiscent of the other cases of addiction I’ve witnessed.
To non-addicts, our compulsion seems utterly illogical and self-destructive. But to our own minds, it is mere maintenance of what it’s used to. From what I’ve read about addiction, it’s a sort of rewiring of the brain. The brain gets used to a certain chemical being there and gets pissed at its truancy. Water quenches thirst, sleep relieves fatigue, and drugs rectify chemical deficiency.
