An interesting thread with which to mark my sixth anniversary clean and sober.
Though anecdotal evidence doesn’t count for much around these parts, I think my experience is relevant. I was addicted to marijuana for about ten years.
Now, I know it isn’t physically addictive. I quit several times. Never had any physical withdrawal symptoms. But it was still amazingly hard to stop, even though it was destroying my life.
I understand that I’m not most users. Most people can have a joint every now and then, get high on the weekend, and then go back to their lives. I couldn’t. I was high whenever I wasn’t at work. My whole life revolved around it.
Which is what makes it a very difficult drug to quit. It’s easy to develop a whole life around the simple act of smoking; the pre-movie bong session, the wake-and-bake weekends, the joint-rolling ritual all become integrated into your habits, your personality, and of course, your social life.
It’s such a happy drug. It seems so harmless. It just makes you happy, and goofy, and interested, and hungry. But there are some people, like myself, who take that and make it the centerpiece of their lives, and then watch the rest of their lives fall apart around it.
Six years ago today, I was living in a three-hundred-dollar a month shack, unemployed, almost no food left in the house, and with the rent almost three weeks overdue, I was fifty dollars short. My dealer showed up; he had a pound he wanted to sell me for two hundred dollars. I started crying.
I’d spent the evening trying to figure out what I was going to do; I was thinking that maybe I could make up a “will fix computers for food” sign, and make the rest of my rent that way. I didn’t have any friends left; I didn’t want to split my weed with them. I hadn’t talked to my family back on the east coast in ages. I’d been spending all my time online, or watching pirated cable, stoned. I had nothing left except a rented shack, a cheap old computer, a ten-dollar yard-sale TV, and my dog.
I think it was the dog that saved me from being homeless. I couldn’t figure out what to do with him if I didn’t have a place to live.
Later that night, still stoned, still crying occasionally, I logged into an IRC chatroom for an anonymous fellowship, and asked “Does marijuana qualify as a narcotic?”
There were some good people there, and I talked and listened most of the rest of the night. I hit my first meeting the next morning, and flushed about a half an ounce of pot later that day. Gave away my paraphrenalia. I kept finding weed around the house for months, though. When you’re going through a dry spell and want pot, there’s never any around, no matter how you look. If you try and quit, baggies and film canisters with a couple of bowl-fulls seem to leap out of every nook and crevice in your house. I still managed not to smoke.
I found a job a couple of days later, even though I was still pretty spaced. I did ninety meetings in ninety days, and stayed clean. I talked to a lot of people. A lot of them had the same problems, and that helped. I just stayed clean.
Six years later, my life is a lot better place. A beautiful, funny, considerate lover, who’s a better man than I ever thought I deserved. Good friends, all clean; I found that I couldn’t be around people who smoked anymore. My dog now has a rambunctious playmate. Our house is nicer, homier than I ever thought I’d live in. And I have a career, oddly enough, that I enjoy and that I’m good at.
I’m not saying marijuana destroyed my life. I did that, pot just made it possible. And I agree that there are no physical symptoms associated with withdrawal, though extreme irritation seems pretty universal for a few weeks after quitting.
But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of people out there struggling with the mess they’ve made of their lives with pot. And for a lot of them, the only way to get out, to see any hope, is to quit. And it’s as tough to quit as any other addiction.
The clinical definition of an addictive substance involves physical withdrawal symptoms. The practical definition has more to do with the utter hopelessness that comes from knowing that you’ve given up control of your life to something that you can’t control. And there are people who are addicted to marijuana, physical symptoms or not.
