You are exactly correct, that’s not what he’s saying. I guess it’s just word vs. word. And that’s why I raised doubts about what was said by someone I know online, and an actual doctor who treats these patients.
Like I said earlier, I was really rather shocked, but mostly interested to here him say this. And as a doc who has seen this (I have no experience), I see no reason not to believe his real-life experience. Call it awe of authority if you’d like. I’d just like to see this talked about outside the Cafe.
Well, there’s a unique and valuable insight for you. :rolleyes:
I disagree pretty stongly with the dismissal of marijuana addicts as “weak minded.” Addiction is a sickness, not a moral failing, and addiction does not need to have a chemical component to completly destroy someone’s life. That said, the chances of a marijuana addiction destroying someone’s life seems pretty slim to me. The fact is, one can smoke an appalling amount of pot and still be a fully functional, productive member of society. Is a person who gets high every day, but still has a job and an active social life an addict? If he is an addict, but it’s not destroying his life, does it matter if he’s an addict?
As for Dr. Drew, his comments here strike me as extremely questionable. Withdrawal from pot can be as bad as heroin withdrawal? Really? I smell something in that statement, and I’m pretty sure it’s not skunkweed.
Miller, what I meant by weak minded is that if you allow your life to be ruined by pot, you are weak minded, because as you said, it’s almost impossible to do so. Someone who smokes every day but is fully functional to me is not addicted, and therefore not weak minded. If you lose your job and get kicked out of your apartment and are on the street because of pot, somethings wrong upstairs. I wouldn’t feel the same way about an alcoholic or heroin addict in the same boat, I’d be more empathetic- with a pot user, I’d laugh at them, because I can’t fathom it happening.
Dr. Drew is an interesting guy, he’s actually managed for most of his career to be rather high profile and not completely full of shit, but he’s missed the mark on this one and I think I can guess why. This new show isn’t actually about helping anyone, it’s just celebrity vouyerism with a sick twist. Let’s poke the junkies with a camera and see what happens. Drew needs someone to “cure” because this isn’t actual drug rehab. So he can “cure” the pothead and at least the show can claim that “success”. If you admit that the problem you’re fixing isn’t really a problem, there goes “Season 1” so you have to embrace bad marijuana myth as a plot device. That’s all this is.
I can’t say on that because its apples and oranges- a substance vs. an activity. Gambling to me would be comparable to a shopping addiction and I don’t know enough of how those work.
But from the cite I posted upthread, pot is less addictive than caffeine- wouldn’t you laugh at someone who said their life was ruined by Pepsi?
Cluricaun is exactly right about the show- its for ratings. You can’t compare the comments of the real Dr Drew and those on the show. Next week the punk guy gets his homegirls to sneak in and party in the pool, much to Drews faux chagrin.
If he really cared, there’d be a guard at the gate. But girls in the pool get better ratings.
In fairness, the comments he made about marijuana addiction that I cited were made almost one and a half years ago. Although you are correct by mentioning that there has been a dual-advertising link between Loveline and the VH1 special this past week.
The guests on the radio show have been almost exclusively been celebs on the VH1 special, but it has been mostly discussion about addiction rather than plugs.
Having been in the academic world for many years I’ll say this debate has been going on ad infinitum and will for quite some time. People in the scientific community look at what receptors fire in an addictive brain and new research is promising on actually understanding human addiction. That being said, of course it’s addictive, most things can be…What specifically is the OP looking for? Is it better for you than any other drug?
For heroin, I just don’t know. Cocaine, you’re definitely right. I guess it’s also a matter of what drugs happen to “work” like that for you. My limited experience with cocaine (in fact, with most drugs) is that seems fairly safe in terms of addiction unless you do it a lot, and many people just don’t do it that often. Even then, I wouldn’t know how hard it would be to kick a cocaine habit.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying here.
Some addictions can ruin people’s life. Now I do think quite a lot of that is due to the insanely high prices for certain illegal drugs and not all due to the effects of the drugs themselves, but a serious alcoholic, for instance, will very likely have problems just being productive when he’s not drunk.
Pot doesn’t produce physical dependency; the assertion that it is remotely anywhere close to heroin is laughable on its face. Psychologically, not so much either.
Where it gets habit forming is when it starts replacing the other positive things in your life. You start smoking pot, gradually you get out of the habit of doing anything pleasurable or maintaining friendships. At some point you think “man, I need to cut back”, and at that point you notice your friends have drifted away and you forgot how to do anything fun besides smoke pot. It can sneak up on you because the day-to-day costs are so minuscule, once you recalibrate for the 5% or so mental slowdown.
That happened to me at one point, and I just like, y’know, stopped smoking pot. There was nothing painful about it except figuring out how I was going to entertain myself with all this newfound free time. But some people do feel they have enough of a problem that they feel the need to attend Marijuana Anonymous to kick the habit and get their life back on track. Not for me, but I’ve known some like that.
Good post. This is pretty much the boat I’m in now- someone calls to go out an eat, nah, I’d rather stay home and smoke pot- you can come over and join me if you want, but I don’t want to leave the couch to go out and eat
And it comes and goes, if I get tired of the laziness as you said, I stop and get back into hanging out and doing things. And when the wee bairn is over, I absolutely drop the pipe and go out and do stuff.
If he really cared he’d get these people shunted off to an actual rehab facility instead of making a mockery of the recovery process because they apparently couldn’t dredge up another group of people who Love New York or get Tom Sizemore to smoke any more crank. I’ve never been to rehab and probably never will, but I have friends and family members who are only here today because they took that first step and got better. This show will probably end up doing a huge disservice to people who may have been thinking about getting cleaned up and thinking that this load of dung is any kind of an actual reflection of what that process is like.
So, you wouldn’t laugh at someone whose life was ruined due to an addiction that involved no chemicals whatsoever. And you wouldn’t laugh at someone whose life was ruined by an addiction that involved very powerful chemicals. But you would laugh at someone whose life was ruined by an addiction that involved fairly mild chemicals.
That strikes me as a little odd.
Regardless, I don’t see how it’s an apples to oranges comparison. We are, after all, talking about addiction in all cases. IANAD, but my understanding is that the mental mechanism underlying addiction is largely the same, no matter what the fixation of the addiction is.
My initial reaction to a gambling or shopping addiction would be laughter as well, but I don’t know enough about it to tell if that’s an asshole thing to do. I know enough about pot to know that pot “addiction” to the point of ruining ones life is hooey.
Or, look at it this way. You’ve probably had more than a few drinks in your life, yet you’re not an alcoholic. You probably know a lot of other people who drink, but aren’t alcoholics. Yet you don’t disparage the concept of alcoholism, right? Despite the fact that alcoholics, for whatever reason, react differently to alcohol than you do, you recognize that alcoholism is a real and serious problem.
Now, is it not possible that, just as a subset of humanity reacts very negatively to the use of alcohol, there can be a subset (even a miniscule one) that can react in a similarly negative fashion to the use of marijuana? Does the fact that a particular illness is very rare somehow make it less real?
The bottom line is, everyone’s physiology and psychology is a little different. Not everyone reacts to the same substances in the same way. Just because a reaction is outside the realm of your personal experience does not make that reaction invalid or imagined.
