Fair enough. Soon as I can figure out a way to get to my home state and see a psychiatrist without staying with my family and preferably without relying on them, I'll be sure to get the pretty piece of paper that says I should smoke weed. My psychiatrist knows that I smoke. He thinks that I should probably stay away from harder drugs, which I would expect, but told me that the weed is neither here nor there for the moment if it's not interfering with anything in my life besides some spending money and has not suggested that I stop. That's not exactly a recommendation, but he held no tone of dissuasion other than telling me that harder drugs were bad for me, and when I initially told him that I smoke, he said, "Probably helps with the anxiety, huh?" Perhaps if I could have transported the two of us 700 miles north, I would have walked out with a prescription for something besides lamictal. Does anybody else see why I think this is a little silly? I visited Colorado last summer. You could have said you had problems sleeping, cramps, loss of appetite--whatever and been handed an excessive amount of weed with a smile and an insurance deductible. I know where everything I smoke comes from, good local hippies who are about as dangerous and shifty as a magician's bunny. It's not like I'm rolling through the projects and picking up zones of bud from Mexico that at some point was laced with embalming fluid or smoking every chance I get.
I accept that weed is part of denial, and maybe I won't heal until I can give up this habit, but the whole "It's totally fine if you have a doctor recommendation" seems so silly when I come from a state where medical marijuana is legal, and from what I've observed in that culture, it's super easy to abuse that situation. Alcohol is legal (though not yet for me! In some months now I will magically become a completely responsible adult. Oh boy) and much worse for one's health. If I were legally abusing that drug, I would still be using something as a form of denial or numbing or self-destruction. If I were addicted to running, I would still be using something to escape. I almost died of water poisoning through this crazy water addiction I developed several years ago, and sometimes I still catch myself picking up the habit of drinking way too much water compulsively when things are bad.
My point in this is to say that the legality of marijuana should be less of an issue than it being a crutch to me. There are a lot of vices available in the world. Drugs, sex, driving (for me, anyway), food, exercise, violence, entertainment, body modification, self-harm, and the lists go on. I think the fact that weed is an illegal substance elicits more attention than a lot of these other items, which can be equally dangerous or hindering in healing.
For goodness sake, you can grow your own weed in some states just because you have a medical license. Basically, in a small, perfectly legal patch, you can grow pounds of the best weed on the planet. That is excessive! But it's okay because a doctor was allowed to say if it was good or not. If I were still addicted to water along with weed, I think my life would be much more at stake because I've seen how far that can go in myself, yet I think that if both of those vices were made very public, people would focus on the weed. That kind of situation seems plain stupid, but I fear that this would be the more feasible response to the hypothetical situation.
I created this thread so that people could look more closely at the behaviors of their loved ones and carefully prioritize their concerns not by societal acceptance but by the direct threat posed to the sufferer's health and the implications of that behavior. For instance, when I self-mutilate, I think, "I am not worth anything. I would rather destroy me than any of these much more valuable things around me." When I drink to excess, I think, "I want to pass out. I don't care what becomes of me or how ill I become. I don't want to feel anything anymore." When I smoke, I think about how much I love those around me and how fascinating life can be. I don't feel numb, I just feel calm and composed. I also feel motivated, productive, able to handle stresses that normally make me fantasize about death. I also connect better to people, listening carefully and speaking calmly, remaining level.
If I were doing all of these behaviors at once, I would rather those aware of this to be more concerned about the former two. In fact, I have been doing all three of these at once before. This was also when I started smoking cigarettes. My parents were aware of all of the behaviors except for the cigarettes and said nothing. I offered my mom some pot and she said it started giving her panic attacks a while ago, so no thanks but thanks. If they knew I smoked cigarettes? I would be bribed, forced, and harangued into every form of treatment possible to end my terrible and awful downward spiral of addiction and supported endlessly in my journey to overcome this dreadful vice.
But how helpful is this in the larger picture of things that could be addressed? I never attempted to suggest that using marijuana as a vice was not harmful, only that other behaviors that seem less scary because they are legal or not labeled as "drugs" or whatever it is should be assessed seriously in addition to concern for pot smoking, because sometimes those other behaviors are of a relatively higher concern.
I think I am a defensive person in general, and certainly some of what I say may be purely defensive. However, my frustration in this thread stems more prevalently from the frustration that prompted its creation: my use of marijuana is being focused on as an obstacle to my healing, when what I am trying to do is drive home that using marijuana may be a vice, but sometimes it isn't the biggest bad guy on the block at the moment. I hope that people can be open to this idea and examine why exactly it is they are concerned about somebody's use of marijuana. Is it because it is an illicit drug, or is it because the user is being negatively affected by it in a way serious enough to prompt the sort of panic I have observed in reactions to this behavior? Is there another behavior present that is more pressing, or perhaps that could give a more proportionate or contextualized perspective on that person's range of immediate problems?
A friend of mine was kicked off of campus and into rehab for vandalizing some school property while drunk one night and going through a manic episode with another person who was also manic. They found marijuana in the girl's system and sent her to rehab for addiction to marijuana. They Clockwork Orange-style rehabilitated her, forcing her to watch 5 or 6 hours of film in which they drill into you that your entire family will basically burn to the ground if you smoke weed, it is as bad as heroine, and she has hurt everyone in her life with her selfishness. When not watching films, they cross-addicted her to coffee and cigarettes, forcing her to chain-smoke as quickly as possible before gulping down two cups of coffee and then chain smoking again, because these were legal vices to get her off of weed. Now, in addition to being bi-polar, she suffers from extreme panic attacks and has addictions that she had conquered before they threw her into rehab (coffee and cigarettes to the extreme).
This seems totally nonsensical. I don't want this sort of irrational prioritization to happen to others, particularly youth who are still greatly influenced by the authority of their parents, who may be particularly preoccupied with fear over their children doing drugs anyway.
