Homo-Machinery

sardonicheight:

[[seductively does nothing to indicate I’m attracted to you]]

Cannabis is not addictive. The worst side effect I have had from not smoking weed, despite now 3 years of daily use when I have access, is feeling bored and having difficulty sleeping, pretty much the reasons I started smoking in the first place. 

Let’s compare this to other drugs I regularly or have regularly taken:

I have been a caffeine addict since the age of 2 when a stomach condition lead to a French doctor advising my parents that they’d have to ‘feed’ me with coca-cola. I drink diet coke like water and can happily put aside 2 or 3 liters of the stuff a day. This has also lead to a keen fondness of caffeine tablets/shots, coffee, teas and all other caffeine goodies. Now this isn’t usually a problem as caffeine use is so widespread within our society and is freely available for pennies. Despite this, sometimes it is a problem. A 24-hour abstinence from caffeine leads to the onset of headaches and nausea, making listening and looking unpleasant activities. The longest I have gone is 6 days, at which point I gave up with the experiment in order to be able to resume actually living. I had joint aches, near constant headaches and very much constant nausea. On top of this, one feels pretty damned exhausted, incredibly irritable (not surprisingly!) and generally depressed. Not pleasant for you or anyone around you! This is not surprising as long term caffeine use leads to long lasting changes in the neurochemistry of the user’s brain. Yet society is OK with this. There is practically no age restriction concerning caffeine consumption and I’d doubt anyone would serve jail time for selling to minors.

Sertraline/SSRI drugs are one of the go-to drugs when treating social anxiety and depression. I took Sertraline daily at numerous dosages, peaking at 150mg/day, for close to two years when a combination of my typical anxiety around people and a hit of depression knocked me off my feet. I’ve only recently come off the drug and frankly it was this experience that got me thinking on this topic. Anti-depressants are powerful drugs that fundamentally change the way you think and perceive the world. Coming off the drug can lead to emotional instability, depression and suicidal thoughts but the worst part for me, by far, was the constant light-headness and dreaminess. Spending a month feeling as though nothing is 100% real is not at all a pleasant experience and can make you feel pretty dissociated from a lot of things; not to mention completely unsafe driving or working with machinery… But again, we’re OK with this because the negatives are outweighed by the benefits. I’m certainly glad I was on this drug. 

Tobacco, on the other hand… This shit scares me, the more I learn about it and the more I think about my own habits using it. When you actually start to investigate tobacco you begin to see that, not only is it very similar to many illegal narcotics, it’s far far worse. Addiction revolves [or seems to] around how a drug affects the dopaminergic pathways of the brain. Tobacco is somewhat unique, or similar to methamphetamine, in that it both prevents the degradation of dopamine due to its MAO inhibitory components, but also causes the further release of more dopamine via the activation of nicotinic receptors. This addiction is profound, with up to 50% of first time users remaining smokers for the rest of their lives. But this is some what besides the point, addiction can be dealt with or moderated in many people after all. What is truly scary is that nicotine is a psychoactive drug. This seems to escape most people who simply see it as a stimulant/relaxant. Prolonged use can lead to changes in behavior, and certainly the introduction of such a thoughtless and short-sighted compulsion cannot really be considered beneficial. Withdrawal can be surprisingly subtle or very obvious from person to person. For me personally, it generally takes the form of sleepiness and grumpiness until I can have a smoke and relax a little, for others it can go right up to getting the shakes and nausea. Odd to think that we used to sell this shit to 16 year-olds eh?