Yes you´re right. Opiate, alcohol and GHB withdrawals are worse, physically than those of the other addictive substances.RayTracer said:Oh nelly. Withdrawals are a bitch man. I've kicked (the term kick comes from the fact that your legs flail like your dying) heroin no less then 6x.
Methadone was the worst though. That shit gets in your marrow man, it takes months until you can really sleep. I've never been a big pothead, but anytime I hear about withdrawals from meth, coke, pot etc.....I just have to laugh, because none of those give you real physical withdrawals like the opiate family. Trust me, if you've experienced it you will know. It is hell. Never again!!!
A major part of addiction though, is in the mind. Pain itself is not that difficult to endure when you feel you´re up to it. But when you feel like you´re not up to anything....
The human body has it´s own endogenous cannabinoids, very appropriately named endocannabinoids, just like it has it´s own opiates, endorphins. And like endorphines are released to regulate pain, the endocannabinoids are a natural tranquilizer, meant to regulate physical but mostly psychological stress. And just like the body eventually get´s used to a daily intake of opiates, it will also get used to a daily intake of cannabis. And adjust. When someone who´s been smoking cannabis every day for a long time, suddenly has to go without, he will experience exactly all of those feelings of stress that would normally be dampened to the extreme. This is actually a physical mechanism that can be seen on brainscans. It is not a persons legs or intestines that suffer a withdrawal mechanism, but the persons brain. How someone experiences this may differ in each individual, just like feelings of stress differ from person to person. But it´s very real nevertheless.
Eliyahu describes these symptoms as: 'seeing the world through poop-colored glasses'. Tokapelli says that 'the bullshit of babylon takes over'. With that he seems to mean that he experiences the world as whicked (babylon), that the whickedness of the world (babylon´s bullshit) invades his private, personal sphere and 'takes over'. In other words, he feels that sensations of discomfort start to take control over his very being when his intake of cannabis is interrupted. When this happens, someone will automatically want those feelings to go away and thus starts to crave for that wich he has learned to automatically associate with the absence of discomfort: the substance.
This is the cycle of addiction. It can be very hard to quit any of those addictive substances. Considering the fact that some people have lost everything, and i mean with that realy EVERYTHING they had to the so called one armed bandit, wich isn´t even a substance, i would say that psychological mechanisms of addiction are actually the main problem. People have no problem going through a week or even a few months of serious pain when they know it is absolutely necessary for their survival, for instance, when they have a tumor that needs to be removed. Hardly anybody says: 'oh no, i don´t want surgery, i´d rather just die'. So it´s not the pain that makes any substance so hard to quit. It´s also clear that when a person would have the choice, he would not choose to loose all he has in the casino. No, the problem is the mental part of it. And in the case of cannabis, their is a clear physical mechanism behind this mental part of the addiction.
People these days go to rehab clinic´s because they cannot quit smoking cannabis by themselves, and because this habit is destroying their lives. Seriously.
I personally didn´t need to go to a clinic. But i´ve had a period of maybe a whole year where i woke-up every day saying to myself: 'today i´m gonna quit smoking weed'. And every single day i managed to have found an excuse why that day wasn´t a good day, and to smoke the stuff anyway. Because that´s exactly what these cannabis withdrawals do: they get inside your head, they´ll make you find excuses, they will make you feel like you´re not up to it.
You are probably right that opiate withdrawals are a lot more serious. But i do want to rub it in, when people cannot function normally without cannabis. Because people do need to be aware that it´s not just harmless fun.
And when you smoke the stuff on a daily basis, chances are that you are actually paying the bullits, fired in senseless gang-wars. All the reasons to adress the issue.
