Gemma Speck

The reason people may say that weed isn't as chemically addictive is because most people don't experience physical withdrawal symptoms the way they do with alcohol or harder drugs that typically affect our dopamine and GABA systems.

You know, the next morning you might feel a little bit hazy, but your body isn't going to physically isn't going to have the same physical withdrawal pattern.

Research does show this changes depending on when you start using cannabis.

So if you start before 16 or if you smoke a lot, you can develop physical dependency and your likelihood of having a chemical or a biological addiction is much higher.

But psychological dependence is a different story.

Weed may not have the same chemical biological pool, but when it becomes a form of emotional and psychological coping, it is just as dangerous.

It is just as dependency driven or dependency risky.

It can start replacing all other coping.

It becomes difficult to stop, especially when it is the only thing sitting between you and the pain, you and the social anxiety, you and the grief, you and the hopelessness.

intense emotions is rewarding it's called negative reinforcement it removes a bad feeling and that is just as motivational as when something gives us a good feeling and that's why it's so intoxicating

Research into the drive behind cannabis use has consistently found that using weed to cope with distress, with tension, emotional discomfort is linked to more problematic use and worse outcomes.

And often because of the way weed makes us feel, which is maybe quite sluggish, tired, lethargic, we rarely then go on to engage in things that might actually help us.

So rather than being something we just use casually for fun,

In this situation, it becomes emotional management or it becomes escapism from our current situation without actually allowing us to address the root problem.

One of the emotions or feelings I feel like links most significantly to cannabis usage is loneliness.

This is a great example of how weed can become a way that we avoid the deeper feeling and

The literature on the correlation between loneliness and smoking weed is just that, correlational.

So we can't say that smoking weed directly causes loneliness because that would be inaccurate.

But what a lot of studies, including one in 2016, suggest is that social anxiety, solitary cannabis use and cannabis related problems are often clustered together.

And that using cannabis can actually be one of the routes that takes social discomfort and mild isolation and turns it into something more problematic.