Saturday, July 4, 2015

When Did You Last Check The Facts About Marijuana Drug Addiction?


Many people believe that they have the right marijuana facts when it comes to addiction, the effects of smoking, and medical marijuana.  But the truth is that there is a lot of grey area in between proper pain medication with cannabis and crossing the line into addictive behavior.

Some people argue that the active ingredient in marijuana is not truly addictive in a physical sense.  While this may be debatable by some, the fact is that thousands of people seek advice on where to get help for addictions each year in order to get off of marijuana. 
facts-about-drug-addiction
Get Your Facts Straight About Marijuana Drug Addiction!

One of the biggest problems with seeing marijuana doctors and getting prescribed marijuana for various medical conditions is that people are often not screened for addiction first.  This is very much like the same problem that might occur when a person turns 21 years old and has their first drink of alcohol, not knowing in advance that they are actually predisposed to alcoholism.  How could you know?  Perhaps one day we will have genetic markers or some other sort of test that can tell us in advance, but for now we have to rely on self diagnosis when it comes to substance abuse.  And unfortunately for us, there is definitely potential for abuse when it comes to marijuana—even though it has some medicinal use as well.

Perhaps you are struggling with marijuana abuse yourself—you enjoy getting high on a regular basis and for the most part, you seem to be able to keep your life in order.  Nothing is really falling apart too badly, though there might be some minor consequences as a result of your new habit.  For the most part you have held your life together quite well, but there may be certain sacrifices that you had to make in order to keep your addiction going. 

You are putting the drug first because you love it so much.  You love to smoke and to get high.  You love the feeling it produces.  You love the escape from reality.  It is like a vacation for your mind, right?  Everyone deserves a little vacation, right? 

This is what you tell yourself, but over time you begin to realize that getting high is just not as much fun as it used to be.  Now you do it every day whether you want to have “fun” or not.  You have to get high just to feel normal, just to function properly.  Maybe you do creative work and you feel as if you can’t really create new things unless you are high.  You come to depend on the drug, even though you tell yourself that it isn’t really all that addictive. 

What, then, is the solution?  Could you find a better way to manage your marijuana intake, to cut down a bit, to control it a bit more?  Maybe you have tried to do that in the past, but found yourself going back to your old level of consumption.  You need a way out, a new solution.  Well, such solutions do exist, but you have to be willing to make a leap of faith in order to embrace such solutions.

I personally struggled for years with heavy drinking and uncontrollable behavior, and my life did not change until I was finally ready to surrender to a higher power.  At first, that act of surrender was simply being willing to ask for help, and in doing so, I had to be willing to entertain the idea of inpatient rehab.  Going to rehab for drug treatment was a scary but necessary first step for me.  Without doing so, my life may never have turned around.

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