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From the article:

> “However, this is not a study that anyone should look at and say, ‘Jury’s in, and cannabis use causes dementia,’” Myran said. “This is a study that brings up a concerning association that fits within a growing body of research.”

From the study:

> Individuals with acute care due to cannabis use were at lower risk than those with acute care due to alcohol use.

Difficulty regulating consumption while intoxicated could easily be an effect of whatever underlying condition is resulting in dementia.

I wonder if doing cognitive tests at various levels of intoxication might be a better indicator than under normal conditions.

One likely explanation is that both cannabis and alcohol users abuse substances due to an underlying process that leads to dementia. There might be something that makes you a heavy user AND prone to dementia. But, of course, we can’t say that alcohol or weed are direct causes of the disease.

> Specifically, alcohol intake is negatively associated with global brain volume measures, regional gray matter volumes, and white matter microstructure. Here, we show that the negative associations between alcohol intake and brain macrostructure and microstructure are already apparent in individuals consuming an average of only one to two daily alcohol units, and become stronger as alcohol intake increases.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28735-5

It's well known that alcoholism can be a direct cause of dementia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korsakoff_syndrome

Alcohol is one of the most toxic substances out there, no surprise the risk is higher than cannabis.

Diagnosis: Misaligned incentives correlate with acute miscomprehension

doesn't exactly get the attention and funding they desire with that spin on it does it?

This is about a specific condition but it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone really.

I remember when there was a huge push on reddit and everywhere to decriminalize and later legalize marijuana and I was a supporter of the movement and still support it but only as a liberty principle. After getting into smoking it regularly in college I had the chance to meet long time users and without exception all of them had cognitive issues. One day I was late for a party and everyone was high when I arrived and I realized that I simply can't stand them because everything they said was the lowest IQ stuff I ever heard and they were pretending that its creative. Quit the thing and never looked back.

Stick to the alcohol and drink within the culture of it and you will be fine. It is bad for your body even at small quantities but at least you keep your mind intact and alcohol actually enhances the creativity by lowering your guard and not interfering with your intelligence. The culture part is important, binge drinking can be fun at college at times but the culture I'm referring is the culture where alcohol is being consumed socially together with some food or at event. Avoid drinking alone and other high risk activities associated with drinking.

I keep reading about how alcohol consumption is dropping, pubs are closing and this makes me sad because I see how young people lock themselves into apartments and smoke weed all day. I don't believe that anything good comes out of it, no wonder the loneliness epidemic is destroying the world.

It's a very unpopular opinion and in some countries drinking only means getting smashed but trust me, there's another way. With weed, there's no another way.

Anyway, here's something fun to watch on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTSCppeFzX4

My anecdotal experience is very different than yours. People on alcohol have issues managing their emotions and impulses, and a lot of men get aggressive and violet - and most of the people that I encounter that consume cannabis you'd never know.

Now, that doesn't cover every case, I run in to people who vape cannabis all the time, and they seem to have some emotional effects from that, but if someone is going to abuse a substance, I'd much prefer that was cannabis. Alcohol is a poison, look at the biology at work when your body processes. Re: cannabis, smoking anything is unhealthy, so maybe don't smoke.

>With weed, there's no another way

Based on what, your personal experience talking to stoners in college? Plenty of people smoke socially, and among people who smoke cannabis, only a small fraction "lock themselves into apartments and smoke weed all day". In fact, that fraction is much smaller than the fraction of people who drink alcohol who lock themselves in their apartments drinking all day. And I don't know if you've spent any time with those people, but they all have cognitive issues too. As do people who do speed all day. As do people who do heroin all day.

Cannabis can be a wonderful social drug, as can amphetamine or cocaine, and I'm sure even opioids, though I don't touch those because I have significant genetic risk for opioid addiction.

I don't think judging a drug by its most addicted users is fair. Especially since you're doing that for weed, and then comparing that to the most reasonable alcohol users.

All that being said, I absolutely agree that cannabis is not good for you in large quantities. It's absolutely bad for cognitive ability, working memory, and long term memory when used chronically. But the only people I've met who would disagree with that are cannabis addicts, and usually young ones at that(the older ones tend to figure it out unless they stay stoned for their entire lives, which does happen). Most people I talk to are well aware of these things. And at least from my own experience, these effects will generally pass once you cut down.

> Based on what, your personal experience talking to stoners in college? Plenty of people smoke socially

Yep. And plenty smoke privately, too. People see the public spectacles and incorrectly conclude it as wholly representative.

Many professionals use cannabis but choose to not advertise it since misinformation is still so rampant, originating from the "Reefer Madness" propaganda days. The tradeoff of potential career damage just isn't worth it.

Carl Sagan understood this, among many others:

https://bigthink.com/health/carl-sagan-on-smoking-marijuana/

> One day I was late for a party and everyone was high when I arrived and I realized that I simply can't stand them because everything they said was the lowest IQ stuff I ever heard and they were pretending that its creative.

And that never happened with alcohol?

It happens when someone is very drunk. People socializing with alcohol are still a nice company to people who don't drink.

The nice thing about alcohol is the dynamic range of its effects. The bad stuff start after the "tipsy" stage and even after that there's quite a bit of way to go until things become a problem.

I would be surprised if the people who don't drink agreed with you here. And let's make sure we ignore the links between alcohol use and violence here too.

As a teetotaller, I'd say that the tipping point is usually around the third drink. I don't know about US drinking culture, but here in the UK that really isn't a lot. Beyond that point, people rapidly lose the ability to have a conversation and slide into a kind of output-only mode. There's a certain charm to that kind of free association, but as a sober person you're more of an audience member than a participant. I think anyone who works in hospitality can vouch for the fact that most drinkers become obviously cognitively impaired much sooner than they realise.

Stoned people might be lethargic and dull, but at least they're more reliably amiable than drunk people. Some people start becoming nasty after only a couple drinks - no fists being thrown, just casually cruel things that they'd never dream of saying while sober, trivial disagreements escalated into petty and personal shouting matches. You don't have to be particularly intoxicated to start saying things that your sober self would be utterly ashamed of; your saving grace is the fact that most of the people around you aren't really parsing or retaining what you're saying.

I relate to this experience (not teetotaler but slow starter/drinker and I watch my consumption). I especially relate to the petty/cruel observations, particularly in the context of big family meals/events.

I think it's one of the reason people "like" alcohol, it gives them both the courage and an excuse to say whatever they want/feel.

But you seem to be making excuses/explanation for this, I don't agree, what people become under the influence of alcohol is who they truly are, without the mask and restraints. If someone becomes petty/cruel/violent or whatever, you just learned that they cannot be trusted and are a bad person, no needs to explain away with alcohol influence.

In general, drugs amplify or make obvious who peoples are, they don't radically change them contrary to what some like to pretend.

Is that really true? I observe that certain drugs impact all personalities in similar ways, like cocaine making people paranoid. If you have homeless near you like most California, you spot opioid or meth drug behaviors instantly because they’re quite distinct. Alcohol does impair judgement, which predictably means less self monitoring and that may explain what you’ve noticed, that jerks get jerkier while nice guys may just get nicer on alcohol.

They key word was "radically". Of course, every drug has a typical and general impact on how people behave and you can even notice it in physical movement (everybody expects any drunk person to have pretty bad motor control). But this is just making my point even more, you need to observe the differences between individual behaviors under the influence, not just the difference between their behavior sober and under influence. A drug will amplify certain key aspects of cognition/movement in the same way for everyone, someone who displays extreme specific behavior is just more noticeable because the amplification makes it very obvious, but it was always there in the first place.

I have never heard about cocaine making people paranoid but it is just something that every drug user displays at some point (because of the fear of being found out, judged and maybe having trouble with the police). Even though I am an extremely chill person, I have found myself to be a bit paranoid under the influence of cannabis at times.

And I have a question for you: is it the drug that makes people paranoid or is it that people who are inclined to paranoid behavior are more likely to use drugs, which amplify the behavior.

People regularly using drugs have issues that push them to this abuse, it's not really the drug that are the problem, the root of the issue is really in the people and their personnality/character.

Definitely don't abuse alcohol, that's very bad for you and the society. Learn how to drink properly

Why doesn't that same thing apply to recreational drug use? And the argument for legalisation is that it makes that use much safer.

I agree, maybe its possible to create a healthy weed culture. I've never seen one but maybe in some places they figured it out. Alcohol is similar, in some cultures the dominant drinking culture is very damaging one.

Can you expand on this comment?

When you say that you've never seen one do you mean that you've seen many weed cultures but never a healthy one?

What makes the ones that you've seen unhealthy?

>Learn how to drink properly

~10% of the population simply cannot.

I'd argue it's a lot higher of a percentage in places like here in Wisconsin.

Actually, weed can be light too. I am always surprised at the doses people who smoke weed get into their head. I personally not a big fan of the effects but a light touch can be very nice, especially for activities that don't mobilize such as sex or watching a movie.

Having had my share of experiences in my 20s going out sober with both drunk and stoned friends I can attest that tipsy people are usually a lot more coherent than the comparably stoned ones.

What's comparable to tipsy for marijuana though? Seems like the relative strengths of the two drugs are being compared here rather than the effects on personality.

Unless the people who are "tipsy" from weed tell it to you, you will never be able to detect it.

People who are drunk say things that are dumb. People who are stoned say things that are dumb, and believe their dumb thoughts are profound. One of these behaviors is a lot more irritating than the other.

I personally thought he was sarcastic.

Your user name was very relevant for that comment. Lol.

> Stick to the alcohol and drink within the culture of it and you will be fine.

The median marijuana user is probably also fine in similar circumstances. This study is talking about "someone who has an emergency room visit or hospitalization due to cannabis" - which I assume isn't the normal experience. And heavy users probably do have a raft of problems but unless we have statistics to break out its probably comparable to the horrors of the serious alcoholics (I had a neighbour once who was vegetabalised after a drunken pub fight - nobody will talk me out of blaming the grog for that one).

Although I would echo the general theme of your post which is that if someone is worried about their health and wellbeing, maybe avoid the drugs. Although I'd go further and say avoid the alcohol too.

Humans have been dealing in drugs and alcohol for millennia at this point. They're not good for you in large doses and the benefits in small doses are questionable (which, given the millennia thing, suggests they may not be there). There is a tactical "benefit" in convincing people to do silly things and they make individuals feel good for a while.

What do you mean there is no other way with weed? You don't have to go full Cheech and Chong with smoking. Your experience doesn't match mine at all, 7/10 of the most brilliant people I know, half of which are mechanical or electrical engineers, smoke weed regularly. To me your comment reads like government propaganda from 60 years ago.

Okay, how does it look like to be slightly high?

With alcohol stages are something like this:

1) First it makes you relaxed. With the help of the music and the company you start feeling integrated. Thats usually within the first hour of social drinking.

2) Later you usually feel liberated, at this stage your personality and emotional state becomes exposed. You can become more friendly, more talkative or if you are not well you can start opening up about it and even cry a bit. You feel a bit tipsy but this is not the dominant feeling. It depends, but the gist is that you lower your guard. This is the stage where most benefits of drinking is. Usually can be maintained for a few hours by keep drinking slowly.

3) Next the effect of alcohol start becoming a bit more pronounced, you feel funny and you might start having motor skill issues. This is the stage you better stop. There's nothing good beyond this. Ideally this is at the end of the night and you are headed home.

4) Then you actually become drunk, you start slurring when talking. Your motor skills are severely impacted and emotional issues may arise and you can do things you will regret later. This usually happens very late at the hight of drinking.

5) The last stage is when you are blackout level drunk and don't remember much tomorrow. At this stage you need to have someone to look after you. You can be a danger to yourself and people around you. It happens when you push it.

How does the weed smoking look like? Where the social smoking fits in this?

A lower dose strain, or a strain with higher CBD:THC ratio would keep you basically at stage 1/2 all night.

The thing about weed is that, if you are getting it legally at a dispensary in a state with strict and enforced testing laws (so not CA), you can get yourself a nice low strength sativa/hybrid while avoiding anything with high CBN (that's the couching chem). You will be buzzed off a hit or two, and you just take another hit every 30-60 minutes or so (everyone's mileage WILL vary). It is just like staying buzzed on alcohol is approximately 1 beer/hr (according to the ancient wisdom of older brother's since the dawn of time).

All drugs have their tolerances and and all drugs have people who abuse them and people who are "allergic" to them and should avoid them at all cost.

>Stick to the alcohol and drink within the culture of it and you will be fine. It is bad for your body even at small quantities but at least you keep your mind intact

Even moderate consumption of alcohol leads to structural and volumetric brain changes: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28735-5

Socially, I agree with this comment. I got very bored at parties where everyone was getting high.

Scientifically, apparently alcohol is worse for your brain. From the study[0]:

> Individuals with acute care due to cannabis use were at lower risk than those with acute care due to alcohol use (aHR, 0.69; 95% CI, 0.62-0.76).

Personally, someone very close to me had an acute emergency room visit about 5 years ago due to what we can only assume was a poorly dosed edible, and/or a newly developed severe allergy. Fingers crossed they do not develop dementia. (Per the study, looks like odds are 1 in 20 for those that hit the ER.)

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40227745/

Pretty weird that "go drink yourself to death instead" is the top comment on HN. Stinkin Thinking is what my grandmother used to say about people making decisions on booze, its not some magic defense against neurodegenerative stuff. Nobody should be defending some dumb stoners, but the idea that you can protect your mental health by hard drinking is deeply unsupported by science.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7488355/

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) has been associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Prolonged excessive alcohol intake contributes to increased production of reactive oxygen species that triggers neuroimmune response and cellular apoptosis and necrosis via lipid peroxidation, mitochondrial, protein or DNA damage. Long term binge alcohol consumption also upregulates glutamate receptors, glucocorticoids and reduces reuptake of glutamate in the central nervous system, resulting in glutamate excitotoxicity, and eventually mitochondrial injury and cell death. In this review, we delineate the following principles in alcohol-induced neurodegeneration: (1) alcohol-induced oxidative stress, (2) neuroimmune response toward increased oxidants and lipopolysaccharide, (3) glutamate excitotoxicity and cell injury, and (4) interplay between oxidative stress, neuroimmune response and excitotoxicity leading to neurodegeneration and (5) potential chronic alcohol intake-induced development of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

Where did mrtksn wrote that you should drink yourself to death? They explicitly stated they only mean drinking socially and not in order to "get smashed".

That’s not what OP said, you know it and were just waiting for an excuse to dump the Rolodex of facts about alcoholism on this conversation.

Alcohol is a potent substance and beyond the ocasional use in moderate quantities it’s terrible both physically and psychologically, but it’s a “social lubricant” and has been for thousands of years because it works.

The truth is most weed people use it like they are alcoholics and there’s the inevitable group who use it as an identity and they are just unbearable to be around.

Yes, alcohol is very bad if you drink it wrong. The core of what I say is that, drink it the right way(don't drink hard regularly, never drink alone) or don't drink it(you don't have to drink but you will be missing out). Don't smoke anything.

But this is not comparing apples to apples. Smoking weed in moderation is probably fine too. The trouble is criminalising it means you can essentially only buy the weed equivalent of cask strength moonshine, and nobody knows how to mix a nice cocktail.

Decriminalising would make it (more) possible to grow and sell lower THC weed, and weed with different cannabinoid profiles. We still know very little about the differential effects of THC/CBD etc in weed as-smoked.

In short, I think your advice is probably premature. Let's try legalising and developing a stoner culture which isn't the equivalent of hardcore alcoholism, then try comparing. Plus, drunk people (> 2 pints) are also seriously boring if you are sober.

I have never seen slightly high fun person, in my experience with smoking weed the aim is to get high as possible quick as possible and maintain it as long as possible. The range of effects is small and there's not much to desire on the lower end of the things. The best you can do is to try to balance THC and CBD as they actually have different effects.

Maybe I will change my mind about weed once I start observing such situations.

But how do you know that all the fun people you've been with aren't secretly high?

The new science says there is no safe level of alcohol and that it is just a straight up poison for your body. Previous studies were flawed.

https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-...

Sure, if you are gunning for a long and healthy life avoid alcohol. Also, helicopters, motorcycles, loud music, professions and places. You will miss out on stuff but it is definitely the safer path to take.

I'm gunning for a long and healthy life. That's why I sold my motorcycle too.

>the idea that you can protect your mental health by hard drinking is deeply unsupported by science

Whose idea is that? Certainly not the person you're responding to, who said nothing of the sort.

I am pretty sure your vision of alcohol "being fine" at low doses is quite simplistic and you are avoiding taking into account people's differences in your comments but I personally don't like weed much and also think alcohol is the best drug. And it's pleasant to read a wall of text on why it is indeed the best drug. Thank you for choosing to die on this hill. I will remember you, comrade.

That's just, like, your experience, man. I smoke weed socially. And know many that drink alone at home. Don't just, like, generalize, man.

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I came to the same conclusion after meeting old friends who had smoked a lot.

I was in a group of friends and I think one of the guys appreciated me and tried to get closer to me. Once he stopped by the house and we spent the evening talking, me drinking and him smoking. Having to wait through his long silences where he tried to form coherent thoughts but always ending up in unfinished sentences was an excruciating experience. That friendship did not work out.

I'm in late 30s and finally gave up booze after something like 25 years of drinking. I still smoke a tiny bit of marijuana every few weeks. I do notice it causes mood swings next few days. Ironically it is prescribed for anxiety. Alcohol depression took nearly a month to clear. I'm sad I can't drink socially, but I still go thru a ton of zero alcohol beer.

I'll change the strain from indica to sativa just for a check. Occasionally I do enjoy silliness it brings that makes me wanna play with my kids. Or have some superficially deep thinking while riding bike. Otherwise I'll likely stop too.

I had to read it three times to realize "the criminal eyes" meant "decriminalize"

Haha, thanks for pointing it out. Fixed

We need a new word for funny voice typing homophone selection.

In my experience, the very same people who claim that they drink in moderation and retain full control are exactly the ones that tend to be unpleasant to be around when drunk.

Wow, I didn't actually think weed could give someone brain damage, but I guess I've just been conclusively proven wrong!

I see a version of this reply every time somebody mentions that cannabis is not entirely harmless. Without getting into the weeds (lol) of what is and is not brain damage, surely you can recognize that habitually blazing extremely potent strains of a hallucinogenic plant is not harm-free?

Well harm has to be defined because different people use it in different ways. Would I say it cannot cause mental changes that can be negative? Of course not, plenty of people don't smoke just because of the anxiety they get from it or other things. But classifying people who smoke as stupid or brain damaged is an entirely different thing and there is very little evidence for that. Social and ideological changes that hallucinogens can cause in general are not simply good versus bad. And there is no link anywhere that makes hallucinating itself cause brain damage, there are tons of ways for people to hallucinate that don't cause brain damage so I don't know why you would automatically assume any hallucinogen is assuredly doing damage.

I hate to be that person, but neither the article nor the study makes that claim.

All we know is that people who visit the ER or who are hospitalized "for cannabis use" (not defined in the abstract; full text is behind a paywall) end up with dementia at a higher rate.

That does not mean cannabis caused it. They've accounted for many confounding factors, but you can't account for all of them. Off the top of my head, perhaps people who are in the very early stages of dementia do not tolerate THC as well? Maybe their emotional regulatory ability declines before diagnosis, and they're therefore less able to bring themselves down if they experience anxiety.

alcohol is great for destroying your body unlike weed. and being obnoxious

As I've gotten older (in my late 30s) I've enjoyed the sensation less and less. I find myself getting stuck in loops of thinking or actions. It wrecks my sleep schedule, and in the worst cases gives me some anxiety (and I don't normally suffer from anxiety.) I just don't enjoy it any more, though it does give me motivation for mundane tasks like cleaning the house, etc. Jut not worth it for me.

I never smoked, and I noticed both loops and sleep problems in late 30s.

I only noticed the issues when I smoke, so if I still have them they're not noticeable by comparison.

Marijuana has never made me sleepy though, it has quite the opposite effect and keeps me awake. Perhaps it was just easier to rebound from staying up all night in my 20s.

17 years of daily use and stopped just like that without any issue or side effect. I’m trying to quit smoking now, but that seems te be an addiction on another level.

I wish you luck. Some people can quit nicotine cold turkey but I had to taper myself off over 2 months, and maybe that should've been even longer because I still felt like crap for about 2-3 weeks after quitting for good - somewhat debilitating brain fog, insomnia, restlessness, depressed mood, lethargy, but I think I had it worse than most. It took me 3 tries. It's way better than developing smoking-related health problems later down the road though.

As someone who's been there: Beware that the effects can be quite time delayed. For me it was a few weeks of anhedonia and depression and that started almost a month after I stopped.

It depends. I suddenly stopped for two months and the only issue was difficulty sleeping for a few days. The depression is due to the lack of THC which your body depends on to feel good. The best medicine for that was riding my bike (literally felt the brain fog melt away during a nice long ride.)

Really, it depends on your life situation and why you use drugs. The root cause for using drugs is always the toughest thing to tackle. After that, quitting is easy. Fixing your life is the HARD part.

Yeah, my and my SO have very different experiences regarding this.

I’ve quit cold turkey several times with little problems - quit for several months or over a year, then used again for x months, then quit again, etc. (This went hand in hand with a certain seasonal job.) Apart from very slight ”I wouldn’t mind a smoke” kind of feelings it doesn’t have much of an effect of me.

My SO was miserable, depressed, craved cigarettes for months and months. For the longest time she was convinced that it isn’t possible for her to quit, since they cravings didn’t go away. (Until they did.)

There's at least some evidence that people have very different affinities to different drugs and their effects and addiction potential are just as individual.

Anecdotally, I can tell you with absolute certainty I could never become an alcoholic, I have no interest in drinking on any two consecutive days and it's usually several month between any alcohol consumption. Yet there have been alcoholics in my family. But when it comes to weed I will be continually stoned out of my mind as long as any weed is available.

It's a terrible side effect of the legal status of most drugs that we have neglected to study most of them to the extend that would be necessary to actually make progress (with the notable exception of tobacco)

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To my knowledge, Marijuana is not physically addictive like Nicotine, so it's easier to stop with willpower alone. I don't want to understate your accomplishment though - congratulations for ridding yourself of an addiction. Best of luck on the next one too. You can do it.

This is a common myth. Cannabis absolutely can cause physical dependence in frequent users. Withdrawal isn't going to kill you like alcohol might, but it's very real.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/marijuana-wee...

Not sure why you’re being downvoted.

The least favorite withdrawal symptom I’ve seen is REM rebound, which causes intense and vivid dreaming, which causes you to wake up in the morning feeling like you haven’t slept at all.

The return of mental clarity also causes some rebound anxiety as you regain mental clarity (especially if anxiety was the reason for smoking in the first place)

I think it does a major disservice to the general population to paint weed in an only-positive light. Yea, I get people unfairly demonized weed for years. But that doesn’t mean we should all go on the complete opposite end of the spectrum and pretend there’s no withdrawal, no side effects, etc.

(Maybe the people downvoting are just occasional once a week users? I could imagine once weekly having zero negative effects. But once you get to daily use, the negative effects are pretty obvious)

Yeah no one ever mentions that for most people weed spikes your blood pressure really high. Add in an adderall prescription, and an underling heart condition that none of my various negligent doctors ever noticed, and boom 6 years later I have a life threatening anuerysm in my Aorta.

But yeah weed is totally harmless and adderall has no negative effects for individuals diagnosed with adhd. Sure.

Yes, yes and yes. In the worst cases you won't be able to sleep, cold sweats, digestive problems even. But in many of those cases cannabis was actually a relief for a pre-existing health issue.

In most cases withdrawal is as simple as a few restless nights and after 3-4 weeks you're completely yourself again.

It's still a lot milder compared to cigarette smokers who can dream of dancing cigarettes years after they quit.

I don't think marijuana is addictive either, but it can build a dependency. There's withdrawal to stopping cannabis after prolonged use, there's discomfort with wanting to recapture that good feeling, but it's nothing like an addiction to nicotine, heroin, etc. Yet it feels so damn good, which makes it easy to become dependent on it.

Congrats!

I’m 50% of Allen Carr’s book [0] and it feels very promising.

0 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Easy_Way_to_Stop_Smoking

It's a shame you're being silently downvoted. I used this book to quit smoking and I credit it with saving me. If any smokers stumble upon this comment and feel like it's time, pick up this book.

Quitting cigarettes (and thene eventually quitting nic gum) was easier than quitting weed for me.

I am ex-smoker for more than 12 years after smoking between half a pack and a pack a day for 15 years, and I went through the process which may be similar to what you describe. So I thought to write here some of my self-observations - maybe they could be useful for you or anyone else reading this.

Cigarettes for me combined many aspects that are psychological and social rather than physical:

- the sucking reflex. Same calming mechanism as the babies with the pacifier

- the comfort of routine, where they support the familiar (the first cig with a coffee, a morning or evening cigarette)

- the social interactions (smokers areas are a great place for a conversation and there is no hierarchy)

- last but not least - physical effect of calming

- the very strong associative effect caused by movies with smoking scenes

- the nice feeling of appetite reduction caused by cigarettes/nicotine

What helped me was:

0) for the routines - replacing with a different ones that do not need cigarettes.

1) to not set the goal to quit outright, but rather to reduce, and then when it went to zero it was “temporarily stop, I can always restart if I consciously find it worth it”.

2) make every cigarette subject of a conscious decision after a discussion with yourself. Do not prohibit it outright - it only heats up the impatience for it. Make it a conscious decision.

3) Look at adjacent habits, like alcohol. My last infrequent routine, which persisted irregularly for some years after I stopped, was to have a cigarette sometimes socially when I had a drink. After I reduced the drinking to almost zero, I once had tried social smoking and didn’t like how it tasted at all, and had a headache the next day. Which was remarkable as I never had this before. No social impulse felt anymore.

4) take up some sport for half an hour a day, preferably aerobic (I do cycling on a stationary bike). If you manage to go for a streak without cigarettes/alcohol, the difference in performance and feeling will be very apparent which will help at (2).

5) watch out for potential weight gain after stopping smoking. Was hard for me (I gained more than 20 kilos), eventually I lost weight because I moved for half a year to another city where I led a much more active lifestyle.

6) the company of smokers at work. This may be hard but super important if you can tackle it. Eventually I started going for the “breath breaks” but just having a chat rather than smoke, but since this strongly triggers the “routine” programming, this is something I could do only 2 years into stopping.

It is a different journey for everyone, but hopefully some of the above may ring true for you and be useful in your journey. Good luck!

Nicotine is far worse than marijuana imo. At least with marijuana you know there's not some chemist adding addictive chemicals deliberately trying to make it more addicting and impossible to quit.

Why did you stop?

Why link to a CNN article when there's a paper... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40227745/

It's a value add on top of the article because it summarizes the broad area of research, discusses the study, and interviews one of its authors.

Just linking the study is strictly less informative since TFA already links to it but adds a lot more context.

Note that correlation is not causation. The study does not show a causative relationship and the relationship could be explained by these folks self-medicating for a pre-existing undiagnosed underlying issue. It might be causative, or it might not - more research is needed.

> Yet research shows that regular users of marijuana are at risk for serious conditions, including strokes, heart attacks, cardiac arrhythmias, heart failure and myocarditis, which is an inflammation of the heart muscle.

I was under the impression that there was a relationship between cardiovascular disease and dementia too.

I expect that inhaling any kind of smoke is going to be contributing factor to those kinds of health problems.

Sure, but that's not the only way of consuming the drug.

Article seems mediocre or worse...

Probably best to keep it in moderation for most folks and occasionally benefit from the introspective or entheogenic effects, which I'd argue outweigh most dangers.

The analgesic effects really do work for some people, it seems via detachment rather than direct anesthetics. If it worked for me, I'd struggle with moderation. While it does shift perspective enough to reinterpret some discomfort in an alleviating manner, it's a bit much for me in exchange.

Recreational use mystifies me, but I'd rather be judged than judge, and regarding these supposed associations with dementia, I find the chronic consumers that I know more mentally fit than most others. I've also, for the hordes of stoners I've known, never observed nor heard of a hospitalization. I have however, observed that the plant and its extracts instill a focused awareness on one's self and previously hidden ailments can be both revealed and sometimes appear exaggerated. I think there's a sensitizing effect, but it's often lost with chronic use.

I consider it a medicine, and given the choice between ineffective legal analgesics, would fear marijuana less than, eg acetaminophen [0] or ibuprofen, which annihilates my stomach.

0. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01638...

One has to wonder: What's cause, and what's effect?

Which came first, the cannabis consumption, or the mental health issues?

I totally agree with some of the other comments: I've seen alcohol consumption lead to MUCH more frequent, and serious, behavioral issues and long term mental and physical health issues.

CNN. I don't think I've ever seen them on the front page.

Anyways, I take gummies about once a week these days. Using them every day is fun for a while but your paying for a new state of mind when you have one for free. IMO, drugs like weed, acid, etc are best used sparingly so they can change your perspective and not to become your only perspective.

Personally I like reading code and studying UI's when I'm high. If you can figure out someone else's code or ui while your high, you know it's good.

I also fuck better. High sex = best sex.

>High sex = best sex.

...surely, a lot must rest on what the other mammal(¿) thinks, especially er....before, during, and after.

As it happens, I've spoken to them about it before, during, and after.

as someone who started from few puffs a day to several blunts a day... wouldn't be surprised to see prolonged marijuana use/abuse linked to not so great outcomes, glad I managed to quite a while back.

This is an awful article, why are journalists so bad at interpreting science?

What journalists are good at? Politics? Economy? Technology? History? Weather? Sports? Anything else?

(Disclaimer: I didn't say they are bad at all of those)

PS. Read the original paper if you don't like the article.