I have a problem-I have been addicted to marijuana for over 9 years and desperately want to stop. HELP!!?

Hello. I have a problem-I have been addicted to marijuana for over 9 years and desperately want to stop because it is expensive. More importantly, to get a good job I will need to pass random drug tests. Despite my wish to stop,I have never been able to because of the depression of withdrawal and the strong cravings to use. How long does the withdrawal last? The longest I could go without using during this past year is 2 days. Whenever I am sober, I experience moderate to severe depression, mood swings, anxiety, anger, fatigue, loss of appetite, insomnia, nausea, and a diminished interest in the world.When does this start to get any better? Do you think I should seek professional help or is it just that I haven’t tried hard enough, been strong enough? I didn’t know that marijuana can be so addictive.Any help would be appreciative, but personal attacks aren’t(”if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it at all”)…

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3 Steps to Help You Stop Being Addicted to Marijuana

Are you addicted to marijuana? You probably didn’t think so until you decided or were told you had to quit but weren’t very successful at stopping your pot smoking habit on your own. You need help! Being addicted to marijuana is not only illegal because it is a drug but that it also has negative effects on your social and family life. Fortunately, there are many programs and tips that are available to you if you are serious about kicking your weed addiction.

Mental Preparation

The first thing you need to do is prepare yourself mentally for this journey. How your prepare yourself mentally is going to be one of determining factors of successfully you can stop being addicted to marijuana.

You are going to have to mentally prepare for all of the mental and physical signs an symptoms you will have to deal with while trying to quit. You are going to encounter symptoms of withdrawal that you are going to have to deal with. These could be minor or strong depending on how strong your addiction to marijuana is.

You are also going to have to deal with cravings. You need to mental prepare for situations and how you are going to handle any cravings that will arise from your quitting. What are you going to replace these cravings with? Are you going to exercise, eat, sew, read, or anything that keeps your mind off of the cravings. Having yourself mentally prepared to deal with all of the emotional effects of quitting is going to make you just that much more successful when trying to quit.

Make a “Stop Smoking Plan”

Isn’t there a famous quote, “Without a plan you cannot succeed”? This is true if you are trying to stop being addicted to marijuana. You will need a plan. You need to sit down and plan everything out. Make a list of things that you know you need to do and of things you know are going to happen. Then use this list to come up with ideas and strategies for handling these different things or situations on your list. It is important for you to know how you are going to handle certain things when they arise or you might slip and fall back into some unhealthy habits. You plan is what is going to lead you to success in your fight against your battle with weed.

Social Influences

The number one reason many people fail at try to quit smoking pot is they do not have the support from their friends. The reason behind this is many of their friends are users also, so they try to influence them to not quit and keep smoking weed. This is one of the toughest areas to correct when trying to stop being addicted to marijuana. The reason is you risk losing your current friend and family. The only way to stop smoking pot and clean yourself up is to surround yourself with people who support you and do not use the drug. You might have to make very difficult decisions on avoiding your friends and family members that smoking or you might even have to make an even more difficult decision of complete cutting off contact with them until the clean themselves up so you don’t relapse back into smoking pot again.

Can You Get Addicted to Marijuana?

As far as real drug addictions go, does marijuana really qualify as being a true addiction? Some people debate the idea that it could be a real addiction because there are generally no physical consequences when stopping the use of the drug. But on the other hand, a lot of people seem to depend heavily on smoking weed every single day of their lives and in this respect it seems like the drug might very well be more addictive then we once thought.

So what is the real truth here? Is it addictive? Or do people just fall into the patterns and the lifestyle naturally and want to keep getting high? Where do we draw the line and say that this behavior is real addiction?

Let’s think for a second about what real addiction is. We can look at the medical definition, the definition in the dictionary, what behaviorists believe addiction is, and so on. For the purposes of our discussion, we are going to define addiction as this: when someone has lost the power of choice regarding their behavior. That is real addiction and almost no one would argue that someone in this state of being is not addicted. If they have truly lost the power to decide whether to take or leave a drug, then that is real addiction.

Does this happen with marijuana use? Yes it does. Most people who try marijuana get high a few times and then move on with their lives. The same would go for thousands of young people who try alcohol or other drugs for the first time in their life. It is just another experience for them and they move on and don’t really think much of it.

But for a small percentage of people out there, they try a drug such as marijuana and they are hooked. They are off to the races. The drug lights up their life and they get excited and passionate about it. They obsess over it and want to do it all the time. This is addiction. What typically happens next is that the person will start to slowly restructure their life so that they are living a lifestyle that involves heavy smoking of marijuana. In other words, they drift away from friends who do not smoke weed and start making new friends who do use marijuana all the time. They start to focus and plan their activities around smoking weed and planning and scheming for ways to buy and get more of it. This is the obsessive element that accompanies any addiction. It happens with marijuana and this is just more evidence that it is an addictive drug.

Now of course, there are some who content that weed is not really addictive because there are almost no physical side effects when you stop using it suddenly. This is actually not true in heavy smokers and some people do experience signs of a withdrawal that include sluggishness and fatigue. But also, it is obvious to me that smoking weed is very addictive mentally and many people use it on a daily basis in order to escape their reality. Another way to say it is if you are relying on marijuana use on a regular basis in order to make it through your day, then that is basically using the chemical instead of coping with real life. This is an immature way to live and if you cannot walk away from such a pattern very easily then you are probably addicted to the drug.

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