Hey folks! Welcome back to another exciting segment of our blog where we give you the low down on cannabis and the culture that comes with it! This week, we’re going to be continuing to break down the stigma surrounding cannabis with an objective look at whether or not cannabis is addictive to any degree. Disclaimer: We’re not doctors. When I write about things in this blog or we talk to you in store about something that has a medical slant to it, we’re simply relaying what we’ve found in our own experiences and by digging around a bit into Health Canada’s publicly available information.
Let’s Define Some Terms
So, it’s important that we define certain terms. For instance, when we say something is addictive, what do we mean? An addiction is generally described as when you have a strong physical or mental desire to do something or consume a substance even if there is a possibility that the activity or substance in question could cause you harm. By that standard I am fully addicted to spicy curries, cause even though I know they’re going to destroy my innards I’m going to eat it gleefully and with reckless abandon.
By that same standard, cannabis can potentially be seen as addictive, especially if you smoke it since you’re willingly inhaling carcinogens (which are harmful) to get at those sweet cannabinoids. However, the same can be said of exercise or a myriad other activities that provide a shot of happy juices to our brain for the low-low price of some short-term bodily harm.
What we REALLY mean when we talk about addiction is the scary stuff: chemical dependency and the symptoms of withdrawal from that dependency. When withdrawing from certain drugs or substances, the human body goes through a period of detoxification that can have some pretty gnarly side effects. It’s hard to watch and I imagine even harder to go through, with some people even dying from the trauma they go through while detoxing. There are also other forms of detoxing you yourself may have experienced. From this perspective, cannabis is not addictive, at least not in a disconcerting health threatening sense. You won’t end up in the hospital with withdrawal symptoms from cannabis, even if you are a chronic smoker who quits cold turkey. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not going to be great to suddenly start facing down reality unfiltered (I hear reality is super overrated), but you won’t have uncontrollable shakes or any of the other side effects of severe withdrawal.
Verdict?
Honestly, the science is taking its sweet time (as it should) on getting back to us with definitive measurements of the potential harm caused by long term cannabis consumption, if any such harm exists. There have never been any fatal cannabis overdoses ever recorded, with opioids and alcohol being the heavy lifters when it comes to fatal overdosing. So, for the time being at least, we can consider cannabis addictive in the sense that you might want it a whole bunch, even when its not a good idea. However, it is non-addictive in the sense that it doesn’t burden its users with a chemical dependency and the awfulness that comes with withdrawing from that dependency.
Hopefully that has helped to shine a bit of a light on this most nebulous of questions. Again, I cannot stress enough that we don’t yet know the long-term effects of cannabis consumption in anything but an allegorical sense; there simply haven’t been enough resources and time committed to studying this topic. Now that science is on the case though, I’m confident we’ll learn more and more about this magical plant and our complex relationship with it.
