Driving home tonight, the radio was on a station I don’t normally listen to and the Dr. Drew show was on. He got a call from a young man, age 23, about to graduate college and become a teacher. The man admits to smoking marijuana daily since about age 16. Man wants to know how long he needs to stop smoking pot in order to pass his drug test to become a teacher. Dr. Drew tells him two months, tells him he is a marijuana “addict”, responds that there is no such thing as “psychological addiction”, says every marijuana “addict” he treats in California has their medical marijuana card (well, duh, who wants to be arrested?), tells the young man that the marijuana “addiction” has put him in denial and led to “drug motivational” thinking because the young man admitted he only wanted to know how long to stop smoking so he could pass and then start smoking again after he became a teacher.
The problem I have with the Dr. Drew show I heard is this reflexive labeling of someone who uses marijuana daily as an “addict”. This young man sounds like he’s doing OK. He’s graduating college at age 23, just about right on time. He’s becoming a teacher. If he was drinking a beer every day, would he be an alcoholic? Would his promise to drink beer after he became a teacher be an example of “alcoholic motivational thinking?” The only problem he has is the illegality of marijuana and the idiocy of collecting people’s urine to judge their fitness for teaching children.
Some people have an unhealthy relationship with cannabis. According to NIDA, about 9% of users can develop marijuana dependence. All I ask is that Dr. Drew make it clear that 91% of us are not dependent, we just like to use cannabis! Like Hunter S. Thompson said, it’s like beer, ice, and grapefruit – you could live your life without it, but why?
To be fair, Dr. Drew also says that if you want to smoke pot, go ahead, he doesn’t want to stop anyone, but if you want to stop and want help he can help you. (For a hefty fee, of course, though I think he failed to mention that.) I think he’s probably not in favor of arresting and imprisoning pot smokers. But when all you’ve got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail – he’s a drug counselor who sees only the most desperately addicted day after day, so every pot smoker looks like a future client to him.
He also mentioned Marijuana Anonymous. Now I know my Twelve Steps, Twelve Traditions, Thirteen Articles of Faith (whoops, wrong religion)… my father was an alcoholic and speed addict who then went through recovery, AA, NA, then got a BSW and became a drug and alcohol counselor when I was a teenager. I can spout Stuart Smalleyisms with the best of them. I know many people whose lives were saved by that program, but it was never for me – way too quasi-religious for my tastes.
As I read the “Twelve Questions” that Marijuana Anonymous asks regarding marijuana use in an effort to help you understand if you’re an “addict”, I can’t help but notice how many of the questions merely observe an effect of marijuana prohibition, rather than any particular problem with marijuana use. For example:
#4. Do you find that your friends are determined by your marijuana use? (Well, yes, because outlaws tend to hang with outlaws. I’d love to have more friends that don’t smoke marijuana, but they tend to be afraid of visiting a home where police may burst in at any moment to arrest “criminals”.)
#7 Does your marijuana use let you live in a privately defined world? (Sure! It’s not often that people who are breaking the law like to make that world public.)
#9 When your stash is nearly empty, do you feel anxious or worried about how to get more? (Yes, because I can’t buy it at a store like a six-pack or a cigar.)
#11 Do you plan your life around your marijuana use? (You mean like avoiding national parks, non medical marijuana states, and states with per se DUID laws while on vacation? Or finding clandestine places to smoke marijuana? Sure!)
I also notice how the questions are only scary if you begin with an assumption that regular marijuana use is problematic. If you asked me some of these “Twelve Questions” about my dog, I could give you “yes” answers, does that mean I’m a Jack Russell Terrier “addict” (I am!)
#1 Has walking your dog stopped being fun? (Yes, but not always.)
#2 Do you ever play with your dog alone? (Sure, sometimes being alone with your dog – or getting high alone – is a nice way to relax.)
#3 Is it hard for you to imagine a life without your dog? (Impossible!)
#6 Do you play with your dog to cope with your feelings? (He’s the best buddy to have on a down day – just like pot!)
Addiction is a powerful thing and I just hate the way it is tossed about by pop psychologists like Dr. Drew and Marijuana Anonymous. Yes, there is a consistent theme among those who abuse anything – pot, gambling, sex, shopping, internet, alcohol, heroin, etc. – but “addiction” should be reserved for those substances that alter the body’s chemistry to the point where there is an undeniable physical need for the substance and without it severe complication can arise. Sorry, but if you force the pot smoker, gambler, shopper, or World of Warcraft player to go cold turkey, they do not risk death, but the alcohol, cocaine, meth, and heroin addict may die. The former people may have a serious psychological dependence, but the latter people have a physical addiction.
Maybe it’s just me and my love of language. I feel calling people with marijuana dependence “addicts” cheapens and demeans the people who are truly physically addicted to serious drugs. (Watching your father kick alcohol and speed cold turkey at age eleven will leave a lasting impression. Show me the marijuana “addict” puking, trembling, hallucinating, screaming, and crying from not having a joint for three weeks and I’ll buy the “addict” label.)
Re: non-pot users not wanting to hang out with pot users. I was never a pot user but lived in S.F. in my early 20s and did indeed hang around a lot of them. I honestly just got sick of how boring they were while they were on the stuff (and otherwise they were really quite interesting people!) But sitting around talking to them, while they were smoking? Ugh. I hate getting that watery-eyed stare as they look at you and slowly try to comprehend what you’re saying. THIS is why the non-potheads are staying away from you, not because we fear the law. At least a couple of drinks (notice I did not say “drunk”) make a person a little more chatty and lively!
In the new season of Celeb Rehab Dr. Drew is at it again. He claims there is physical withdrawal from pot that lasts 7-14 days and is very difficult to get through! When I was a teen I smoked every day. One day I just stopped and didn’t smoke again for 20 years while I raised my kids. I did not have a single withdrawal symptom. No problems wwhatsoever. Now, if I don’t have my coffee in the morning I will have a migraine in the afternoon. If I don’t smoke a bowl today? Nothing, I’ll just look forward to it tomorrow. What’s addictive?
Oh, I covered that. In fact, Dr. Drew and I had a direct (well, Twitter-direct) conversation over that incident. http://stash.norml.org/dr-drew-controversy-over-lindsay-lohan-comments-with-his-tweets-to-radical-russ
While we’re on the subject of Dr. Drew’s credibility let’s not forget that he ADMITTEDLY stated that he would attempt to frame Lindsy Lohan for drugs she did not use or possess in an effort to secure her presence on his reality t.v. show Celebrity Rehab. He begged for her to sign on for season two and offered her loads of money. When she refused he threatened to FRAME her by stashing drugs on her person and residence in order to get a court order for her to attend rehab freeing her options up to apear on his show. This isn’t a myth or a tabloid story, it happened, Google will tell you all you need to know.
So while he is deamonizing cannabis and it’s users keep in mind his entire career and financial life depends on the belief that cannabis is evil and without it he would have no celebrity persona, no lucrative practice, and yes no reality t.v. show.
Keep that in mind while you take his word on these issues.
BTW framing any persons for any crime is a federal offense of the first degree. The fact that he was willing to break these federal laws for the sake of ratings and money is no different than anyone who sells drugs or robs a bank for money.
Based on this it is clear that Drew Pinsky is indeed nothing more than a desperate criminal himself.
I think that what should be done, in light of these debates, is that a classification system should be drawn up based upon the strength and intensity of the withdrawal symptoms of the drug as well as other factors.
First off I would like to say I enjoyed the article because it definitely challenged what these mainstream have been pushing in recent times. I have to say I am in agreement that I don’t feel like certain things should be called “addiction”, but the definition of addiction in and of itself is broad enough to support many different behaviors.
“Addiction – the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma.”
In my opinion it is awfully vague. If you turn on your t.v. today you can see that there are shows that follow people with all sorts of “addictions” to things that don’t produce harmful withdrawals such as sugar, cleaning products, foods, ingesting harmful substances…
So it would seem that basically anything you can think of can, in theory based upon definition, become an addiction.
If it were up to me I’d probably just change the definition of addiction. But I suppose that rather than do that it would be easier to just work with it and instead just work with is and draw up a classification system. For example certain substances could fall under Class A addictions (Class A addictions could be defined as having harmful withdrawals and producing extreme behaviors to avoid withdrawals…etc) and then of course the majority of the harder substances (Meth, Heroine, Crack…) could fall under that….
While the system wouldn’t have a huge impact at first. If it were accepted, people could then begin to debate and try to implement change based on that system. For example, one could debate that people with “Class D” addictions should not be forced to go to rehab.
That’s just my idea though. Great article.