Have you tried quitting cannabis even for a few days, and felt bad because of it? Do you have to consume more and more cannabis just to get high at all? And finally, is using marijuana the most or one of the most important things in your life?

If you answered yes to one or more of those questions, reading this article is the most important thing you can do right now because the harsh fact is that 1-3 of every ten people who love marijuana and consume daily are addicted to it. This isn’t just “psychological” addiction—it’s physical addiction that changes your psychological self.

Cannabis addiction happens because plant-based cannabinoids radically change neuroreceptor networks in your body, decreasing and interrupting your body’s production and distribution of natural neurotransmitters and hormones. Chronic, long-term marijuana use shrinks and otherwise damages brain areas responsible for learning, memory, and emotion.

When you stop using cannabis, your body is left without the external chemicals it counts on, and with altered brain structure, so you experience withdrawal.

Chronic marijuana use is bad for you even if you don’t yet feel the bad effects, and cannabis addiction and withdrawal aren’t drug war lies—they’re well documented by science. I include links to legit studies at the end of this article, and embed the following science video to prove it:

Being hooked on weed, and cannabis withdrawal symptoms, are not always as crippling as being addicted to or quitting heroin, other opiates, or alcohol. However, they’re often worse than addiction and withdrawal from other addictive substances like caffeine and nicotine.

Marijuana addiction may have a genetic component, but more often, it occurs because your lifestyle and situation don’t make you happy. Marijuana makes you feel good without effort, so you use marijuana instead of doing the work of changing your life so you naturally feel good.

Even medical marijuana use can become addictive. For example, some people medicate after work or when they want to get to sleep. Pretty soon, they can’t de-stress from work, or sleep, without using cannabis first.

Chronic marijuana use alters your internal chemistry so much that after a while you can’t get high anymore, or at least not as high as you’d get if you only used marijuana a couple of times a month. This is called marijuana “tolerance.”

On the Growing Marijuana Perfectly team, marijuana tolerance is an embarrassing logistical problem, because we test-grow marijuana strains, but we’re so high all the time we can’t evaluate potency of recently harvested buds. Along with sending buds to analytics labs, we give them to infrequent users (the majority of marijuana users) to find out if the buds are potent and what their effects are.

Marijuana addiction and withdrawal are official psychiatric diagnoses, but currently there are no medications or non-drug therapies designed for and proven to beat marijuana addiction or alleviate marijuana withdrawal symptoms.

One sure way to know if you’re addicted is to quit for at least a week and see if you experience withdrawal symptoms, which include the following, and can last for a month or longer after total cessation:

  • Insomnia, and if you manage to get to sleep, vivid nightmares.
  • Depression, anxiety, anger, mood swings, irritability.
  • Body aches and pains.
  • Digestive disorders.
  • If you’re a medical marijuana user, problems that cannabis helped you with often reappear with increased intensity.

When members of our team get to the point where we’re consuming 15 grams or more of the highest potency buds or taking multiple dab pulls per day, we’re forced to break our addiction using a combination of the following techniques:

  • Micro-dosing psychiatric anti-depressants. The best are bupropion, mirtazapine, trazadone, but all psychiatric drugs have serious side-effects. That’s why we microdose by not using them every day, and using only the tiniest effective fraction of recommended dose.
  • Using non-pharmaceutical supplements that boost dopamine, serotonin, and other neurotransmitters impacted by addictive marijuana use. The best are L-Dopa, available as Dopa-Bean from the Solaray vitamin company, and L-Trytophan and L-Theanine, made by Jarrow. Caffeine is also useful, but caffeine itself is highly addictive, and has harmful side effects including insomnia.
  • We will do a separate article about marijuana and sleep, but this supplement often works well enough to reduce insomnia: Source Naturals’ Serene Science L-Theanine with Magnesium and GABA. Melatonin is also commonly used, but it works well for some people and not at all for others.
  • Substituting hardcore exercise for marijuana use boosts feel-good chemicals, especially if it’s a team sport rather than solo.
  • Choosing admirable goals such as career/income enhancement, completing a college degree, making music or art, to give you something to look forward to other than getting high.
  • Joining addiction support groups, but not ones like 12-step, NA, AA, Narcanon that either require you to believe in an invisible god or “higher power,” or are  based on faulty data, such as Narcanon (which is a Scientology front).
  • Professional counseling from an addiction specialist, but not “faith-based” or New Age counselors.
  • Getting more involved in positive social interaction, such as volunteering, sports teams, going to college. Social isolation is a common lifestyle for addicted marijuana users, but social interaction boosts dopamine and other happy-mood internal chemistry. Socialize with sober people who are not dependent on marijuana and rarely if ever use it. Hanging around other marijuana addicts is not a helpful social interaction when you’re trying to abstain.
  • Watch embedded video from statured Stanford scientist Dr. Andrew Huberman, who has the most accurate, reliable health/fitness/happiness channel on YouTube. When marijuana cravings hit you, you fight back better when you remember data on how bad addiction is for you.
  • Read Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards’ memoir, Life. It’s a scary addiction story, although Keith’s addictive drugs of choice are alcohol, heroin, cocaine, and tobacco, not cannabis.
  • Isolate yourself from marijuana during abstinence. Studies show that chronic, heavy marijuana users need at least 31 days of total abstinence before their body systems at least partially reset to normal baseline. If you have piles of buds within easy reach, it’s harder to quit using.

The last bullet point bleeds over into breaking marijuana tolerance. You could have marijuana tolerance syndrome without being addicted to marijuana, but the two usually occur together.

Marijuana tolerance occurs when your system is so saturated with external cannabinoids that it doesn’t have the capacity to make you feel high anymore.

Some people claim a tolerance break of 2-3 days is enough to reset you so the next time you get high, it feels like the first time, when getting high was so intense and exciting. But that’s not backed by science or most users’ experience. If you totally abstain from cannabis for only 2-3 days, you might feel the next high more intensely than before you abstained, but not very much more. A tolerance break of at least 10-14 days is more likely to reset you so you get a better high, using less than before.

You should also reduce how often you use cannabis, and how much you use at each session.

There are people who use the strongest cannabis all day every day for years and function well enough, but not as well as if they used less and less often. Others can use marijuana constantly, then quit cold turkey whenever they want, with no withdrawal syndrome.

For me personally, however, breaking marijuana addiction has been the hardest challenge ever, harder than Marine boot camp, for example.

The first 2-3 weeks are truly, horrifyingly miserable. I sometimes consider suicide during that period. Sometimes it takes as long as 6-7 months to truly clean out my mental and physical self so I am as cannabinoid-clean as a person who’s never used marijuana. I’ve known hardcore users who had to go into rehab to kick cannabis!

During abstinence, my craving for getting high is as intense as heartbreak and craving experienced after losing a favorite long-time lover. It truly tests your soul, integrity, and love of self.

The good news is that using less marijuana less frequently makes each high way better. It also makes sobriety better. I rediscover that I can feel ecstatic, euphoric, and energized without relying on marijuana. Activities like extreme exercise, Nature exploration, making music, dancing, socializing, going to college are often more dopamine-boosting and fun that marijuana ever could be.

Chronic, heavy marijuana use, addiction, and tolerance are especially bad for people under age 25 because they create permanent, negative, often irreversible changes in physical and psychological structure that plague you the rest of your life.

You want to be honest with yourself and realize that anything or anyone who makes you feel really really good can become your master, and you their puppet.

If you want to enjoy marijuana without it owning you, this article and the embedded science video and scientific study links (look below the Puppets video) are going to save your life. If you don’t break marijuana addiction, this incredible song will continue to be your theme song…

Marijuana addiction and withdrawal science:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6223748

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2764234