Is Marijuana For You

Given the legalization of marijuana in many states, I wanted to have an open discussion on the ramifications and repercussions of its legalization, and why choosing to use might not be the best choice for everyone.

Marijuana is so readily accepted everywhere now, in both legal and illegal states and in any and every social circle; regardless of its legal status, its use is suggested by so many people for everyone and everything under the sun…it’s a revolution that makes Woodstock look like a quilting circle. Grandmas and grandpas, CEO’s, lawyers, actors, the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker….everyone’s using marijuana, legal or not, and they’re not afraid to tell the world. And the marijuana of today ain’t yo mama’s marijuana…today many people prefer to smoke marijuana wax rather than the green herbacious stuff, because wax is a minimum of 90% pure THC, miles away from the 15% green stuff.

The legalization of marijuana has created a slippery slope. Now it’s basically off the radar for police, meaning that most officers will give a pass for possessing up to a certain amount of it, even in illegal states. The police officers have discretion in the field, and most just confiscate it and maybe write a fine ticket for it, or maybe not…it’s not worth the time or effort for them to fight it any further, even in illegal states. If they just wrote every possessor a fine ticket for marijuana possession, they’d be buried in tickets, so imagine the paperwork if they arrested them all. I watch a live police program on weekends, and the first question an officer asks the driver they’ve pulled over is if they have any weapons or drugs in the car. They then emphasize that “honesty goes a long way” when it comes to their decision-making process in drug possession. Sometimes they’ll employ a K-9 officer to find drugs, and I swear that at least 85% of the cars they pull over contain drugs of some sort. And most times (after the officer makes it clear that they can’t get in trouble for it) a driver will readily admit that they have smoked within the last hour or minutes before getting behind the wheel, or even just smoked while driving. This is apparently due to a general consensus that marijuana doesn’t cause impairment, which is debatable; more recent studies are suggesting otherwise.   

Because marijuana has essentially vacated its spot in the illegal drug hierarchy, the next “least worse” drugs, meaning cocaine and methamphetamine, have moved up, becoming “less illegal” in a way. Now officers even have some discretion when it comes to the possession of cocaine and meth; if the possessor only has a small amount, they may not necessarily go to jail. As hard as it is to believe, I have seen it on the live police program, people issued a ticket for possessing a small amount of coke or meth. The only difference is the type of ticket issued: while a marijuana ticket is just for a steep monetary fine, the ticket for coke or meth possession is essentially an order to appear before a judge, who then decides if the offender goes to jail or gets off with just a steep monetary fine and/ or probation, community service, etc. I wonder if lawmakers ever imagined that the legalization of marijuana in some states would lead to the near decriminalization of even minute amounts of drugs like coke and meth, but it seems it has. Similar to marijuana, I think it’s likely due to the amount of time and effort it takes to haul every coke and/ or meth possessor to jail: small amounts are permissible when weighed in the face of 100% rule of law…it’s certainly faster, easier, and more profitable to fine someone through the nose (no pun intended) than to house them in our overcrowded and expensive jails.  

Enough of the legal ramifications. Of course as a physician, I see the more personal, medical side of the legalization of marijuana. I am literally asked about it by patients every day, and I am a medical marijuana prescribing physician- I jumped through all of the state’s many hoops so that I can prescribe marijuana. I believe that used properly, marijuana has definite value as a drug. The key is for whom. I think it’s good for someone with cancer, with brain tumors, for AIDS, for neurologic disease like ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis), for Crohn’s disease, irritable bowel syndrome, for post-traumatic stress disorder, for specific types of chronic pain, and for certain seizure types. While I don’t prescribe marijuana willy-nilly, I definitely do prefer prescribing marijuana over other controlled drugs like opiates. But as I tell patients, just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s useful for everyone or even reasonable for everyone to use it. In fact, I think that for a subset of the population, up to age 30-ish, marijuana is counterproductive at best and damaging at worst. I call marijuana “the nothing drug.” If you give marijuana to a young developing mind, let’s say someone aged 14, the person belonging to that mind has their life course altered. From the day they start smoking marijuana, nothing happens. Their motivation drops off. They think a lot of good thoughts about what they can do or would like to do, but they do nothing. So nothing gets done. That’s what alters their life course. Dreams are great, but the key is to act on them. I tell my patients that when they use marijuana, nothing happens. Nothing bad, but nothing good. Nothing scary, but nothing awesome. Just nothing. Users do nothing, and if they continue to use habitually, they may amount to nothing. They may not fail, but they definitely will not excel. When you ask that marijuana-smoking 14-year-old what they’ve been up to, they’ll say ‘’nothing.’’ When you ask what they did in school that week, they’ll say ‘’nothing.’ When you ask them what they did over the weekend, they’ll say ‘’nothing.’ When you ask them what happened at the football game, they’ll say ‘’nothing.’’ When you ask them what they do when they get high, they’ll say ‘’nothing.’ Now you get the picture. Marijuana… The Nothing Drug. There’s a PSA campaign for ya’.

Using marijuana is mostly about being alone, being high, and being out of touch. You cause no problems. As a matter of fact, the last thing you want is conflict…it would harsh the mellow. My patients who smoke tell me that when they use it, they just want to keep using it, because it makes them feel so good. But there are qualities to marijuana that make people prone to isolation, where they don’t communicate with others as much. Think about it. When was the last time you went to a wild, raging party with people smoking only marijuana? Do you hear a lot of meeting and greeting, talking and laughing? Nope. But you do hear the sounds of lots of lighters striking and water bongs gurgling. And some muffled coughing- that wierd upper throat/ nasal cough that comes from people holding their breath and trying hard not to cough up the hit they just took. You may hear a woo-hoo or two, but that’ll come from the direction of the couch, which will be replete with reclining stoners. In my experience, people who smoke pot waste a lot of time doing so. It’s the kind of drug that can be used constantly, for hours and days on end, because there’s no concern of overdose. There’s a lot of time wasted, no pun intended, on thoughts not thought through and things left undone. When I warn patients about isolation, I often hear back from them that they do spend time with people, that in fact, they get high with people. I tell them that they may think they’re spending time with friends, getting high with their buddies, but that most of the time they’re getting high and playing video games or listlessly bobbing their heads to music and they just happen to all be in the same room. There’s no real interaction…it’s a very solitary pursuit, but in the presence of others, a mental masturbation marathon.

Obvi, I have many patients that complain that their lives aren’t going well, that they’re depressed and generally unhappy, and many of them smoke marijuana to “relax.” When I ask the marijuana users why they’re unhappy, they seem completely devoid of any insight as to what’s going on. I have a list of questions I ask, and it starts with “How much do you smoke?” I can probably count on one hand the number of people who tell me the truth, that they smoke a lot of marijuana; they always say they smoke “a little” marijuana. When I ask what form they use and how much “a little” is, some admit to using wax, and many tell me they use “only at night, never during the day” like that makes all the difference in the world, given that there are basically 12 hours of night in a 24 hour day.  

The best “medicine” I can dispense to these marijuana-using patients is education. I have given a version of the same talk at least a thousand times, tailored to the patient’s age and condition. It basically goes something like this: “You’re unhappy because marijuana alters you. It makes it so you’re just going through the motions of life; when you’re directed to do something, you can do it, but you never do anything of your own volition. You have no original thoughts or ideas or insight into your life, because you don’t bother to examine it. You don’t have any meaningful interactions with other people. You spend your time playing video games and eating junk food. You never see the sun, unless you have to venture out in daylight for a marijuana-related errand. You’re lacking a creative outlet, because marijuana isn’t conducive to creativity. Marijuana is robbing you of motivation, memory, ambition, desire, and energy. It blunts your emotions so that you feel nothing, so you smoke more to feel high because that’s better than feeling nothing. It’s a vicious cycle. You’re just like a rat on a wheel in a cage.” These facts are why marijuana is most damaging for people up to about age 30, because by this time at the latest they should be expending great effort trying to establish themselves and their lives, deciding where they want to go and setting goals to get there. Instead, they use marijuana and all that goes out the window. For an 80-year-old woman with cancer or rheumatoid arthritis, marijuana isn’t going to affect her life nearly as much as a 20-something-year-old looking for a job or deciding what career path they want to take.

As an example to show that using marijuana is not exclusively for the young, take my patient Frederick, who is 68 years old. He started smoked marijuana at ten and basically smoked all day, every day since. Consequently, he did nothing his whole life, so 58 years. That’s 58 years completely wasted, again no pun intended. Somehow he got on disability years ago. As far as I could tell, his only disability was that he wanted to smoke all day, that he liked to be high. I have another patient, a 23- year-old named Skylar. He’s basically a trust fund baby, living in his parents’ Palm Beach mansion full time while they spend 48 weeks of the year living up in Massachusetts. Skylar’s “job” as caretaker of the mansion, supposedly overseeing a staff of six, has always left him with more than ample time to do, well, nothing…except smoke wax. And he was a hard case, because he was able to afford the strongest wax and he smoked a lot of it- one of the handful that admitted to doing so. I saw him in my office a couple of months ago, and he told me he had wasted enough time using marijuana, he wanted off, and would I help him? Once I recovered from the shock and picked myself up off the floor, I of course told him that I’d be glad to, and I explained the deal. Most people think there’s no withdrawl from marijuana, but that’s not true. There is about a ten day withdrawl period that typically includes insomnia, restlessness, and irritability. It then takes six weeks for green marijuana to eight weeks for wax for all traces of THC to leave the body. I use medications like clonidine and trazodone to minimize the effects of withdrawal, and they make it much easier. At the two-week mark, the four-week mark, the six-week mark and the eight-week mark, patients are amazed at how they feel clearer and clearer at each point. They’re able to see how impaired marijuana was actually making them- they were totally unaware of their impairment at the time, how slow they were, how dopey and lazy. Once it’s completely out of their systems, they tell me how they’re more active, how they’re getting up in the morning and showering and getting dressed, how they’re going outside and exercising, and how things are happening in their lives. I’m happy to report that Skylar was no exception. His withdrawl from marijuana wax was uneventful, and after eight weeks, he was shocked at how different he felt, describing it as like being awake after years of being asleep. For the first time in recent memory, he was thinking, he was weighing his options (now that he had some) and he was planning his future. When I asked his greatest revelations, he said, “I have to make things happen. I have to be proactive. I have to look for and seize opportunities. No one can do that for me.” I really couldn’t have said it better than that. 

Re-reading this, I noticed that I said that marijuana is ‘robbing you’ of this and ‘taking away’ that, but really, marijuana doesn’t take things away from you, you give those things away when you choose to use. Marijuana has its place in treating certain illnesses and diseases; but remember that just because something is legal to use doesn’t make it reasonable to use it. If you’re faced with a choice to use, just think about Frederick, with 58 years wasted, no pun intended, and Skylar, who got a late start in adulting but has an unlimited future…now that he’s no longer letting marijuana limit his present.  

For lots more entertaining stories and information about marijuana and other drugs, check out my book, Tales from the Couch, available on Amazon.com. It makes for a great read and an ever better gift!