Marijuana Abstinence Support Thread

This is a very good point, and I think it definitely suggests something to be guarded against: allowing a promise of 'future use' to just restart the addiction cycle.

For me personally, I think it helps to not think of drugs as single-minded things, to recognize their complexities. I can recognize that there were times in my life when cannabis has been helpful, times when it is was pleasurable, times when it enhanced my life. It was my abandonment of using it at the appropriate times, of keeping it within limits, that made it turn into just a bad thing for me. But in the future, if all conditions of my mentality was different, how I'd approach the drugs would be different to.

I can allow myself the possibility that, when I repair my mindset, I might be able to use drugs without dosing higher and higher, more and more frequently. At the moment I can't. But I recognize there are some toxic parts of my mindset that lead it to be this way. And I don't blame cannabis for that, it's a drug without any moral quality good or bad. My mindset has been toxic, and the drug has teamed up with my toxic mindset to be self-harm. But my mindset might yet be repaired. And in the future when my mindset is repaired, if I can get there, I can imagine that I wouldn't even really anymore desire to use drugs to such an extent that I push away my own judgement.

I know that some people get sobriety by the AA-type mantras, saying that the drug has made their life unmanageable and that they can never be near the drug again without losing control. I respect this, and I recognize that my life has been unmanageable with drugs too. But I reject their notion that one will always be unmanageable around drugs, that one has to treat it such that one small whiff will send one into a spiral. This seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me. I want to be able to use some drugs, especially mushrooms, with moderation. And giving up weed for me is a desire to promote the value of moderation within me - acknowledging that I've lacked self-control with it for a while now, but not trying to appeal to god or something else as a way to say I'm *never* going to have true self-control (which I feel AA does).

Instead of the AA mindset these two ideas are fueling my sobriety: first the idea of debt. Having used cannabis excessively for years, I will continue to deal with deficits months after not using them. I have to restore this debt before thinking about using cannabis again - and that'd likely be many years, to restore the balance caused by years of misuse. Second, I think about the reason for use. For years my reason for using has been to numb pain and cope with life. Right now the idea of using drugs for pleasure is unthinkable for me; and so it is not possible for me to use them in the right mindset, and I'd have to substantially improve psychologically before I even could have a right mindset.

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