by weedhater » Fri Apr 03, 2015 5:27 am
1. Your age during recovery: mid 20's
2. How long and how much you smoked: a decade. by the end of it: all day every day weed, hash, and hash oil from a large bong and vaporizer collection... a disgusting amount that was impossible to keep track of. I wouldn't go an hour without it. The addiction progressed ever since I first started, I was addicted since the very first time I ever smoked weed and it was constantly getting worse. I started off smoking around once a week, finishing at more than once an hour. When you smoke that much, it's impossible to get 'high' because you never experience a transition from sober consciousness to stoned... your receptors get down regulated and you get braindead.
3. Your withdrawal symptoms: puking my guts out every time I tried to eat food. Lost a good 20 pounds at least. After one month I had my appetite back, that was the hardest part, going all day without eating anything and then eating a banana and puking. I puked hundreds of times during withdrawal. Insomnia, like staying up for a week straight followed by horrible sleep disturbances (sleep paralysis etc.). Severe panic attacks. For 6 months I did not have the motivation to do so much as play video games, I was just staring at a wall waiting it out. I had extreme cravings to the point that I would think about cannabis from morning until night all day, every day obsessively. It was completely f***ed like I was a crack fiend honestly. After the acute withdrawal I began to experience extreme panic attacks that are simply not describable but utter hell. This led me to the emergency room at the hospital multiple times with my heart pounding out of my chest, begging for mercy and telling my family that it was my time to die and that I was sorry for wasting my life. I began to self harm at this point, cutting myself and stuff because of the godawful miserable panic attacks.
After I stopped fiending weed, having realized it was over and I was never going to be able to smoke it again, I began to fiend other drugs. The brain was seeking alternatives, in the words of my addiction doctor. I didn't actually act out on this and use other recreational drugs but it was another phase of withdrawal to go through, for a few months I was fiending for acid and mdma and any sort of consciousness altering drug but I got through that nonsense too - it was just a reaction of fiending the dope for so long. I no longer desire any sort of consciousness altering recreational drugs and I think they are stupid (like how I did before I became a junkie)
4. Time until your symptoms started fading: The physical symptoms were over in a month. The extremely anxiety peaked around 6 months and has been slowly improving ever since. The severe depression lasted around 6 months a year. I will probably never recover from the severe panic disorder that was triggered by abusing this drug, I'm just hoping it doesn't get worse and I go schizophrenic or something.
5. Time until you fully recovered: I will never fully recover. I just have to learn to live with the new me, this newfound extreme anxiety disorder I have picked up. But I will never touch that garbage filth again so long as I live.