You Had Good Intentions with Weed: You Just Wanted to Feel Better. But Now You Can’t Stop, and You’re Afraid to Admit It. This Was My Story, Too.

Maybe it was PMS. Or a chronic illness. Or depression. Whatever it was, you just wanted the pain to stop, and weed was there to greet you. 

It was there to greet me, too. When I quit Big Pharma.

Before that - before I got addicted – weed was “just a party drug” or to help me sleep when I was too amped up on Adderall. Always around and used often. But I’d never taken it with the conscious intention to “feel better.”

Not until one fateful night that changed everything. 

I was withdrawing from prescription drugs - the Adderall and also birth control - and I was alternating between extreme irritability and just feeling plain dead inside.

It was suggested that I smoke a joint to take the edge off. So I did.

It was my first time smoking in my “new body“ - without any interference from synthetic hormones, or legal speed, or while mixing it with alcohol - and it felt different. 

I remember sitting on the couch that night in amazement, like, “Wow, this stuff REALLY works.” 

After that, I was almost never without weed for an entire decade. Even though weed would end up making me feel irritable and dead inside, too. 

But I couldn’t stop. 

And when I ran out and was desperate for a fix, I’d scrape the bottom of the bowl to take a hit of ashy resin.

Yet I refused to see myself as an addict.

I told myself that weed users were just stigmatized due to “the war on drugs.” That it was a “harmless plant” that “helped” everything from my creativity to a chronic pain disorder I’d been living with.

But the problem is that I wasn’t actually getting any better! My creativity wasn’t flourishing, my chronic pain continued to get worse, and everything else in my life just sort of flat-lined.

I thought I’d gotten off drugs when I quit prescriptions. Yet with weed, I still had no idea who I truly was or what my body felt like completely clean and clear. 

Until I was finally ready to get honest with myself and get off of it. THAT’S when I was able to heal why I felt I “needed” weed – needed any kind of drug – in the first place.

That’s when I was able to learn how to TRULY feel better and to THRIVE without weed.

– Malana