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Last edited Tue Oct 15, 2024, 03:03 PM - Edit history (2)

...a few things in answer to your questions.

I am addicted to caffeine and I do experience what can be recognized clearly as withdrawal if I am deprived of it, generally manifested symptomatically as headache. It should be obvious however, that the effort of asserting a parallelism between being an alcoholic and a caffeine addict is extremely superficial to the point of being absurd. There are alcoholics who addiction results in them killing people, most notably in driving, but in other syndromes as well, liver disease, metabolic syndromes, and of course extreme intellectual impairment. The physiologic and intellectual manifestations of caffeine addiction are, while real, much smaller. People are not arrested for driving while caffinated.

This alcohol-pot-caffiene-heroin-cocaine-tobacco equivalence, which I generally hear mostly from pot users and defenders doesn't hold water, at least with those I regard as having cognitive skills. People always like to talk about Carl Sagan, obviously a high functioning pot user. They fail however to speculate as to whether he might have functioned at an even higher level without it. Winston Churchill was a high functioning alcoholic. One may wonder if his special case is an endorsement of alcoholism.

My nephew became addicted to pot just out of adolescence, as an early teen. His mother knew all about it and at first tolerated it, something of which, owing to my scientific background and experience I disapproved, but said nothing, minding my own damn business.

Yes, he has tried to quit. I have heard about efforts many times. I have spoken to him just once about his addiction as his uncle, then only to tell him that I love him and if he needs or wants my help, it's available. I put no pressure on him whatsoever; I just hope for him to pull through though it is obviously beyond my control.

Unsurprisingly he failed out of of college as did his housemates who kept a bong in the living room. Thus he needed to get a job, and through a friend had an opportunity to apply for a high paying skilled job using fairly dangerous equipment requiring clear attention. The management of the company required drug and alcohol testing for reasons I applaud. I explained to his mother the physiology of THC and the pharmacokinetics, the long half life and aspects of the technical approach to testing by mass spectrometry. To the best of her ability she translated this to her son, and because he really did want the job, he tried and failed to quit in the weeks before the test, yet another time after previous efforts. He failed to quit, failed to pass the drug test and failed to get the job. Mind you, he had connections, but they could not waive the requirements.

He has a number of serious issues with a psychological basis, but obviously getting high hasn't cured them. From what I hear, they've only made them worse.

He may never succeed at quitting, although his mother is exhausted by this and other issues, which she shares with my wife. She, like others, has traveled the distance from tolerance to objection.

I'm an old man who came of age in the early 70s. Obviously I knew lots of pot smokers and for that matter alcoholics. I'm not niave as to the consequences which are obvious to me, I claim, as a function of sobriety. I generally don't hang around any more with people who get high; generally I find them uninteresting, as often their lives are about their drug as opposed to the greater world.

OK?