I smoked a lot of weed daily (~1gram/day) for almost 10 years. Finally got sick of this life and decided to quit, once I run out of it. First day I was pissed and then I was cured. I always thought that I'm addicted and it will be almost impossible to stop, but turned out I wasn't really addicted.
if the drug helps you cope with things going on in your life and is the only way to cope with them you might as well be addicted. You can physically stop but mentally now coping with life becomes harder. It's like a crutch. Also, anecdotally all people are addicted to something to one degree or another. Some of these addictions are socially acceptable - some are not. Usually when you "quit" what happens is that you replace an addiction with another.
That is one of the “great” things about weed. There really is no physical addiction so once you decide to stop (and avoid the behavior) then you’re pretty much in the clear. The behavior trigger can be strong so I’d recommend not having any in the house and picking up something exciting/interesting to do in the evenings to replace the urge
I have to admit, I once agreed with this position, before I got to a ~5g a day habit. While I was a heavy user (6+ years) I was a strong proponent of legalization etc. "Better than booze", "It's only a gateway because it builds connections with people that have other stuff available".
But there is arguably a physical dependence at that routing usage. First thing every morning, every 1-2 hours another J. I wanted to quit almost every day. I'd have conversations with my partner about quitting every few days. But neither of us could. If we had none we wouldn't sleep for 48+ hours, just didn't happen. Anxiety sets in, stress about everything. You just want to sleep, so you smoke. You go broke you scour the house to find enough coins or bottle to return (EU here) to get .2g to roll once to just get to the next day. You leave the house to do anything and you're so anxious and paranoid you become misanthropic. Only way to deal with it is to go home and "relax" to manage the borderline panic. Just for reference, before I was maybe a bit awkward sometimes but had absolutely no issues with the outside world.
I also don't agree that afterwards you're in the clear. I used to be borderline photographic with my memory. I'd pull random statistics from papers I'd read years earlier in conversation with references that I could use to validate when challenged. I no longer can even remember what I decided to go to the grocery store for, even though it's a ~2 minute walk. I forget what I started a sentence to express while typing. I'm a systems engineer, when I change tabs in an IDE I lose nearly all the context I took with me to the new tab. Sure context switching breaks flow yadda yadda, but it's just different. I don't even remember there was something to remember, just... "why am I here again?"?
I do agree that the behaviour trigger is very strong, so I replaced the urge with League, an arguably far more self-destructive tendency.
The DSM is just a compilation of named clusters of ambiguous and arbitrary symptoms that have been agreed upon by some arbitrary board of psychologist and psychiatrists.
It's not like the DSM is some infallible book of mental disorders backed by rigorous mathematical proofs. Rather, the DSM-V seems to be constantly criticized, lacking evidence, culturally biased, etc., and it mainly benefits health insurance companies more than patients and clinicians.
FWIW, the DSM, ICD-11, Neurology, etc. all have differing definitions of the word addiction.
