In my city alone, there are 4 dispensaries for every single Tim Hortons all in less than a 5km radius. Canadians used to joke that you can't drive down any road without coming across a Timmies. Today, you can't look in any direction without seeing a dispensary in the distance. Hell you can't walk outside for less than 10 minutes without smelling someone lighting up in a parking lot.
As for me, I've been smoking weed since I was 15. My dad used to own these massive jars that he would stock like half a kilo of weed in, and every once in a while I would take a few grams and ration it for as long as possible. I smoked a lot, and it, along with other drugs did some irreparable damage to my brain. It got so bad I was making homemade gravity bongs. If you somehow know what that is and how to make them then I would highly suggest quitting weed as soon as possible cause that means you've entered the stage where you cannot afford to waste any cloud of smoke if it means getting as high as possible. It was my main tool for rationing the bit of weed I would steal every month and it completely annihilated my lungs to the point where I could no longer pace around my room without being out of breath.
Potheads absolutely love explaining to you about how far weed is from a gateway drug but what they fail to understand is that nobody falls down the slippery slope of substance use without crossing the legal and social barriers necessary to do so.
If you buy your first baby pre-roll at a legal dispensary, you probably aren't going to do coke. Because all they sell is weed. But anyone knows that the guy you bought your weed from in high school never sells JUST weed, and the people you hung around that you knew you could get weed from, never JUST smoked weed. Now maybe you're not gonna smoke weed one day, shoot fent the next. But you will likely smoke weed one day, end up on Xanax another day, and do DXM the next if you are around the right people. And that is because you are someone who is not only crossing a legal barrier, but a social one too. Your network is the biggest determining factor in what kind of decisions you make. But as a teenager I ignored this fact in pursuit of pleasure.
When you wake up in someone else's garage 2 cities over sweating like a pig while your heart is beating so fast it feels like it's going to pop before realizing that your phone, along with all your money and government ID was stolen from you; checks of reality begin raining down on you reminding you that all the bad decisions you made has led you to this point. The next logical step you take being cutting your contacts and now all you're left with is a substance use disorder. That's what you deserve for having no parental guidance during your adolescent years. But the past 1-2 years you spent putting bullshit into your body to feel good is now ingrained within your habits so it's not like you can just quit cold turkey without wanting to bust your skeleton out of your meat suit because you think your skeleton is the part of your body that is sentient or some shit. So now you're stuck at home as a NEET doing nothing but rotting, doing drugs, and occasionally doing something productive, or something "productive" like watching anime or playing a story driven video game. At the time, this group of people was all I had and it completely ruined my development.
Enjoy relapsing every few months, or years if you're lucky, and spending an unprecedented amount of time, money and energy optimizing your habits to only favour certain drugs just to minimize cravings for stronger ones as if it is a prescription medication.
Now, I'm not a very big fan of laws. Traffic laws. Intellectual Property laws. Drug possession laws. Zoning laws. Laws that require you to censor genitals in pornography. Laws that prevent me from calling white boys niggers and cops niggerhogs. But even then, I don't believe that legalizing crack will absolve it from being a "gateway drug", and that's especially the case if everything gets legalized. If you only buy crack legally from a "thank you, have a nice day" millennial on a minimum wage salary, you aren't gonna hit up the sketchy plug to get you a bottle of codeine. That's too scary and unfamiliar not to mention unregulated and risky. But if both were sold the same way alcohol, tobacco, and weed is sold then it would only be a matter of going across the street, or just adding it to your online pick-up order. In this sense, every drug is a gateway drug, which has always been the case. When coffee stops working, you move on to Adderall. When that gets boring, you move onto coke. It always starts with self-medicating.
If you are a NEET. Drugs 90% of the time are not worth it and will only do harm. That includes psychedelics, and that especially includes weed. As a matter of fact weed will probably rape your brain to a cripple.
Look, if you're a NEET, there is a very high chance that you are already a lazy cunt. Which is fine, so am I, and so are most people with jobs. But as a NEET you are contained within your own personal environment 24/7 surrounded by all your favourite video games and manga and anime with very little responsibilities to worry about that aren't related to sustaining your existence. Let me explain just how damaging weed is to the mind of a NEET.
First off, the unemployed homebody runs on sleep. With a lack of sunlight and physical exercise, the most important thing that ties back to your mental health is getting quality sleep. You may think that smoking an indica right before bed will improve your quality of sleep but that couldn't be further from the case.
Smoking weed affects your REM sleep, which is the most important stage in your sleep cycle. What this stage does is quite literally trim fat off your synapses allowing neurons to reach target areas more effectively. This means information you absorb the previous day, emotions, and learned behaviors get implanted into your mind during this cycle and ensures you can remember things, and regulate your emotions better.
Shut this stage off and your brain becomes bloated. Neurons cannot get to where they need to go, and you end up having far less control of how your brain operates. You become increasingly more frustrated, you have trouble learning new things, and very simple tasks like reading a paragraph feels as if you've become dyslexic. Even something as simple as speaking becomes a workout. I honestly believe that chronic weed usage gave me a speech impediment.
Another thing that happens when disabling your REM sleep is that you no longer dream. Now this is only temporary for the night you shut your REM sleep off, and whether you consider this a good or a bad thing is up to your situation. If you hate the kind of dreams you are having, or have reoccurring dreams where bad things happen to you, then smoking that za before bed may be a remedy, but you should understand the trade-off that comes with this. Your dreams may suck, but a less than functional brain could potentially be worse.
Weed is poison to the mind of a NEET who is gifted with time that could fill the entire area of China's Forbidden City to learn and do literally anything. To make full use of this requires a healthy brain with healthy sleeping habits, and weed is something that will place endless potholes on your track. A weed addiction to a NEET is like having cancer. You need to get off that shit immediately if you care at all about your cognitive ability. And let's not even begin about what weed will do to your fontal lobe's development. If you're a young NEET, it's even more imperative that you avoid this shit like the plague, because for every year you are a chronic user you are gonna be subtracting 2 iq points and potentially giving yourself a personality disorder.
Any homebody I know with a long term weed dependency has become a hollow husk of a human. An unthinking specimen with zero awareness of their own being, going through the motions each day only to sustain it's existence. Repeating the same day every single day like they are on autopilot as they stuff their face with junk and throw fits over the smallest little inconveniences. They lose their ability to read, operate a vehicle and have a conversation with anyone over anything. Many of them are also on SSRIs and ADHD medication. Just bleak. To think that I am similar to them makes my skin crawl. Makes me want to kill myself because the damage I've already done nonstop for 8 years. Don't worry I'm not killing myself ever, but it really gets to you, especially when you are living through that kind of experience. You feel beyond saving, like you already died years ago and you're a low iq invader operating the body of a once intelligent person.
So much time wasted, and for what? Watching moeshit and eating Little Caesars? Scrolling Instagram reels? Sleeping for zero benefit? Endlessely stuffing your face with fried foods and sugar bombs? Gooning for 2 hours straight to questionable material? Smoking a bowl because you think it will make you more creative but all you end up doing is watching bullshit on YouTube that you can't even invest half your attention into? What a fucking waste, man.
If you are someone who is already deep within the weed dependency rabbit hole, then the number one thing you need to understand is that you have already caused a ton of irreparable damage that you cannot come back from. Now it's probably not as bad as you might think. A lot of the brain fog that you experience on the day to day is mainly due to dormant THC lurking around in your brain that wont go away due to daily usage. The easy way of correcting this? Stop smoking.
Might be easier said than done, but listen, all you need is 2 days away from weed, and the cravings vanish. Now, you will still have some brain fog here and there. THC will still be stored in your fat cells for about a month, and you may have urges to smoke before things like eating, or watching a movie, or going to bed; but this is good because it's where your willpower will be put to the test.
Here's why you shouldn't worry:
WEED DEPENDENCY HAS BARELY NOTICABLE WITHDRAWAL SYMPTOMS.
You may have a mild headache. You may be bored. You may feel as if "ooo I neeeeeed it so i can draaaawwww or writteeeee or paaaainnttt or editttttt"
But that's faggot shit for silly little lazybones. You wanna be a lazybones? All you need to do is brute force it for 2 days and those cravings will go away. Weed is hands down the easiest drug to quit cold turkey. You aren't a cokefiend, you aren't a fentgoblin, nor are you a methhead. There is zero excuse to not being able to quit weed cold turkey, granted you are someone who wants to quit.
But now you have the problem that many people fail to address, which is that there needs to be some way to keep your mind off the za. But this is easy. If you are a chronic weed user, then you are most likely going to be someone who flocks toward escapism.
NEETbros.... There are so many escapism replacements out there.... You are on a magic box right now! Use it to escape!
Now, the immediate alternatives are not necessarily healthy, but they are unlikely to kill your braincells. Unless you're doomscrolling or some shit.
Here's an easy one. Consume art. Video games, movies, anime, books. Whatever, just consume it. Escape into another world. Or better yet, make your own art. Escape into your own sober world. Or better yet, go outside, ideally away from a dispensary. Or better yet, lose yourself into learning some kind of skill, which is something that every NEET should be doing. Doesn't matter what it is, and honestly it doesn't even matter if it's a financially viable skill. Just put your brain to work.
Doesn't matter what it is. If it gets your mind off the weed, or other drugs for that matter, then you solved your problem.
Relapse will inevitably happen. It's just a curse that's been put on you unfortunately. Maybe one day you're too stressed, or some big life event happens that makes you depressed. But if you are someone who is actively working towards getting yourself away from drugs, then this is something you will end up figuring out as long as you are in the right environment, and staying away from the places and people that put you there in the first place. This is a whole other can of worms, but maybe I will write about this in more detail in the future.
The main point I want to forward is that weed is more than just gay. It is far more damaging than any of the pro-weed propaganda has made it out to be. Your brain is the most complex and fascinating organ in your entire body. NEETs have an obligation to protect that organ as much as possible, far more than normal people, because you are someone who is highly vulnerable to developing a substance use disorder. Even more so if you're depressed, have trauma, or are just so bored everyday that you wanna kill yourself.
Now let me briefly go over the drugs that I commonly see NEETS use:
Highly addictive, but generally safe. Yes, cocaine is safe, at least as far as "hard drugs" are concerned, but I really cannot stress enough about how addictive it is. Cocaine directly interacts with your dopamine receptors in very unnatural ways. However, most of the dangers that come with cocaine are the fact people tend to mix it with alcohol. Please for the love of God, don't mix it with alcohol. Is it better than weed? In my opinion, yes, but only because it's much easier to be functional on cocaine than you can with weed which essentially immobilizes you. I was able to use coke to get a ton of work done during my early years of video editing, but I was on a rather lower dose. Extremely addictive, but I personally was able to control it far better than I can with weed. If you are going to use cocaine, use it with extreme caution. Clean your nostrils, and try not to eat a lot during the day cause it's gonna make you shit.
There is no drug that is as universally loved more than alcohol. Literal poison. You are consuming actual poison with this stuff. But it has been with humanity for longer than civilization itself. Alcohol is humanity's best friend. Anyways I see no reason why you can't drink alcohol. Yeah, it's bad for your liver but who cares lol. You can still be functional as a drinker. Just try to avoid day drinking too much. Just please don't mix alcohol and coke it will probably kill you.
I fucking hate psychedelics and the culture surrounding it. I hate how people think just because a drug has no physiological effects on an individual it is somehow safe. Fucking baloney. Medium to high doses of LSD and psilocybin has serious, and potentially permanent effects on your personality. Far too often have I seen cases of people taking >4g of mushrooms or 200mcg of LSD and are then just make extreme changes in their life and end up regretting it heavily several months later. I've had people quit their jobs, burn bridges with people, or just become barely functional schizos who are impossible to talk to. The shit these drugs do to your personality cannot be understated. Be careful. Start low. Never make a big jump. Never do them alone unless you are highly experienced. These drugs are not something you can just fuck around with. They are more dangerous than people make them out to be.
Unless you are someone who really likes smoking, cigarettes are a complete waste of money. I smoke a lot, but I really get zero psychological benefit out of it. The only reason I smoke today is because it gives me a reason to go outside and stand around for 5 minutes. It's just chill and it feels cool to do. If you're someone who just wants to chill without interrupting your day too much than an occasional beer and cigarette will be fine. Blah blah blah lung cancer and gum disease blah blah blah child gore on my cigarette packets. Half our body is made of plastic anyway. If you're Canadian go visit any smoke shop on a native reserve and get your smokes there.
Consistency is more or less the same, but now it just tastes like nothing. I got that true neutral load. The biggest difference actually since I've been taking these multivitamins is that my libido is much higher. I think it's due to the zinc content in the supplement which is 11mg.
I've run dry on my smokes so I'm pretty much just gonna cut smoking out entirely. I have read from a colleague that really just increasing the uptake on my fruit consumption will affect the taste, which it may have since the saltiness is entirely gone. I'm going grocery shopping tomorrow so I think I'll pick up some Kiwis and those trays of pre sliced pineapple. We'll see what happens on the 26th. I'm doing this again on the 26th.
Oh what? This is gross? It's too "vulgar"? It's called science, and the people appreciate this. We should normalize men being more considerate of their semen quality and having healthier diets and lifestyles.