> but remember there was a period of time where many seemingly forgot about their addictive properties.

There was also quite alot of talk about how doctors, by being reticent to prescribe opioids, were inhumanely forcing patients to live in pain, and not being sufficiently deferential to patient autonomy. Moreover, the rhetoric was incorporated into discussions about racist disparities in treatment, given there was some evidence doctors were less likely to prescribe opioids to black patients, suggesting doctors were systematically being cruel. Naturally, the easiest way to dodge those accusations was to simply prescribe opioids as a matter of course. Even in the absence of Purdue Pharma pushing their claims about lack of significant addictive potential, there was already significant pressure to discount the risk of addiction.

This point of view makes no sense to me.

If you take it and you feel your anxiety is lessened, that's the greatest proof you can ask for. All the psychiatric studies are already based on self assessment.

Second, a lot of psychatric treatments are temporary, ending whenever the medication is stopped or wears off so I dont see how this would be any different

Yes. Rather it is the reverse that helps. Exercise is the biggest one, but essentially “pain that will stop” seems to help in general. Ice showers, fasting, new challenging activity, giving up caffeine/alcohol.

All these things suck in the short term, and make you feel more good in the medium term. Maybe because your default becomes “not in so much pain”, rather than “feeling worse than when briefly enhanced by substance X”

Edit: I’m referring more to the “self medication” approach. Please don’t take any of this as medical advice.

Sadly, I have witnessed three of my friends who started THC product to deal with anxiety, developed paranoia. Two of them quit THC and got better but one got way worse and now is in process of divorce. His personality is completely different, he was pretty chill guy but now he is talking way too much, easily distracted, and always worried about macro events.

"This wasn't helped by the decades of claims that claimed THC was basically free of dependency problems."

But did anyone professional made these claims?

I was pretty much told since a child, no physical dependency (unlike alcohol and nicotin) but potentially strong psychological withdraw symptoms.

Isn't the problem with psychological dependency that drugs generate basically a artifical depression, so more drugs are needed to basically feel normal again? Thus saddling a already existing problem with the same on top?

Yeah this has been my experience with THC. I never took it for depression, but it was always a temporary thing. I doesn't treat anything IMHO. its a symptom relief at best.

it works pretty good as a temporary relief from anxiety.

It's a meta-study and came to the conclusion that there isn't reliable evidence that it alleviates symptoms of a bunch of stuff:

> There were no significant effects on outcomes associated with anxiety, anorexia nervosa, psychotic disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, and opioid use disorder. There were insufficient data to meta-analyse studies of ADHD, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and tobacco use disorder. There was an absence of RCT evidence for the treatment of depression.

Beyond the semantics, this is what the meta analysis(1) actually says in the abstract

> There were insufficient data to meta-analyse studies of ADHD, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and tobacco use disorder. There was an absence of RCT evidence for the treatment of depression. Meta-analysis revealed higher odds of all-cause adverse events (OR 1·75, 95% CI 1·25 to 2·46) among those using cannabis versus control group

The paper says there's no evidence of effectiveness in treatment, and evidence of harm.

1: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...

> Plenty of people use cannabis to alleviate symptoms. I don't think they expect to be cured entirely.

Obviously can't speak for everyone, but I know people who do think literally that. They think that weed will actually cure their depression, and they'll allude to some studies about it that I'm pretty sure don't exist and that they just made up.

"Treat" != "cure"

I think it became socially acceptable because there’s not a huge reason to hate on it.

The risks to cognition and health exist, but they’re no where near as bad as alcohol or cigarettes (and the negative effects basically don’t exist at low, even moderate doses)

The biggest negative effect of using weed regularly is it seems to slowly kill people’s motivation to do stuff over time. It will turn just about anyone into a couch potato. That’s more dangerous than any other effect IMO.

Because the Schedule 1 prohibition was ridiculous. This is the cultural pendulum swing to normalize it and push legalization.

Since the 1960s and the emergence of the New Left, and the introduction of the Frankfurt School and 60s post modernism into academia, there has been a widespread belief amongst a large segment of the population that everything traditional is wrong. A social stigma is merely ignorance, that which is seen as bad is actually good, traditions are wrong. All of these things need to be overturned for the enlightenment. Since society deemed marijuana bad, it is therefore good. As those people who were went through that indoctrination in the 60s as students got older, they got into power. They took power in universities. By the 90s they were pushing all of the ideas as the status quo. Students in the 90s then took those ideas, and when they got into power in Media, they pushed those ideas into all movies and tv.

I think there’s probably some adjacency to other things which make people feel good, but are ultimately bad for them. Gambling, alcohol, porn, infinite scroll social media. There are a few people making a ton of money on this stuff and the social costs aren’t something they care about.

Maybe because like 65% of the nation is in favor of legalization and a huge chunk of the nation has been smoking weed for 70+ years without crisis?

Probably because almost everyone has done it and it's fun.

I am not sure I'd say I'm "against" it since broadly speaking I don't think it should be illegal, but I am against it in the sense that I really think that absolutely no one should be smoking weed. It's kind of an unearned opinion; I don't know anything about medicine or health or anything like that, but I hated what it would seemingly do to my friends in high school.

I'd have friends that would be more or less down to earth, start smoking weed, then start finding and watching videos of Alan Watts and Carl Sagan and convince themselves that they knew everything in the world about physics and philosophy, and they became utterly insufferable in the process, and whenever anything negative about weed was ever said, they would provide me a lecture about how weed is a cure to pretty much everything and how no one has ever had a negative effect from it ever in history.

I think there's been a huge over correction; there was so much bullshit about the dangers of weed that people started acting like it's some miraculous cure-all and ignoring actual issues.

This was such a visceral turn-off for me that I to this day have never used weed, and the idea of using it still kind of makes me viscerally annoyed. It's entirely possible that my friends were insufferable teenagers purely because teenagers can be insufferable, and that's not even unlikely, but the way I remember it is the weed making them annoying it. Not saying it's rational, just that memory and human brains are weird.

People were smoking weed even when it was socially unacceptable and illegal. Then they were going to jail for a decade or more because of it. This simply did not make any sense. I believe most of this is a backlash effect.

Weed was the worst thing ever. Weed is the best thing ever. Eventually weed will be in the same category as coffee.

Yep. Of course alcohol is depressive.

Weed is great for my anger and sleep. I’ve never found as good of a sleep medicine for someone who wakes up too early.

I also had debilitating anger in my teens and weed really helped calm that down. I’ve been off it for years at a time and I still can’t get past my anger without it.

That said my memory is shit

We can acknowledge that weed might be bad for people while also acknowledging that it probably shouldn't be illegal. There's no contradiction.

I think alcohol is bad for people but I don't think it should be illegal. I also think weed is probably bad for people but probably shouldn't be illegal.

I have found the exact opposite of that. Illegal weed was mild buzz and fun. Legal weed is EXTREMELY potent. They want to pack as much THC into the legal limit as they can.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition

Idk, you can still find outrageously potent weed in states where it's recreationally legal. But maybe it's just a residual from the fact that it was illegal not that long ago and binge consuming it is still quite normalized?

Who is this “everyone”? I smoke weed because it helps with my anxiety. Is it a perfect “treatment”? lol

It gives me some respite, that’s it.

The data being all over the place on benefits, but pretty clear on harms, is about as good a reason you could want for experts not to recommend something as treatment. That's what it often looks like when something doesn't work, or doesn't work very well. "The error bars are too big to say it works, so we shouldn't tell people it works" is a pretty good thing to inform people about if that's the case.

It's really easy to convince yourself that something works when it doesn't, that's the whole reason why people have to take statistical significance seriously. Maybe it really does work and a really good study could shrink the error bars but that's more hope than anything.

I guess if you weren't around for the 30 years when every marijuana advocate on the planet wouldn't shut up about it being a cure for anxiety, evidence that it is not wouldn't be particularly interesting to you.

Ok I see so they have six studies that they found to indicate effective treatment of anxiety with cannibanoids but their meta study only found six trials with 50 people so the significance / n count is not high enough. So the study is a null result ie they don’t have enough data not they’ve disproved it. In fact their data supports the hypothesis. Then the coverage on science daily misrepresented this. Here's citaiton 40: https://www.nature.com/articles/npp20116 "Cannabidiol Reduces the Anxiety Induced by Simulated Public Speaking in Treatment-Naïve Social Phobia Patients" Pretreatment with CBD significantly reduced anxiety, cognitive impairment and discomfort in their speech performance, and significantly decreased alert in their anticipatory speech. The placebo group presented higher anxiety, cognitive impairment, discomfort, and alert levels when compared with the control group as assessed with the VAMS.

That seems biased: if you only notice the people who act out due to their mental health issues, you will not notice the people who use cannabis but don’t have any issues with mental health.

Furthermore, people with mental health issues are known to self-medicate, which will introduce a bias if the correlation is seen as causation.

It's way better trust me.

Only smoke when at parties and in company.

Alone smoking is terrible. You enjoy the first, then you know very well how you feel the following ones.

Only the bad effects of being lazy, tired, sleepy, none of the pros.

Why do people use cigarettes? Cocaine? LSD?

Not because they're effective treatments for mental disorders

Using quantified isolates is the correct way to do a controlled study. Dosing is important.

Claims that you need a special combination of exactly the right strains are just a way to move the goalposts forever. They could study 10 different strains in controlled trials and the same people would show up to dismiss this study because they weren't using some random strain that has some perfect combination of entourage effect.

Using actual plants and smoking would also introduce another major variable, with further claims that the strains they were giving patients were too weak or they were smoking it wrong.

EDIT: I don't have time to read every single citation included, but the claim above that they were all THC or CBD isolates does not appear correct. One randomly selected citation:

> The short-term impact of 3 smoked cannabis preparations versus placebo on PTSD symptoms: a randomized cross-over clinical trial

So the claim above that they didn't investigate smoked cannabis or "entourage effect" is false.

Yeah, I noticed this too. Canadian universities have been studying cannabis use using actual cannabis, so I'm not sure why this metastudy considered anything else. "We need to publish something" perhaps.

>The headline could read instead: No evidence cannabinoid isolates help anxiety, depression, or PTSD.

There’s no evidence that what they tested with was pure THC isolates. If they’re using cannabis in plant form, even if it was bred for higher thc content, there is still cbd.

This is the most reasonable take I’ve seen in this whole thread. Alcohol doesn’t reduce anxiety either yet tons of people take it as a social lubricant and it probably does more damage to those consuming it than those who consume weed. So shrug? Just be responsible folks and let people blow off steam how they like without judging it like weed is an 8 ball.

That's classic with most cannabis studies. They sound like they started with a conclusion and then worked their way back fitting the data.

The Lancet has been around for 200 years. It publishes weekly.

It's a highly regarded journal, but it doesn't mean 100% of the papers published are perfect.

If you're trying to dismiss a study because it was published in The Lancet then that's not a convincing line of reasoning to anyone who understands the scientific publishing landscape.

same lancet that tried to bury covid lab leak theories in february 2020

These dismissals based on the source rather than the material are getting really annoying. We’re supposed to be intellectuals here, we can do better than that.

To be fair, ever since I’ve started weekly psilocybin microdoses for depression I’ve been able to stop my regular anti-depressants which had some nasty side effects. And in those 3 years, I’ve had exactly zero depressive breakdowns like I used to have.

I don’t really enjoy the feeling of a normal dose of shrooms, but with a microdose below a noticeable effect (sometimes I overshoot a little and it gets a little warm and tingly), I have in fact had a huge quality of life increase.

I guess in some ways “not wanting to die regularly” could be seen as “having fun” by some people, and I’m sure that if a proper study was done the result would be inconclusive. I mostly think that the inconclusiveness in these depression studies has much to do with a lack of understanding of what depression even is and thus a lot of them have people with very different root causes of their pathology all being labeled “depression.”

But it works for me, and it works very well. (And 2g of shrooms per month is also dirt cheap compared to expensive anti-depressants.)

Huh? Like Paracetamol doesn't work because if you take too much you die? Are you confusing "overdosing" with something else here maybe?

Ive overdosed edibles multiple times and I dont know what you talk about.