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Cannabis and Alcohol
If I drank as much alcohol as I smoked cannabis, I’d be Keith Richards.
Most cannabis smokers have a complex relationship with alcohol even if they don’t drink. When I was seventeen I was sick with glandular fever which resulted in a bout of Hepatitis A meaning that for a year, a prime drinking year for a young adult, my liver was unable to process alcohol. It was during that year that my love affair with cannabis became a marriage. Consequently, through my twenties and the rest of my cannabis career I had very little interest in alcohol or what could be loosely termed alcohol culture. I’m not alone; there are plenty of other dope smokers who also don’t enjoy alcohol or boozy situations and some look upon the average drinker with a feeling of moral superiority.
There is a deep resentment at the heart of cannabis culture of the fact that alcohol is the world’s acceptable drug. Most cannabis smokers believe that alcohol is the more dangerous of the two, both for the individual and for society and unarguably the medical and social statistics bear this out. Interestingly deep within alcohol culture there is a counter-sense of not trusting those that don’t drink. Confirmed boozers of the past from Winston Churchill to WC Fields sincerely believed that abstinence was a sign of shallowness and weakness of character. And ties of friendship and loyalty are still bound tight by the use of alcohol for social bonding.
These days, for more and more people, the two drug cultures overlap and are interlocked to such an extent that individually and collectively they are capable of causing both extreme pleasure, but unfortunately also genuine suffering. At Marijuana Anonymous meetings I met quite a few hard drinkers who when they first discovered weed thought they had found the perfect solution to avoid the dangerous situations that they would get themselves in to when drunk. However because they couldn’t drink with moderation they also found they couldn’t smoke with self-control. Over-use led to experiencing all the negative aspects of smoking too much cannabis. Instead of the social drinker they used to be, they had become isolated; they exchanged recklessness with paranoia. Potential liver disease with respiratory problems. I think it’s helpful at this point to examine what devotees of both stimulants might see as the advantages of their particular drug of choice.
From an early age, adolescent drinkers quickly discover that alcohol makes socializing a lot easier. Many young adults lack self-confidence and drinking has always been experienced as an easy way to let go of social and sexual inhibitions. Traditionally, alcohol has also always been used as a relaxant to relieve us from life’s stresses and strains, and as an anesthetic when our emotional lives become too intense.
Cannabis is generally used as a stress reliever first and a social drug secondarily. The emotional numb-out we get from smoking dope has a more long-term subtle consequence than drinking to forget. The hard-core smoker just tends to forget to forget. Cannabis is also enjoyed because it heightens sensory perception, and a few smokers are in the lucky position where they have the time and resources to use the drug creatively or as a spiritual sacrament. More and more cannabis is used as a natural remedy for any number of medical symptoms some with great legitimacy, others less so. Cannabis users as a whole tend to be just as happy smoking alone or in a quiet group rather than in any raucous party atmosphere. It’s no accident that the larger cannabis café’s in Amsterdam are kept securely separate from the loud bars and pubs that share the same premises.
So far so good, but it all comes down to dependence which is the process where your need for a substance (whatever that might be) or even behaviour, begins to take control over more and more of your life, to the point where you come to depend on it to get through the days and the nights. It’s fair to say that both problems and dependence can vary between mild moderate and severe and there are some important variables as to how we can compare alcohol dependence with cannabis dependence.
For example binge drinking has become an increasingly common phenomenon. This might mean drinking to excess on occasion, but not every day. In the UK there are Government Recommended Guidelines as to how many units of alcohol per week it is safe to consume. Some definitions of binge drinking classify a binge when half the week’s units are consumed in one session. A hard-core pot smoker on the other hand might smoke all day every day, from morning till night as I did, others may smoke during all their free time which could mean every evening and all day on weekends. I think all these behaviours from a healthy living point of view could be called excessive but its also possible that this sort of habitual overuse of either alchohol or cannabis can be kept up for years and the negative health effects only slowly begin to manifest.
Some people really love the effect of using alcohol and cannabis together which frankly is a pretty dangerous combination, I think usually it’s the drinker who is always looking for that extra hit rather than the other way round. In the same way as some drinkers like to use cocaine, so they carry on drinking longer.
I used to think that alcohol was a more extreme drug than cannabis both in terms of its physical and behavioural effects, but today’s skunk has made me re-think that conclusion and there are no government guidelines recommended or otherwise as to how many weekly THC skunk units are safe for consumption.
To sum up there are millions of people for whom either alcohol or cannabis, or both are an important part of life. Neither are particularly safe drugs both in fact are generally pretty unhealthy but I don’t see how prohibition or finger pointing changes anything. The issue will always be one of education. The sad truth is that school-age children are getting stoned and drunk younger and younger, and more and more often. For young adults up to the age of 21 or 22 the brain is still in the process of developing. It is a proven fact that overuse of alcohol or cannabis during this period can both severely restrict brain development and increase the risk of both mental health and addiction problems later in life. These are social problems that can only be dealt with if society finds healthier ways to teach really young children to be confident, to relax naturally and to be at ease in their emotional lives these skills need to be taught as a priority and not just an after thought.
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