I’ve heard countless times that “Cannabis doesn’t really get me high anymore. I just use it to feel normal.” For years, I thought the answer was straightforward: tolerance to the drug. That’s also true—but it is an incomplete answer.
A fascinating new study by Katharina Lege and colleagues at Maastricht University will be published on July 15th. It suggests something else may be happening. Tolerance does not mean the brain has recovered. It means the brain has adapted to cannabis.
I have ADHD, otherwise known as “the thing that causes you to have bad short-term memory since the day you were born”.
I didn’t touch marijuana until I was in my 30s, and I didn’t drink or use ANY kind of intoxicant until I was in my 30s, either. I was never a big drinker.
But because I have ADHD, my attention bounces all over the place, and it gives me a massive amount of anxiety. After trying marijuana, I found that it actually helps me calm down and helps me focus on individual things much better, and makes my life significantly more enjoyable.
I am involved in online communities for people with ADHD, and I am also autistic, and within the communities, it’s known that marijuana seems to have a lot of really positive effects for people within these two groups.
Along with the benefits I mentioned for ADHD, for autistic people, marijuana can drastically reduce social anxiety, and here’s a really big one: MARIJUANA CAN ACTUALLY HELP ME UNDERSTAND NEUROTYPICAL PEOPLE’S SOCIAL INTERACTIONS. So a few times a week, in the evening, a few hours before bed, I eat an edible, and for the next several hours, just thinking about my life, I start to have huge realizations about why other people behaved how they behaved, and how they perceived me. And I write this stuff down, in ways that I can understand, and I read it back when I’m stone-cold sober, and I understand it well. I can’t explain the full extent of how much this improves my ability to function, and how much it improves my quality of life.
I have a really big fear that research like this will notice a correlation between marijuana users and having reduced attention spans, and that they will come to the mistaken conclusion that it’s the marijuana use that actually causes the reduced attention span, instead of the reverse. In fact, I have observed this for myself and for others, that it is actually the condition that causes the reduced attention span that causes the attraction to marijuana. The cause and effect are the opposite of what everyone else assumes.
I’m undiagnosed spectrumy and used Cannabis in my youth, then stopped for 20 years, and now I’m using it again. Does it change the decisions I take? Absolutely. It does not always coincide with what society thinks is good for me, but really works for how I function. It’s for this and the adaptations I made for myself that I went from being a nervous alienated wreck after optimizing my sober self into total burnout to someone much more grounded and happy.