can smoking weed make autism worse

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All I'll say is that most stoners I know are pretty accepting of unusual people.. It also gives an easy route to some common small talk. It's also quite common to not talk much and engage in wall staring competitions, so I would expect aspies to find it easier to fit in,

Pot is certainly one of the safer drugs, there are less extreme reactions than pretty much any other drug, thing includes OTC stuff such as paracetamol.. I do think it's very wrong for minors to smoke, but on balance i'd rather see a 14 year old smoking pot than messing around with solvents or alcohol.

Jason

I realize i'm a little late for a reply but I've been smoking for 12+ yrs and I felt I should put in my 2 cents.

At first, it helped me. It numbed down a lot of the hypersensitivity I've always dealt with and it allowed me to enjoy life a little bit more and stress a little bit less. I also made friends who smoked weed too. I felt alive and social for the first time ever and I was still able to go to school and keep up with my work.

When I started smoking I was in my second year of college with pretty decent grades. I met a girl on AOL (the good ol days) that introduced me to weed and we had a wonderful relationship that lasted several years until she decided to stop smoking and I was hooked and couldn't (or didn't want to). She left me because I was a stoner.... this was so ironic it would have been funny if she wasn't my first-ever girlfriend. I survived the breakup but I started smoking daily and I quit school and took up a job because I was getting "tired" of sitting in classes all day.


Now fast forward 12 years.

I'm 31 now.
Today, I am a building superintendent/janitor. I make close to minimal wage, no half-decent girl is interested in me because i'm broke and haven't accomplished much of anything in life and I can't afford to go anywhere or do anything fun.

But what can I blame for this horrible decline? My Asperger's? My weed smoking? The sad fact is that I will never know which one of the two has dealt me such a crap card. The only sure source of blame I have for the way my life has degraded is myself. It was all my doing. Now that i'm gone this far with no friends, no more parent, and no more support network I'm finding it impossible to quit. It's a psychological addiction, not a physical one, but when I don't smoke I feel so depressed and hopeless that I go right back to it to numb myself out again.

I've tried to quit before. Once cold turkey and a couple times by trying to switch to antidepressants and none of it worked. The Antidepressants helped for a while but the side effects and prices were WORSE than weed.

weed has only one bad side effect: It will kill your motivation. It seems pretty innocent and harmless but as the years go by, it literally sucks your potential right out of you and will leave you worse off financially, socially, and mentally. But worst of all it will affect who you marry or have kids with (if at all) and the type of environment your offspring will live in (poverty?)

There is always time to quit in life... it's just a question of not wasting your best years.

Last edited by JacobV on 16 Feb 2014, 5:48 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Nobody needs to be taking unreasonable risks with drugs, no matter what their age is.

A reasonable risk is one where the possible payoff is good enough and likely enough to warrant taking the risk. In the case of recreational drugs, usually the risk is not worth it because a drug conviction can ruin your life. But in some situations, like with medical marijuana (which is starting to become more legal), someone with severe symptoms and good reason to believe it could help could be taking a reasonable risk if they were to buy and use some, since those symptoms may be worse than the possible consequences (losing a job, paying a fine, jail time, and similar, if caught; psychological addiction or bad side effects, either way). When it's legal, and I think it will become legal in most areas, the risk will be lower.

Some recreational drugs are so dangerous that trying them for fun is not a reasonable risk even if they are legal to buy and it's impossible to get caught. For example, you absolutely don't want to sniff paint, no matter how easy it is to buy it and how unlikely it is that you'll be caught, because those fumes are poisonous and can cause coma or death. Not inevitably; not even often. But often enough that you really wouldn't want to try it just to get a buzz.

I don't believe in over-hyping the danger of recreational drugs, but I do not like it when people pretend there are no risks. The risks exist, both social and physical. In some situations they are minor risks; in other situations, they are risks that you wouldn't want to take unless it were a matter of life or death. You can't treat all chemicals the same way because they are different substances with different effects. Legality has more to do with politics than with safety, but it should affect your choices. You should take into account the possibility that you will be caught and ask yourself whether it's worth that risk.

Except for the fact pharmacutical drugs kill thousands of people, and many have some pretty nasty side effects, you might look up the effects of long term anti-psychotic use. And then there are zero deaths caused directly by marijuana medical and recreational included.

Direct deaths, not indirect ones. There are plenty of indirect deaths.

For example, you know how they use marijuana to help chemotherapy patients deal with their nausea? It works nicely for that. But, unfortunately, it also suppresses nausea in people who are getting falling-down drunk and smoking pot. Which means that, instead of throwing up, they die of alcohol poisoning. Suicide attempt by poisoning is also more likely to result in death if the person is smoking marijuana. So, in this case, an effect we generally consider positive--the lessening of nausea--can backfire.

It's not harmless, because no medication is harmless. Medication works because, in some way, it changes how your body works. Whether that's a desirable change depends on the person and the situation--what will help one person will harm another person. Most drugs both help and harm, simultaneously--that's what side effects are--and we use them because they help more than they harm.

Here's a discussion from WebMD of marijuana as a medication:
Marijuana: Uses, side effects, interactions.

Doctors go to medical school for a reason: There's a lot to learn. You can't just go, "Oh, here's a natural substance that's never killed anyone, so it must be good for me." Like any drug, there are things it will work for and things it will make worse; there are side effects and interactions with other drugs. It is safer than many legal substances, but it is not absolutely safe, nor is it necessarily useful or helpful.

In your alcohol example it would be the alcohol poisoning that kills the individual...it is very irresponsible to drink like that whether or not one is smoking marijuana...the marijuana in that case is a possible contributing factor, but I haven't read any infomation that implies marijuana suppresses nausea to the point where someone won't puke if they drink way too much alcohol, also there are cases where people die of alcohol poisoning with no accompanying cannabis use. I think the point here is its very dangerous to drink in extreme excess. Also I don't think the cancer patients who use it for nausea should be denied it because people abuse alcohol and cannabis having anti-nausea properties might make it more difficult to vomit.

But if you notice even I specified no direct deaths, did not deny it can be an indirect factor in some deaths...even so from everything I've read deaths with cannabis as a contributing factor are much less than deaths from prescribed pharmaceutical drugs. Also the point is there are thousands of deaths directly caused by pharmaceuticals, this is not the case with marijuana.

Also that last bit feels like an insult to my intelligence...I am very aware of the fact all drugs including marijuana have side effects, they can also effect different individuals differently and yes they can make some conditions worse and some conditions better. I don't know about most people but I spend a lot of time reading relevant information on marijuana, pharmaceuticals and many other drugs and herbs.

Also its not useful or helpful for everyone....however for many people it is both, there are lots of studies on marijuana and how it can treat a variety of mental and physical conditions. And due to it being a non-toxic substance it is safer than many pharmacuticals and so where it is effective it should be used. I mean if someone finds that marijuana helps with their pain from a back injury for instance...why should they have to be prescribed dangerous opiate drugs if they want to opt for the marijuana?

Supresses nausea in people who are drinking?
Are you kidding me?

Some of the only times I've thrown up while drinking were actually from getting drunk and then smoking MJ.
If I hadn't smoked the marijuana, I wouldn't have thrown up.
It helped cause the nausea, it didn't supress it.

I've thrown up from just marijuana before....once I was in a group smoking and we had quite a few pipes going around, so I accidentally overdid it a little and ended up throwing up. If I remember right one reason its impossible to overdose on marijuana alone is because you will vomit or pass out long before you can ingest enough to die from.

I don't know, and I don't plan to do it. I am willing to try lots of things to help with my difficulties, but I would not take to illegal drugs.

A person in my support group said it felt like a cure when he toked in the '70's. Yes he used the word cure. I have a obsessions so that means I have an addictive personality so I feel it's best for me to avoid.

Ive smoked on and off for past 10 years roughly. Ive had no ill-effects other than being sleepy or groggy the next morning. Which fades after an hour. I smoke because it shuts up my brain constantly analyzing everything. However it will allow to be more focused on subjects I have interests in and causes less OCD for ME. Its opened my mind to new perceptions, and socially.. it gave me more confident. Though that could be because its opened up more people that I can discuss similar interests with.

Have I had bad experiences? Not so much bad.. but I know i smoked TOO much and had an anxiety attack. And you're talking 3-4 joints and a few bowls to do that in an hours time. Once I dialed it back and knew my limit, I've been fine since. No different than how people act with alcohol.

I would not recommend smoking to a minor. Wait till you're a bit more mature. I didn't start till 18. And I didn't really smoke it regularly till the past 1.5 years.

I also waited till I was 18

you dont need to smoke a large amount to get medical benefits from it. also its a lot better than the majority of organ destroying pills out there
some strains have very strong anti psychotic effects that work as good if not better than the pills without the brain melting side effects

Not to mention it lacks the risk of causing Tardive dyskinesia.

Marijuana isn't illegal if used medically where I live (California) and many other states, and in some states it's even legal recreationally (Washington and Colorado).
It's unfortunate that it's still illegal in the UK, imho.

What if it were legal?

What if it were legal?