I think that on balance, legalization is a good thing. Certainly it should not be illegal when alcohol is legal.

At the same time, I'm about 30 days into quitting entirely after realizing that I couldn't have a healthy relationship with it. I'm experiencing intense anxiety, dark thoughts, and have struggled with the intensity of REM rebound. My resting heart rate immediately went up about 15BPM on average as my body starts the process of finding its new equilibrium.

I first started using it "medicinally" to cope with poor sleep and depression. It actually helped lower my anxiety (with the right strain). It suppresses REM sleep and dreams, which was beneficial since my dreams tended to be part of the reason I had such poor sleep. For a time, it was incredibly helpful, and it helped me establish some better habits and process some difficult things.

But over time, it crept into more and more parts of my life. I never went full "wake & bake", but found myself wanting to use it earlier and earlier each day. When I did use it recreationally, I started to feel the pull even stronger. It started to majorly impact my short term memory, and I started noticing myself forgetting important things while exploring a new relationship. I started to feel like it was no longer beneficial, and decided to quit. And that's when I realized how hard it was to quit. I tried and failed multiple times before finally building enough willpower to actually do it. And there's this part of me that still worries that I'll fall back into it when things get hard. For better or worse, I'm dealing with some really difficult situations in my life and I'm staying away from it anyway. This gives me optimism, but damn, I didn't think it would be this difficult.

In many ways, it feels like the pendulum has swung too far with legalization. This is not to imply I think it shouldn't be legal, but that the culture around it and the public messaging hasn't really caught up with the reality of the potential for harmful use. The public is well aware of the downsides of alcohol use, and there are well-established methods and institutions to help people deal with alcohol addiction and recovery. If someone is an alcoholic, the public understands the severity of this addiction, and recognizes the challenge that such a person faces in staying sober.

But people who are addicted to cannabis often have a hard time convincing people that this is a real issue. The fact that it's not physically addictive in the same ways as alcohol and other drugs has led to the misconception that the addiction potential is not real and that the difficulty of managing it is not real. The warnings that "using this can be habit forming" don't seem to convey the reality of what it feels like to form that habit, and how hard it can be to break it. Growing communities like /r/leaves and /r/Petioles tell this story over and over.

I think that the extremely high THC strains, and even higher THC concentrations in concentrates and cartridges has a lot to do with this. The stuff people are getting these days isn't your hippy uncle's weed, and while the public consciousness is calibrated on the relatively harmless stuff, the stuff that people are using all day looks nothing like that.

All of this to say: be careful. I have had some incredibly good experiences with it, and I think it helped me open my mind. It helped me through a tough time. It's also really enjoyable. But it has a much darker side than many people realize, and it took me far to long to accept that I might be one of the people who can't have a healthy relationship with it. And the fact that I'd had a "take it or leave it" feeling about it for years lulled me into a false sense of security. The slide towards maladaptive use happened gradually and took awhile to notice.

I hope that with the continued movements towards legalization, there is also an increase in public awareness and support for people who get themselves into trouble. More focus on the safety concerns of high THC strains and harmful use. More growers who focus on medicinally useful products vs. just chasing the highest THC.