my cannabis journey...

January 30, 2026

I wrote this on a post on r/leaves, figured I spent enough time typing it i might want to keep it here. First the OP comment since i think it is being moderated out…

This has been my most successful attempt at quitting to date and I can’t believe it’s really been a full year since.

I still remember a year ago. I had an easygoing job, no gf, no responsibilities… I had aspirations and high expectations for myself, but I always felt like I had time in the future. And I never thought of weed as a hinderance. If anything, it was a way to “reward” myself after putting in the work.

But the truth is I had all the common symptoms of addiction. I was smoking the very moment I had finished the short list of things to do for the day, or other times as soon as I woke up in the morning. The most prominent indicator for me that something had to change was how badly I wanted to be high when I was sober, and then how bad I wished to be sober once I was high. I would smoke when deep down I knew that I didn’t want to.

I can say now that quitting is really only half the battle. I like to use an analogy: quitting weed draws back the curtains to your life. When you are sober, you’re forced to look at your own reality and really sit with it. And if you’ve been smoking for a really long time you might not like what you see. But when you are sober, you have the opportunity to change what is there, not just cover it up and pretend like everything is how you want it to be. That’s not to say it’ll be easy, that you won’t encounter hardships on your path to restoring yourself. But when I inevitably fail, I can confidently say that I was putting my best, sober foot forward in the process.

For me, the most underrated upside to quitting weed is being ready at a moment’s notice. Not that I suddenly have a spontaneous life or anything, but the ability to drive somewhere on the spot, dealing with an emergency, or even just holding a random conversation. It just feels so liberating to have that normal human ability again without the anxiety that comes from being high.

Anyway, I wanted to post in here to show what quitting looked like for me. This community really helped me in the early stages of sobriety. Now, it’s more-so reinforced in me the types of thoughts I had when I wanted to quit which makes staying sober that much easier.

Wherever you are in your journey I wish you the best of luck.

You’re right, Quitting is only half the battle. I’ve been quit a little longer, it’ll be 16 months in a week, after smoking for 45 years. My whole long adult life. But who’s counting? (most of us)

I made so many decisions driven by my habit. I had grow rooms.. not big ones, not to make money, but enough to keep me supplied so I didn’t have to make a choice between spending money on weed or rent or participate in the criminal economy that illegal weed was. I sold enough to cover my light bill, but i really grew so i wouldn’t have to make the choice between buying weed and paying rent. I was pretty straightforward about that. Keeping a grow room operating means that vacations aren’t much of an option.

When my mom died 16 years ago, I was in the house and my brother and i probably smoked an ounce in the next couple days. I was unemployed at the time: I lived in colorado, mom died in Michigan and literally on the way to the funeral, I got my offer letter out of the mailbox on the way to the funeral. A few days later I drove to North Carolina for a new job.

I have been married and divorced 4 times and i can’t avoid the fact that my pot use was part of why all of those marriages failed. When my wife at the time drove out to my new apartment, she brought a qp and it was gone in a month or two. At the new job, i’d walk out to the railroad tracks off the corporate campus and smoke up over lunch, all of that. I spent every possible waking moment stoned. wake and bake, lunchtimes in the car, sometimes waking up in the middle of the night smoking and going back to bed. I never found a reliable connection while I was in NC, but drank quite a bit n the years after Mom died.

Side note: brewing your own wine and beer is a great way to hide how much you’re drinking because you don’t toss empty bottles, you refill them. I’ve had neighbors who drank a lot and I’ve felt a little judgy when I’d hear all their cans going into the recycle bin.

I ended my marriage in a shitty way, got into a disastrous relationship with someone I never should have even considered, but during it I’d been pretty much “straight”, no pot but a lot of alcohol, for couple years because that girlfriend was not approving of pot. I resented the hell out of it. We drank a lot and alcohol is a terrible substitute.

When that relationship ended in the most horrible breakup (to me) I ever had, I came back to colorado because of the pot laws. I got a red card for a year on the basis of an “evaluation” of an army medic who was signing everyone’s paper that showed up. I remember looking at him in the meeting and thinking this is what a compromised doctor looks like. “what’s your problem?” back pain.. “ok here’s your slip”. I went back to being stoned all the time for 11+ years more. The next year, Colorado made it more difficult to get a card, but by then I was in another relationship with a woman who had her card because of legit pain issues, so I was still getting as much weed as i wanted for less $$$ than in the illegal dayst. She actually had a doctor who was suggesting ways for it to be helpful for her. For some, it really is a godsend. Not me, I was just an addict who didn’t want to deal with that word.

It was rec legal a year later, so I could get as much as i wanted. There’s a dispensary on every corner in Denver, just a couple in my town. It’s always available here. I set my computer up in the garage and spent all my time getting high and reading reddit and watching youtube videos.

3 years ago I got the idea of maybe quitting. One night I just went out to the garage, picked up my pipe and put it back down, said “nah” and went back into the house - wtf had just happened? I spent the next two years going back and forth - we all know the drill.. quit.. week later I can have just one.. stoned for a couple more months, quit again, make it a month. Decide I can just buy a gram, but by the time i walked out of the dispensary i had a half oz and knew i was going to spend the next few weeks fucked up. At first, I’d tell people I was quitting, but then I’d fail, eventually I just wouldn’t bother to tell anyone because I was pretty sure I’d fail again.

Finally what got me to really quit was two failed UAs for a job that I really needed to get. That got me serious. I had another prospect that wasn’t gonna happen for 3 months and I knew it would require a UA, so that’s what got me to stay the course. The other job never materialized, but by 3 months straight, I was starting to prefer my new brain.

I tried MA, but i could never get into the 12 step thing, I’d even gone to a couple AA meetings during the time I wasn’t smoking. This sub has been a godsend to me. I really feel for the folks who are just wanting to get through the first few days, couple weeks… It gets better, but there is always some more work to do.

When I really quit, i realized pot wasn’t doing me any favors. I used to tell everyone who would listen that smoking weed was my self medicating for ADHD that was never officially diagnosed until 3 years ago when I was 61. I still have untreated ADHD but it’s still better than being stoned all the time. Now I can be around people smoking and I know it’s not for me. For a long time, when declining to smoke, i would tell this long story about how I was never going to quit.. until I did. The day I just said “no, I don’t do that any more” was a huge milestone for me.

It’s really hard, some days, to avoid “what if i had actually quit when I had decades of life ahead of me”. There’s no cheese in that maze - can’t change any of that now. I don’t have decades ahead of me, people in my family don’t usually make it to 80.

Just now, as I have been typing this, I remembered that there was a lot of drinking in my Mom’s family. So i’m with you, OP, a year or so out, and while I’m not smoking weed any more, I’m stagnant again. Just quitting isn’t the end of the story. I realized one night that in my psyche, addiction is a load bearing wall. I still have a nicotine monkey, but it’s not as bad as weed was. I need to find something better to be obsessed with that isn’t self-destructive. Your post had me realize that I am at a plateau. I don’t even consider falling back into weed. I’m much more functional, but I’m still playing small, and in the face of all that is going on, I’m not engaged in doing anything about it. I’m still not smoking, but i’m doom scrolling as bad as i did when I was smoking all the time.

Sorry this is a huge brain dump, but your post was a big wake-up call for me. Not sure what I’m going to do about it, but now it’s out there.

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