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Cannabis Psychosis and Me!!

cannabis-psych-pic

For almost 20 years I smoked Cannabis and for a long time I thought it was helping me forget all my troubles. The fact is that high strength Cannabis for example Skunk is a potent strain and although It seemed to help it was in fact having a huge detrimental effect on my brain, my thoughts and behaviour of which my Fiancé will agree. Almost every day I found myself thinking about what money I had in order to buy my next bag or where I was going to buy it. At work I would often lose my train of thought and sit thinking about it, what if I couldn’t get any that day. On reflection that was totally ridiculous but I can say that now that I have given up for quite some time, as hard as it was to kick the damn stuff.

The other issue this problem often threw up for me was the sorts of people I would be mixing with although I will say I still have some good friends from those days so not all bad! In my younger years, i.e. at college I was smoking a fairly low amount but in reference to people I met this was a very influential time for me. I found myself in some dark and dingy places often surrounded by much harder drugs. The people associated with those drugs were for want of a better expression very colourful to say the least. a lot of them were actively involved with crime, burglaries etc. to feed whatever habit they had. As you might have guessed I was encouraged to partake in using harder drugs like Ecstasy, Cocaine or even Heroin and at times. I had a dabble with mainly Ecstasy and Cocaine, this was at age 17 at a time where my brain was in what psychologists refer to as stage two development. This was very dangerous in terms of the long term effect it was having on me personally.

Going back to Cannabis and moving on some years into my twenties I was using much more. I found it to be a comfort in bad times as well as using it socially as all my friends did to, or were they friends? Acquaintances one might say but with a common interest at play. Smoking Cannabis in several ways from rolling a joint to smoking through pipes, bongs and other homemade bits of kit known to us as a “Bucket” for those who used these will need no explanation I’m sure. During this time, I had no idea what damage it may have been doing to me however I knew that I wanted to get it every day and was as much part of my daily routine as getting up in the morning.

In my relationship at the time in my early twenties Cannabis had a detrimental effect there to by way of pretty bad mood swings, especially when I either couldn’t afford it or when my dealer of the day had none. It would cause all sorts of arguments often based on really silly things that were often lost on me by the time an argument had finished or I had just stomped off. After 4 years in the relationship and having my first child things came to an end there mainly due to my moods and at times violent behaviour both verbally and infrequent outbursts of pushing and shoving and downright abusive language towards my then partner. Looking back on it now makes me sick to the stomach and a real feeling of absolute regret.

I met my now Fiancé in 2004 while at work but was almost a year before we formed a relationship. At the time I was smoking heavily, although I had ditched using Ecstasy and Cocaine and often as before had mood swings much for the same reasons, money or lack of supply and it seemed that history was repeating itself. You might think I should have learned my lesson but as Cannabis so often does, it had clouded any decent rational thoughts and truly had a grip on me both personally and outwardly towards others, I guess with an end goal of making sure I had it most of the time if not all of the time. During all of this stupidity I went on to have 2 more children and bringing up another boy whom I call my son now and then. Cannabis still played a big part in my life and now that I had to support a family this really begun to cause financial problems. You will guess it caused huge rows centred around finance, I was smoking £20 – £30 a day, times that over a month was £500 and more, that’s rent for a house or money for other things. It could have gone towards allsorts but being blinded by Cannabis is truly so powerful it was still hard to kick the habit. You would have thought circumstances would have made me just give up.

This is where psychosis comes in for me now that I fully understand it. As you will see above any rational person would have just changed things but Cannabis is a cruel drug let’s be honest, or at least for me I feel that way with my mind and body completely clean of THC, the main component of Cannabis (Tetrahydrocannabinol) for those of you who appreciate the scientific name.
This I appreciate is a brief explanation but I hope that some of you will identify with it with the aim of raising awareness for those that don’t. It explains what happened to me and the root cause of it all was my underlying Anxiety and depression. Psychosis was the by product that’s my understanding so I hope this has been of some use to anyone reading.

Shawn – Founder.