I got out of the Navy in 2008.
I started dealing with my friends killing themselves off before I got my honorable.
I had more than enough after I was discharged.
After losing friends while active, and after they got out to suicide I swore I would keep living to honor them and live the lives they couldn't.
It is getting more difficult everyday. I'm feeling PHYSICAL PAIN from the fact that I can see data and patterns while the entire world is just giving into feelings and forgetting what happened 5 minutes ago.
I'm in the works of getting my VA disability increased because of this and extra therapy sessions, but all I get is platitudes and "just go along with it, you need your job" kind of shit.
I am SOOOOOOOO fed up with it. SOOOOOOOOOOOOO FUCKING FED UP WITH IT.
If I were not a man of my word, I would not be here right now. I am a man of my word and I will be here until the bitter end.
I don't know much of anything technical about weed, all I know is from 2nd hand observation. I've seen guys who lead a fully functional life with it get deep into a pit of despair, and they took the express route. All of them required medical intervention to get out of it, and each agreed later that weed was a compounding factor. Didn't cause the depression, just made it impossible to escape without becoming a medical crisis.
Maybe you're different. Like I said, I'm no expert, can't even say I know what it's like to smoke, since the couple times I did it as a kid I was so hammered I didn't feel anything. I just know that self-evaluating your self-medicating habit as normal and non-problematic is a rationalization as old as time. Me, I'm a drinker. Not heavy, and not often, but I do drink. If someone, anyone at all who knew me well enough to have an opinion, came to me and said "I think you have a drinking problem", I'd be going somewhere to have that shit evaluated ricky tick. Not because I agree, but because I know how insidiously substance use can turn into substance abuse.
The problem with weed is that the effects from abuse are much more subtle and slow than you'd see with other drugs.
Benzos, which are prescribed for anxiety, have the same effect on the brain as alcohol.
It's all about behavior. Don't compartmentalize, learn the chemistry.
I'm not bashing your nor disagreeing.
Didn't think you were. All I can do is share my experiences, up to you to decide if they're relevant to your situation. As a non-smoker, doing a deep dive into the brain chemistry of marijuana use is going to be pretty low on my priority list. Just being real. Not because it's not interesting, but for me it'd be more of a pure academic exercise, education just for the sake of it, and if I'm going to do that I'd probably read more about how the Finns kicked Ruskie ass in the Winter War, or something else involving communists dying. Maybe that's just more hedonism, though, since it makes me feel good and is otherwise pointless.
Our modern world does not make meaningful interactions easy to find. You have to both actively search for it, and block out the endless distractions that seek to lead you astray. That last part is the real bitch.
There are a lot of folks who smoke weed to a point that if drinking or other drug use were the same, would be a huge problem. Because weed is so benign... they just give the rest of us a stigma.
It's hard to find meaningful interactions these days. I realized it before I woke up.
In high school, I'd skip and go on campus to the local univeristy and make friends.
When I came home from the navy in 2008, everyone was already on their phones a lot. They were less friendly.
It was another 5 years until it became clear why.
Internet and Smart Phones, two biggest socially disruptive forces in human history, one right after the other. They tag teamed the shit out of our culture, and we were not ready.
Back in the early 2000s I was constantly ranting to people about how dangerous Facebook was, how for the first time in all of human history, we were allowing a for-profit corporation to insert itself as an additional layer between peoples personal relationships.
"But my friends are on Facebook."
This baseball bat swinging straight for our collective noggin was easy to see coming, but the average person couldn't avoid it. Because they'd already been deprived of community by that point, and were desperate for something to replace it with.
Like you said, this crap has been a long time in the making. If you've never seen the famous Yuri Bezmenov interview, it might be worth a watch.