Last September wasn’t the first time someone wrote in to TSB about their addiction to weed — or, their shame about having to even call it an addiction since it’s supposed to be non-addicting — but it was the first time I took it seriously. But we had an enormous number of people write in to tell us about the pernicious and debilitating effects of what is now commonly known as Cannabis Use Disorder (CUD). I’m sure there are more out there willing to share. If so, hit us up.

What’s your relationship to weed right now? Do you want to stop, but can’t?

All contributors will remain extremely anonymous.

Please keep contributions to under 500 words.

Send your stories here: [email protected]

Subject: WEED STORY

Anyone who submits gets three free months of TSB Sundays.

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Below, we have a harrowing essay to start us off. — AJD

CONFESSIONS OF A WEED MOM | Anonymous

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I’ve quit cannabis an amount of times that in the past I would have described as “embarrassing,” but at this point I would describe “the number of times an addict needs to quit, give or take.” 

Why did I quit the second-to-last time, in the fall of 2025? I don’t remember if there was one big reason. It probably had something to do with realizing that yet again, it had become a compulsive habit and not a pleasure. That I was sick of always losing my earbuds/phone/keys/laptop charger/recently opened can of sparkling water. That I am at a middle age stage of life where sleep and skin elasticity are precarious enough as it is. That I was probably counteracting my antidepressants with the amount I was smoking. That I wanted everyone in my family to leave me alone so I could get high. That I was spending hundreds of bucks a week at the dispensary. The withdrawal as usual took a week or two of moodiness and discomfort, a few more weeks getting sleep back on track until I realized I had made it through the worst of it and re-confirmed that life can be pretty good while sober, in fact better than pretty good because now I had money, time, less guilt. 

So why did I pick up again in February? I went to dinner with some friends and I told the hostess I didn’t care if she smoked her cart at the table, and decided fuck it, if I pulled a few times from it myself it wouldn’t kill me. I had had a hard few months caring for a mother with dementia and my dad who doesn’t have dementia-dementia but is an aging boomer who likes to drink and was utterly dependent on the former person he knew as his wife. I figured, why shouldn’t I get to slip into something a little more cognitively dysfunctional myself? 

The next day, after dinner with my girlfriends, I bought a big pre-roll and told myself I could handle smoking a little bit of it at a time over a day. Before long I was smoking a couple of those pre-rolls per day. 

I first smoked weed in the play structure of a suburban Tot Lot in high school almost 30 years ago at a cast party after a concert. It didn’t really take until a time or two later when my friend T. and I smoked a nugget from an aluminum can and we finally got high together and giggled and ate pasta salad and mused on my X-Files bedroom poster. Over the next ten years or so I got weed when and where I could, sometimes putting myself in danger (taking a joyride on the back of my teen dealer’s moped), frantically spraying deodorant and perfume in the air inside my dorm room as the Washington, D.C. police sniffed the air in the hallway before telling the R.A. there wasn’t enough evidence to bust anyone on. 

I began to understand addiction more when I was a little older and could get weed more regularly and realized that if I got stoned before my day job, it didn’t really matter. It made the commute more pleasurable and the button-pushing rather soothing. Then I began working for myself, and I could get high whenever I wanted to. Then it was legalized in my state! I could get to a dispensary in less than a ten-minute drive. 

Even after I realized that I couldn’t moderate booze and that it was just easier for me to quit that rather than try to have a little, I think I either hoped or didn’t understand that I couldn’t moderate weed, either.

My kid picked up my phone to look something up and saw the dispensary site on my phone and asked me if I was buying cannabis. I lied like a wimp. I also lied to myself that my phlegmy coughs were from a cold I had picked up even though I had no other symptoms. The staff at the dispensary began greeting me by name which gave me an uneasy feeling. I stopped caring if the dispo had my favorite, second or even third favorite strains in stock and just took what I could get, including a strain nastily called “Cheetah Piss” (compared to my friendly gal pal Jenny Kush). Finally, the last time I went to the dispensary another customer got into a verbal altercation with the budtender about a freebie he was owed and/or the budtender’s personality and I felt the urge to get the fuck out of there before anybody got too mad. Plus my kid was graduating and I didn’t want to look stoned in the family photos. It was time to quit, again.

I’ve quit cannabis enough times to know and anticipate the symptoms by now. The urges, depression, malaise, irritability. The lack of appetite and nausea and constant shitting. The bad sleep and the vivid dreams seem to return to my deep fears of being perceived as an asshole (like the one where a group of people gathered at my door to accuse me en masse of being racist). I went on r/leaves and read my quit lit books and just tried to wait it out. It didn’t seem too bad this time, maybe because I knew what was normal and I was kinder to myself in the past.

This time, though, there was something exciting and new. About a week after going cold turkey I felt an unsettled stomach after dinner. I barfed up my broccoli pasta and wondered if I had gotten a bad batch of produce, even though nobody else who had eaten it had gotten sick. Weird.

A few days later, I felt unsettled again, skipped dinner and went to bed early but this time got up three, four, five times to vomit so copiously I couldn’t believe I still had anything in my stomach to barf. I threw up so much I couldn’t catch my breath. I threw up and got some sweet/acrid vomit stuck in my nose and throat, and then vomited that out. I vomited so much and so loudly my husband told me he could hear it two rooms away and got worried for me. I must have lost three or four pounds from throwing up. (Of course I weighed myself; turns out I don’t need Ozempic, I just need to become addicted to a widely considered harmless drug and then go into withdrawal.) 

The next day I felt tired and tender and woke up to a note my husband left for the kids telling them to be quiet and be nice to me because I had had a rough night. I always feel a sense of shame around tapping out around my family when I don’t feel well. (Am I really sick or am I just faking it because I’m lazy?) This time it wasn’t something not-my-fault like being truly sick but a sickness I had brought upon myself. 

I went to the grocery store to stock up on BRAT diet-type food and saw that it was now carrying cannabis drinks in the liquor section. It made me sad for all the addicts out there like me who didn’t have the benefit of being rocked by all that barfing to keep them from feeling tempted. I kept my bananas and applesauce and saltines down just fine, confirming that it wasn’t a norovirus like I had secretly hoped. 

The puking was really bad, and scary. In addition to the immediate unpleasantness, I had a raging sore neck for a week after all that time hurling into and around the toilet bowl. (I failed to mention that the first night I puked I also had to pee and my first attempt to boot was unsuccessful so I sat down to pee but then the vomit came up in earnest, so, forced to choose, I threw up onto the bathroom floor while I peed.) 

This was a gift, in a way. Who in their mind would get high again after an experience like that? All I would have to do, the next time I thought about getting stoned, was think about that toilet time and know, for real, this is it. You can’t. If you could have moderated, you wouldn’t have been there. Better to save your money and sleep real sleep, feel your feelings, not smell like smoke, orgasm while sober, and worry less about succumbing to vascular dementia. 

But I’d be lying if I didn’t think ahead to an annual camping trip I take with another parent friend, where we rent separate trailers to enjoy some quiet time and then get together to talk, walk, or do some drugs. 

What if I just brought a few pre-rolls for that trip? What if I only smoked then and got sober again when I got home? What if this time was the time I could . . .

I have a lot of time to silence that debate in my head. The fact that it’s even happening even after all this time, it makes me sick.