I was once unambiguously addicted to weed. When I was partying a lot, I questioned whether I was addicted to alcohol as well. I concluded no, but that conclusion seems worth explaining right now, as I taper off Ritalin. These three have been “problems” in different ways, so it’s interesting to articulate how.
I stepped up my Ritalin intake from weekly to daily once we got word that our house was finally ready for move-in. We had to pack, take care of a newborn, and also be reasonably mentally present at LessOnline. By the time I arrived at LessOnline (where I was unable to resist running events) I’d taken Ritalin for ten consecutive days, and it was a bad time to stop. Then there was Manifest… then the truck unload… then unpacking…
Two weeks into settling in, I decided to taper off Ritalin and my now-high caffeine dose. I tried to line up childcare, because I expected to have about five days of being about as incapacitated as I am on the second worst day of a Covid infection. When one has to manage withdrawal that way, one naturally wonders whether one has a “problem”.
(This expectation was wrong – I bumbled around and got nothing done, but I didn’t feel totally wretched the way I did during off-med days when I was working a tech job. My suspicion is that I’m moving physically more than I did then.)
I’ve never worried about alcohol withdrawal. I am not dependent on it to function, merely to socialize. Alcohol turns me from a person who has almost no interest in socializing in real life into someone who finds it fun. A fair amount of my cognition during a social event is devoted to tracking my inebriation and keeping it at the sweet spot – if I go over it, I set a 15 minute timer and set aside my drink until it goes off. If I’m under, I drink more immediately. I prefer hard liquor because it’s faster and gives me more control. I mostly do not care about the taste of alcohol, because I see it as a medication that comes in different flavors.
When I became pregnant, I gave up alcohol with little difficulty, but it meant giving up socializing as well. For nine months I mostly stopped seeing people. It was sad at first, but after a month I forgot what it was like to enjoy being around people, so I stopped missing it. Concomitantly I did not miss alcohol.
This is not true of Ritalin. Ritalin does not gate one of many enjoyable ways to allocate brainpower. Ritalin gates brainpower itself. This makes Ritalin dangerous to me in a way alcohol isn’t, even though I do not viscerally enjoy Ritalin and my Ritalin dosage is very low (half of the minimum prescribed pill).
(Just to add some more pairs to this list: nicotine, which I was once addicted to, seemed to gate nothing but itself. Also maybe the ability to dip outdoors and take a break that felt fully like a break. LSD gates the joy of being someone or something else. Based on one experience with ketamine, I would hazard to state that ketamine gates feeling like there is no possible way my body could move incorrectly during dancing.)
Marijuana, now but especially when I was addicted, gated creativity and interest and okayness-with-the-universe, which made it even more powerful. I can give up socializing painlessly. I can give up folding my laundry effortlessly with a strong pang. But I can’t give up being interested in things. To be bored and creatively inert is like being dead. Ritalin gates my ability to execute on projects, but weed (once) gated my ability to care about projects.
If a drug gates something important, it doesn’t directly make it a problem. It makes it powerful. Things that have power over you tend to cause problems for you. Like people. You can have a perfectly pleasant working relationship with someone who has power over you. But if the relationship is not pleasant, your choices are three: give up the thing a drug gates in order to reduce the power it has over you, find another way to get the thing it gates, or accept its rule.