This post describes the system I’ve used for the past three years to use marijuana at a healthy rate. It is my greatest success in working with rather than against myself to shape my own behavior.
Practically speaking, it is targeted at a rather narrow audience: people who
- can’t control their use of a drug
- don’t think it’s feasible or even desirable to get off it permanently
- can log 3 numbers in a spreadsheet every day
- have enough impulse control that they can (frequently) choose more drugs later over some drugs now
If this is you: this system was my way out of a hell. Maybe it can be yours, too.
my context
From 2015-2020, I could go weeks without even thinking about marijuana, perhaps punctuated by reasonable one-off uses. But, inevitably, I would go into a weed spiral where I compulsively got high for 4-30 days straight. Life would slow-motion cave in on me. Some people can function while getting high every day – not I. The awareness that I was in trouble would creep up on me and crash down as an epiphany that no, seriously, I need to stop. I’d throw out all my weed, and manage to return to the “weeks of not even thinking about it” stage, buoyed by that epiphany-energy. And so half a decade went by.
I felt like a normal person on a successful life track, except for the thing where I got pulled away from the great beach party of normal society by a riptide 4-6 times a year. After swimming valiantly back to shore to rejoin the group – who hadn’t noticed I had disappeared for a while – I would work very hard to preserve that not-noticing. Since it was embarrassing and never visibly ruined my life, I rarely spoke about my problem to other people. I don’t think I used the word ‘addiction’ until I got it under control and was able to say, oh, I used to be addicted. This is not quite true – I still am. I cannot stop. But it doesn’t rule my life, and using it reasonably now feels effortless.
The tricky thing is that weed is also really good for me. I’ve entered some of my favorite creative flow states in it. (I wrote my favorite short story on an otherwise irredeemable summer of being high all the time.) I’ve forgiven people I knew I was overdue on forgiving but somehow couldn’t, including myself. When I become extendedly anhedonic and forget what it feels like to be interested in anything, it can put me on some Wikipedia page rabbit hole and rouse me out of my rut.
I always recognized that marijuana was a miraculous gift from the universe – or would be, if I could just fucking use it once a week. But I couldn’t, so it was a beast from hell.
using it once a week
The bad news is that you’re going to have to meditate, which is boring. You can substitute another activity, but I encourage starting with meditation. It’s good for addiction, and you can meditate anytime, anywhere. Just sit down, set a timer, tune into the noises around you (or breath, or body sensations, etc), and return to it when you notice you’ve wandered off.
Set your meditation goal (GOAL) to 60 minutes. After meditating 60m (probably in multiple sessions over multiple days), one use of your Substance will clink into your candy jar. Once the candy jar has at least one use in it, you can retrieve it any time and get high.
What happens after you hit your 60m goal? Count up how many days (DAYS) it took you to hit 60 minutes. Your new GOAL is 60 * 7 / DAYS.
You can see that GOAL auto-adjusts. If you were in a rush and did all your meditating in one day, your new meditation GOAL is 420m. Future you will need to meditate 7 freaking hours to get high again. Even though if you’d just waited one more day, the GOAL would have been 3.5 hours.
But if you meditate 10m a day and hit goal in 6 days, your new GOAL is 60 * 7 / 6 = 70m. If you continue taking it easy, you can get high once a week for no effort more expensive than meditating 10 minutes a day, which most people would benefit from anyway.
the spreadsheet
(Before you look at the numbers too closely and get confused by discrepancies, I should note that I actually use 7.6 days as my target period. My target was “4 times a month”, which is slightly different from “once a week”.)
Every day you are going to log
- MED: how many minutes you meditated that day
- (optional) MED_CUMUL, a generated column where every cell is the sum of the cell to its left and the cell above it) how many minutes you’ve meditated since the last unlock
- GOAL: how many minutes you need to meditate to unlock a use
- CANDY (jar count): how many uses you have unlocked
- (optional) WEED (dosage): how much weed you used that day
When you use weed:
- you take 1 point away from that day’s CANDY, and optionally record your WEED dose.
When you unlock (MED_CUMUL matches or exceeds GOAL), as I did on e.g. April 14th:
- you add a point to that day’s CANDY, and
- set the next day’s GOAL to the new calculated GOAL, since the next day is the first day of your new unlock period.
On April 14th I unlocked a new use after 5 days, so my new goal was 92.2 * 7.6 / 5.
accommodating the existence of your addict self
Every time I set rigid rules for marijuana control, like “I get 4 uses a month”, I failed. Some instances of me are incapable of thinking about anything other than marijuana until I get high. The system must accommodate her existence, and expose a way to get weed – just at a mounting cost that she can understand.
The rest of this post is about the extensions I tacked onto this system to further accommodate addict me. Unlike the auto-adjusting meditation goal, these extensions are idiosyncratic. Therefore the extensions are not recommendations (except perhaps 1 and 2). I have written them down largely to illustrate my process of emendation.
Because I think you must be prepared to amend the system so that recovering within it is always more appealing than abandoning it. But be careful – think hard before you amend, and don’t do it too often. I’ve done it 5 times in 3 years.
If you are interested in using this system to manage your own addiction, I recommend setting up your own spreadsheet first (with starting numbers of your choice, if 60m and 7 days don’t work for you) before reading the rest of this. My system got very complicated, and I’d rather you spend mental effort on trying it out than understanding my hideous final form of that thing.
extension 1
The first extension I introduced was to accommodate the self who saw the 0 on the CANDY column and went, fuck it, I’m going to get high anyway. This happened 3 months into the system.
An intuitive consequence – I won’t say punishment – was to decrement 2 rather than 1. So after that action, CANDY was now at -2.
Eventually I went into far enough debt after a bad patch that I was at -8 and wondering what kept me from traveling further down. The answer was that, after -8, the decrement is 3.
extension 2
At some point, I decided that the system should reward lower dosage. I used to decrement the same amount regardless of how much weed I took, so I had no in-system incentive to be moderate. Sometimes I would be in the kind of depression where I didn’t particularly want to get high, but merely not be in terrible pain. While my usual dose was 15-35mg, 5-10mg would do for palliation.
Since I spend most of my time in the -5 to 0 CANDY zone, where I pay 2 CANDY every time I get high, I decided that anything below 10mg would only decrement CANDY by 1.
Once I was rewarded for restraint, my tolerance – and expectations for how much I ‘should’ take – crept down. These days my dosage is 5-20mg. At time of writing, I haven’t exceeded 15mg in three months. Past me would find that quite surprising!
extension 3
I was bitten by the ass by the thing where a particularly desperate self can meditate 2 hours in a day and stick her future self with a 14h meditation bill. So now the minimum update length is 5 days. This means that, even if I hit GOAL on day 4 of the period, the operation of “CANDY increments, GOAL is set to updated number” does not happen until day 5.
You can see I hit my minutes count on March 8th, but GOAL didn’t update until the March 9-10 boundary. The leftover MED_CUMUL rolled over when the new period began.
extension 4
It struck me that I could harness my addiction to make myself do things that were not sitting in a chair motionless with my eyes closed.
This is the change that made my system too complicated to explain easily. I used to have a meditation column. Now I have a “day_sum” column, which is… here we go… the sum of:
- how many minutes I meditated
- how many minutes I spent on Anki (spaced repetition learning software)
(100*A) / (A+60), where A is how many minutes I worked on art(60*W) / (0.5*W+800), where W is how many words I wrote – fiction and journaling count, blogging doesn’t.
Why those functions? It’s because f(x) = Cx/(x+D) has a convenient shape – one that rewards me for doing any x at all, but levels off gently so that I’m not inordinately rewarded by getting lucky and just having one of those days where I can work on a painting for 10 hours.
extension 5
I wondered if I shouldn’t say this one. It seems to set a bad example. It probably does, but it also lets me discuss how to discern whether an amendment is safe.
I said when explaining extension 1 that I decided I’d decrement CANDY by 3 once I’d hit -8. After half a year of spending much of my time under -10, I found myself at -15. Months of fluctuation had boiled away all my optimism that I could go back into the “good zone” of -5 to 0.
So I gave myself amnesty. I reset CANDY to -2.
I am now sure this was the right call. I haven’t done it since, or felt remotely tempted to do it again. But it was hard to tell at the time. I had spent two years cocooned in this system that protected me from hell. Even as I was crashing against its boundaries, magnetized to my Substance, I was terrified of rupturing the membrane that separated me from riptide life. I couldn’t tell if amnesty would fix it or break it.
But I was unable to think of how to earn my way out – not when I was so exhausted, so sick of meditating, not remotely in shape to do creative work. So I reset the number. All I can say is that I did it quite solemnly, driven by the urge to protect the system, not to cheat it. There was no glee in the bailout, no sense I was getting away with something. As the giver I was saying, “You’re getting this because you need this.” As the recipient I was saying, “I will try very, very hard not to make you do this again.”
That’s probably a good sign that you’re on the right track.
postscript, another 2 years later
Five years into this system now. I became pregnant and couldn’t get high, so I racked up 25 uses, 15 of which I used to pay back for my past self. I feel sufficiently abundance-mindset about marijuana that I’m considering paying interest on it too. Feels good, man.