Quitting Won’t Fill the Hole

There’s a pervasive notion that floats around recovery circles—this idea that once you kick your habit, everything will magically fall into place. The clouds will part, the birds will sing, and suddenly life will be worth living again. While it’s true that being addicted to a “thing,” whether substance or act, eventually tallies up consequences that weigh heavy on our souls, the math isn’t quite as simple as “remove addiction, add happiness.”

I’ve watched countless cannabis enthusiasts (and addicts of all stripes) fall into this trap. They sit in circles, eyes gleaming with hope as they declare, “If I could only quit, then everything would be better…” But they’re missing something crucial—their addiction isn’t the source of their discontent; it’s merely a symptom of something deeper.

Addiction, at its core, is a means of dealing with something we cannot name or are desperately trying to avoid. It’s the bandage we slap over a wound without cleaning it first. The cannabis, the alcohol, the gambling, the endless scrolling—these aren’t the disease itself but rather the body’s misguided attempt at self-medication.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that most recovery programs don’t emphasize enough: if you don’t do the real healing, even if you manage to white-knuckle your way through quitting one addiction, you’ll inevitably find something else to cover that gaping wound. Maybe you’ll trade joints for junk food, or bongs for binge-watching. The face of the addiction changes, but the role it plays remains constant.

Let’s take a deeper dive into this cycle and why simply quitting isn’t enough to truly heal.

First, we must acknowledge that when it comes to pain and addiction, everyone’s journey is unique. What feels like an insurmountable mountain to you might be a speed bump to someone else, and vice versa. There’s no universal scale for suffering, which makes navigating these waters all the more complex.

However, across all these varied experiences, there’s a common trap I’ve seen ensnare countless individuals—what I call the “If/Then Fallacy.” It’s the belief that one singular thing is the root cause of all our discomfort. This is where addicts often say, “If I can only kick this addiction, then my whole life would be better.” While this may seem logical on paper, it’s a deeply flawed perspective.

The real issue rarely lies with the substance or behavior itself but with something deeper—something the addiction is helping us avoid or cope with. Whether it’s trauma, depression, anxiety, or simply the existential weight of being human in an increasingly disconnected world, there’s usually a wound beneath the bandage.

Furthermore, the “If/Then” scenario places your healing, joy, and accomplishments in a fictional future state. “If I stop smoking weed, then I’ll finally have the motivation to start that business.” “If I quit drinking, then my relationship will improve.” These statements create a dangerous binary—because when the “if” is satisfied but the “then” doesn’t materialize, where does that leave you? Often, it leads to “If that didn’t work, then what’s the point of trying anything?”

This thinking creates a perfect setup for relapse or substituting one addiction for another. After all, if quitting didn’t magically transform your life as promised, why continue to deny yourself that temporary relief?

If you’ve been considering quitting cannabis or any other addiction, and you believe it to be the sole source of your unhappiness, I strongly urge you to reconsider your framework. The cannabis, or your relationship with it, is likely just a mask for your real pain. If you want to truly liberate yourself from the burden of addiction, you need to develop the capacity to sit with your pain, examine it, and cultivate joy despite it—not because it disappeared.

This article was inspired by a post I came across while scrolling through Reddit the other day—one of those moments where someone’s raw honesty stops you mid-scroll. A 32-year-old man shared that after smoking cannabis and drinking 4-6 beers daily for nearly his entire 20s, he had finally managed to quit both. No cannabis for almost six months, no alcohol for three. A significant achievement by any measure.

Yet instead of the transformation he expected, he felt “MISERABLE.” Despite taking medication for ADHD and anxiety, and despite removing substances that conventional wisdom says should improve his mental health, he felt no positive change. In fact, he felt worse, as if he’d “stopped doing things that were fun for me, or at least making life bearable.”

His post ended with a plea that broke my heart: “Is this just how I’m going to feel now? Does this go away eventually?”

This redditor’s experience perfectly illustrates the point—even when you manage to power through the physical and psychological challenges of quitting an addiction, your mental and spiritual state doesn’t necessarily transform as a result. His baseline remained exactly the same, perhaps even dipping lower without the chemical crutches he’d relied on for so long.

When you’re changing habits but not experiencing the promised benefits, it’s a clear sign that your discomfort or pain isn’t primarily coming from the substance. The cannabis or alcohol wasn’t creating your misery—it was masking it, providing temporary relief from a deeper issue that remains unaddressed.

This is something we all must consider when facing our compulsions. If you find yourself in a situation where you want to stop a behavior but simply can’t, it might be time to look deeper. Ask yourself, “Why do I do this activity?” And then ask “why” five more times, each answer digging a layer deeper toward the root cause.

Why do I smoke cannabis every night? Because it helps me relax. Why do I need help relaxing? Because my mind races with anxiety. Why does my mind race with anxiety? Because I’m worried about my future. Why am I worried about my future? Because I don’t feel secure in my career path. Why don’t I feel secure in my career path? Because I never really chose it—I fell into it. Why does that bother me? Because I feel like I’m not living authentically or pursuing my true passions.

Once you’ve excavated to this deeper level, you can begin to address the root causes directly. Perhaps the issue isn’t the cannabis at all, but rather that you need to reassess your career path or find meaning outside of work. Without this deeper work, quitting the substance becomes an exercise in willpower rather than healing.

Your addiction isn’t necessarily the root cause of your issues—it’s often just the most visible symptom. If you’re depressed, anxious, or feeling lost, it’s not primarily because of the substance; it’s because of something deeper that the substance helps you manage or forget temporarily.

Unless you actually do the internal work on these matters—examining your pain, seeking appropriate mental health support, rebuilding healthy relationships, finding meaning and purpose—no matter what you quit or how long you stay “clean,” you’ll likely find yourself seeking new ways to shield yourself from the pain. The prison isn’t cannabis or alcohol; it’s the unhealed wound those substances help you endure.

If you’re struggling right now, it’s absolutely important to seek help. That might mean therapy, support groups, or speaking with a healthcare provider about potential underlying mental health conditions that need treatment. But alongside that external support, commit to the honest and difficult work of looking inward. Ask yourself what you’re truly trying to avoid when you reach for that joint or that drink.

At the end of the day, we all have our struggles. If yours involves cannabis at this point in your life, there’s no judgment here. I’ve been there myself. But I’ve also learned that true healing rarely comes from simply removing something from your life—it comes from adding understanding, self-compassion, and addressing the real gaps in your heart and mind that the substance was never capable of filling in the first place.

The void can’t be filled by quitting. But quitting might just give you the clarity to finally see what the void truly needs.

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Which Cannabis Compound Do Scientists Think Can Replace Opiates?

…And Why This Is Important

Opiates are a type of pharmaceutical drug that’s been made from the opium poppy plant. While it’s somewhat a ‘natural’ substance that’s been extracted from the fibers and sap of the opium poppy plant, these are extremely dangerous sedatives that act on the central nervous system. However, there are completely synthetic opioids as well, which are manufactured entirely in laboratories.

Famous examples of well-known and widely-used opiates today include heroin, codeine, and morphine. They all work similarly, binding to the brain’s opioid receptors and users feel a drastic reduction in pain. It also causes users to feel euphoric, drowsy, or sleepy. Common side effects include constipation and nausea.

Because opiates are powerful for dulling one’s pain perceptions, they have become commonly prescribed by doctors and hospitals for pain relief. That said, opiates have become one of the world’s most addictive, dangerous, and fatal drugs – and you can get prescribed it right by your very own physician. Repeated use of opiates can easily lead to dependence and addiction, and eventually consuming high doses can drastically slow down breathing, and cause brain damage, or even death.

Since doctors still keep prescribing opioids, this has resulted in the deadly Opioid Epidemic, which has killed thousands of people. It’s a worrisome public health crisis, most especially because of fentanyl, an illegally manufactured opioid which is said to be 50 times more potent than heroin.

Could The Answer To The Opioid Epidemic Lie In Cannabis…Terpenes?

The past few years have shown that cannabis legalization is critical for surviving the opioid epidemic, and reducing overall opioid consumption.

The results of a recent research paper, which builds on past studies conducted by Dr. John Streicher, who is a member of the Comprehensive Center for Pain and Addiction, reveals fascinating findings. According to Streicher, cannabis terpenes were found to provide relief in inflammation models as well as on neuropathic pain caused by chemotherapy.

For the study, Streicher and his research team analyzed 4 kinds of terpenes that are found in mid to high levels in Cannabis sativa plants: linalool, geraniol, beta-caryophyllene, and alpha-humulene. They discovered that each terpene produced significant pain relief among mice subjects with fibromyalgia and post-operative pain, and among the terpenes, geraniol was found to be the most powerful.

“Our research is showing that terpenes are not a good option for reducing acute pain resulting from an injury, such as stubbing your toe or touching a hot stove; however, we are seeing significant reductions in pain when terpenes are used for chronic or pathological pain,” he said. “This study was the first to investigate the impact of terpenes in preclinical models of fibromyalgia and post-operative pain and expand the scope of potential pain-relieving treatments using terpenes,” Streicher said.

Cannabis terpenes are the compounds responsible for the aromatic profile of each strain; they are located in the plant trichomes. Not only do they contribute to each strain’s unique flavor and odor, but they also have valuable therapeutic and medicinal benefits. There are around 150 kinds of terpenes known today, though in the entire plant world, there are known to be some 20,000 terpenes.

Understanding the therapeutic benefits of terpenes is incredibly valuable also because they don’t contain THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the compound in marijuana that gets you high.

“With fibromyalgia, there isn’t much of an understanding of what the pain state is, and there are not a lot of great options for treating it,” explains Streicher. “Our findings show that terpenes may be a viable treatment option for fibromyalgia pain, which could potentially have a large impact and make a difference for an under-treated population.”

Other Studies

This is not the first time that cannabis terpenes have been found to demonstrate excellent pain-relieving properties. It must be noted that just like what Streicher says, terpenes seem to do better with chronic pain management, instead of acute pain management.

Another study from 2024, which was published in The Journal of the Association for the Study of Pain, was conducted by researchers at the University of Arizona and the National Institutes of Health. The investigators analyzed the analgesic properties of different terpenes including geraniol, humulene, linalool, pinene, and caryophyllene among mice subjects with chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy.

According to the researchers, all the terpenes delivered analgesic effects that were equivalent to around 10 mg/kg of morphine. It was also interesting to note that administering both morphine and terpenes together at low doses resulted in ‘enhanced’ pain-killing effects.

“Together these studies identify cannabis terpenes as potential therapeutics for chronic neuropathic pain,” said the investigators.

There have also been other studies that have found that combining cannabis with opioids can indeed provide long-lasting pain relief. It comes with the added benefit of reducing opioid doses needed for effective pain control. This phenomenon is called opioid-sparing. These types of protocols can be beneficial for patients who suffer from severe, chronic pain caused by cancer, arthritis, joint problems, fibromyalgia, diabetes, post-surgical pain, migraines, nerve damage, and so much more.

Conclusion

Learning more about the pain-killing properties of terpenes is extremely valuable for the medical community, patients, and even society as a whole. We can all do with less opioid addictions because it has torn families apart, and caused the deaths of thousands of people.

Terpenes, or cannabis in general, offer a natural and safe alternative that can be complementary to other pharmaceutical treatments designed to reduce pain.

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Cannabis and the Authoritarian State

Cannabis has been legal for longer than it has been illegal. Let that sink in for a minute. For thousands of years, humans cultivated and consumed cannabis freely across civilizations and continents. It wasn’t until the early 1900s that we witnessed a massive push to drive hemp and cannabis into the black market, primarily due to industrial competition from petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, and other industrial applications.

What makes cannabis so threatening to powerful interests? For starters, hemp and cannabis are highly versatile crops with over 50,000 different uses, from medicine to textiles to fuel. Even more remarkable is how this plant is hardwired to work with the human body through our endocannabinoid system—a biological network we didn’t even discover until the 1990s.

Perhaps most threatening of all is that cannabis is insanely easy to grow. This means that if the plant helps you with a particular physical ailment, you have the ability to grow your own medicine indefinitely. No insurance premiums, no wait lists, no pharmaceutical middlemen—just you cultivating your own healing directly from the earth.

Authoritarians do not like this, not one bit. When people can meet their own needs independently, power structures lose their grip. When citizens can think differently without permission, control systems begin to fail. So today, we’re going to look at the interesting relationship between authoritarianism and cannabis, and how this humble plant plays a key role in keeping you free.

We’ve already established the versatility of cannabis, but there’s another element that those old D.A.R.E. PSAs inadvertently reveal about what authoritarians think about cannabis. I’m talking, of course, about “behavior.” You see, in an authoritarian system, you and I are but cogs in the machine. We’re the expendables who should be proud to work ourselves to death for our “fearless leaders.”

This is precisely why certain ideas, philosophies, religions, movements, books, and substances are typically banned in authoritarian regimes. Take North Korea as an example: everything from the type of television citizens watch to the music they hear is a tightly spun spell designed to keep the populace in check. While they don’t have explicit laws against hemp (they actually grow it industrially), smoking psychoactive cannabis is strictly forbidden.

Contrast this with places like Malaysia, where you can get up to 5 years for possessing just 20 grams of cannabis, and even face the death penalty depending on the situation. These authoritarians don’t play around when it comes to cannabis because they know it affects the behavior of their populace in ways they can’t control.

The question becomes: what behavior do they fear so much that cannabis produces within the individual?

The answer is a critical mind. People who consume cannabis often begin to question their own belief systems. Most regular users undergo some transformation in their values and perspectives. Cannabis has a unique way of helping people see beyond cultural programming and think outside established paradigms. It can make the familiar strange and the strange familiar—a psychological state that’s antithetical to authoritarian control.

This independent thinking runs counter to the narrative of authoritarians who wish to maintain a tight grip on social consciousness. If even 10% of a population begins to pivot in their behavior within a regime, it can have massive ripple effects. Just look at cannabis in the US—it went from being demonized to being embraced by the majority in less than 80 years, despite massive propaganda efforts.

For authoritarians, psychoactive cannabis isn’t primarily a threat to public health and wellbeing—it’s a threat to the health and wellbeing of authoritarianism itself. When people start thinking differently, they start living differently. When they start living differently, they start demanding different. And that’s the beginning of the end for any system built on unquestioning obedience.

Beyond the threat to thought control, there’s another reason why drugs in general remain illegal: the state can use prohibition as a weapon against the populace. This isn’t conspiracy theory—it’s documented history.

Take Nixon’s war on drugs. His domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, later admitted: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.” Nixon essentially placed cannabis on the Controlled Substances Act because he needed an excuse to shut down anti-war protests and target Black communities.

Since hippies and anti-war protesters were smoking “freedom grass,” making it illegal would circumvent their freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, and more importantly—turn free citizens into state property. It’s a win-win if you’re an authoritarian looking to silence dissent.

Then there’s the whole “boogeyman” complex that prohibition creates. We’re told “drug dealers” are roaming the streets preying on innocents, giving them “marihuanas” so they can do vile things. What the government conveniently leaves out is how the banks these “dealers” use to launder their money remain untouched. They don’t mention the shadier dealings of law enforcement either—like running guns into Mexico (eventually leading to the death of one of their own), or spraying poison on crops, killing and hospitalizing people because, you know…”Drugs are bad!”

Authoritarians cannot let go of the value that keeping the most widely used illicit substance in the world illegal provides them. This explains why the US hasn’t federally legalized cannabis despite nearly 80% of Americans supporting some form of legalization. It’s not because they don’t have enough research or that they’re genuinely concerned about public health—it’s because prohibition gives them all the privileges of violating constitutional rights while siphoning money into their coffers.

Drug prohibition creates a perpetual enemy that can never be defeated, allowing endless justification for surveillance, militarized police, asset forfeiture, and expansion of state power. What authoritarian could resist such a convenient tool?

Cannabis is a plant. You can’t make nature illegal—it’s counter to the human experience. When governments attempt to criminalize a naturally occurring organism that humans have cultivated and used for thousands of years, they reveal the absurdity of their position and the limits of their authority.

While the United States isn’t a full-on authoritarian state (yet), the truth is that many authoritarian elements have played out over the years. You only need to look as far as the war on drugs to see how the state utilizes prohibition as a weapon to their advantage. From no-knock raids to civil asset forfeiture to mass incarceration, drug laws have erected a parallel legal system where constitutional protections often don’t apply.

The fundamental truth is that cannabis is not only versatile and medicinal, it gives you back your autonomy in multiple ways. It helps you think for yourself. It allows you to grow your own medicine. It connects you with a plant that humans have used ceremonially, medicinally, and industrially throughout our history. And this autonomy is something authoritarians cannot stand—free individuals who know how to think beyond the narratives they’re fed.

Cannabis doesn’t just get you high—it offers a perspective from which the absurdities of prohibition become glaringly obvious. Perhaps this is why, as state after state legalizes, we’re witnessing the slow but steady unraveling of one of the most enduring authoritarian policies in American history.

So if you count yourself among those who value freedom of thought and bodily autonomy, who believe that nature doesn’t require government permission, and who understand that true liberty includes the right to explore your own consciousness—well, maybe it’s time to toke one up for freedom!

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