The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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My “medical cannabis” prescription was approved. I’m not a huge stoner but I don’t like feeling like a criminal and, while the penalties for possession in the UK are very low (as far as I understand it you just get a warning and the cops confiscate it) I think it’s embarrassing to buy drugs like a sixteen year old when you’re approaching thirty. I also want to avoid smoking if I can avoid it but the vapes available on the UK illicit market are pretty much all dangerous synthetic cannabinoids where you have no idea what’s in them; the only way to get safe vape oil is legally.
The process was very straightforward. You have to have tried treatment for whatever condition (anxiety, ADHD, back pain, Long Covid, whatever) before, so I said I needed it for ADHD because the medication had not satisfactorily resolved my symptoms. This was indeed true. They checked my medical history (I think this is to detect schizophrenics who can’t have it), had one consultation and then approved it.
Interestingly, while my ADHD diagnosis consultation to get lisdexamfetamine cost £900 or something like it and took an hour, the medical weed one only cost £200 and took like ten minutes. After this you order what you want from an online store and it gets delivered to your house.
One interesting thing I’ve found is how few people in Britain even know that legal weed is a thing here at all. On the subreddit it’s common to see stories of police raiding people’s houses or even of people being fired before those involved are informed of the person’s prescription. It’s been legal since 2018 but is only available privately, not on the NHS.
I think weed is particularly dangerous for young people because it kills motivation. That said, as a gainfully employed adult, I find it strictly preferable to alcohol for most occasions because of the lack of hangover and lack of calories. Booze is more fun, almost always, but I’ve been more alert, have found waking up easier and have done more in the morning since replacing drinking at dinner with it (on perhaps 4/7 nights a week).
Every now and then, I'm reminded of how absolutely ridiculous the treatment of "medical cannabis" really is. While I can buy that there are a variety of maladies where people are able to mitigate symptoms by using weed, these often seem to be along the same lines as someone saying that their arthritis bothers them less after a nice dram of whisky in the evening. Strictly true, they're not lying, but not really something that rises to the level of needing to come with the trappings and verbiage of medicalization. There's something both hilarious and depressing about governments needing to maintain the facade that marijuana bans were actually a pretty good idea and very justified while also providing a trivial path to workaround the bans and get weed anyway. That this has become a somewhat normal position for politicians to state openly that they support "medical marijuana" but are against recreational use is just one of the absolute dumbest aspects of American politics despite there being a veritable see of stupid things to choose from.
Obviously the vast majority of medical marijuana users have no actual reason for using beyond wanting to get high. But to the extent that medical marijuana replaces opiates for chronic pain, this is a net positive. In all other ways, except maybe for the like three people who actually have the kind of cancer it works on, it’s a bad thing.
Disclaimer- I don’t like pot. I hate the smell of it, I find potheads annoying and contemptible in a way that alcoholics don’t affect me, and I Just Don’t Like Seeing It. If potheads would smoke weed in their living rooms I probably wouldn’t care very much, any more than the bottle of whiskey a night drinkers at home.
And I think that’s the real crux of my objections to weed. It’s the inability of our society to say, ok, this is a bad thing we don’t approve of, but it’s not worth really cracking down on. If it became legal advertising for it would be everywhere, public places would stink like it constantly, and heavy users would get a platform for bitching about discrimination against them. I don’t want those things, and they’re what happened in other states that legalized the stuff. I think there’s probably also some technical arguments about driving, and adolescent use, but they’re not my real reason.
But circling back to my second paragraph- our present society doesn’t recognize ‘stop celebrating things I hate, it’s really annoying and offensive, just get it out of my face’ as a legitimate complaint. There’s something missing there; if I went to a mosque and set up a booth entitled ‘Mohammed was a pedophile’, I would have no right to complain about getting my ass kicked and being physically removed(I’m given to understand that radical Muslims in the US tend to not actually go to mosque very often, so I wouldn’t expect a beheading). But that’s a general principle, and the need to promote things I hate is one of those annoying parts of modern society.
I think in the US we've managed to find this balance with cigarettes. Smoking is perfectly legal, but banned in most places where non-smokers would be forced to encounter it and advertising is highly restricted. I am a big fan of weed but I see no reason why anyone would need to consume it publicly nor any reason why we need to tolerate garish advertising for it.
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