When I say it is addictive I suppose I mean it is habit forming and creates tolerance. This to me is the definition of addiction. It is not dependence, I don't need weed to function normally, but I do feel compelled to consume it. Whenever I have weed, I smoke it. If I have any amount of nug whatsoever, there's a 99.9% chance that I'll smoke some that day. If I'm fresh out of buds, I will scrape every surface, go through every nook and cranny of my apartment to collect shake. I will completely clean out my grinder of kief (seems that I'll never have enough to press even a gram of kief). I will resin hit my bowl until it produces nothing. Looking back it makes me feel like a crackhead.
It doesn't heavily interfere with my life, I still do really well in school, although bowls during the day probably means less studying overall for that day, so I try to keep my weed smoking for right before or after dinner at the earliest. Also I try to make it to the gym every day before I smoke. But I've got enough of a tolerance where I can still work out or study if I smoke, as long as I give myself 30 minutes to an hour. Tolerance is one of the defining points of any addictive drug, and MJ definitely has that. I smoked between 1/2oz and an oz of premium herb in the past two weeks and the effects of tolerance are obvious, it takes at least 2 bowls to get me where I want to be whereas with no tolerance, one well placed bong rip is often enough. My highs are also only really about an hour long, with some residual effects that last pretty much the entire day.
When I stop smoking for a day, I notice the following withdrawal symptoms: loss of appetite, insomnia, and the aforementioned fiendish addict behavior. The loss of appetite I think I can blame on the overeating I sometimes do when smoking a lot, my appetite returns within a day or two and I think that's just my body catching up with my stomach so to speak. The insomnia is weird and is what inspired this post, I had to be up at 7 this morning and I didn't sleep a wink. Maybe 10 minutes of that daydreaming in bed was actual dreaming, I dunno. The thing about the insomnia is that weed doesn't necessarily cure it even though I'm almost 100% that the lack of weed caused it in the first place. If I do happen to have weed around and am just taking a few days break for exams or something, but can't sleep, I have tried taking a few puffs and it doesn't get me to sleep, at least not until after the effects have worn off. Really irritating. It seems the only way I can avoid insomnia is by smoking, but not right before bed. Unless I smoked a lot and can just pass out easily. The insomnia for me lasts a long ass time, maybe a week or more. I don't really know because I will start smoking before it cures itself, or I will take prescription sleep aids. Maybe I just have insomnia by default and weed is a good self-medication, iunno.
Thoughts?
. Kind of ironic considering what I said, but some unforseeable shit happened tonight. I definitely still stand by my post though, I'm done smoking daily for the time being. The only reason I consider weed "addictive" is because it's something we've all done more than once... That's the same for anything though... the extent to which a user is "addicted", as well as both tolerance and withdrawal symptoms you mentioned vary from person to person needless to day. We definitely agree on the main point of your post though, they all happen to these varying extents.