The question has come up to me recently: Is marijuana actually addictive? Does it actually have the power to get people hooked like other, seemingly more destructive drugs, such as cocaine or alcohol? It is a fair question because most people who have tried smoking weed do not really seem to get caught up in a daily habit of doing so. But at the same time, there are many people who do get caught up in the lifestyle and seem to devote a lot of their free time and energy to getting high.

So what is the real truth here? Is it addictive? Or do people just fall into the patterns and the lifestyle naturally and want to keep getting high? At what point do we distinguish between a bad habit and a full blown addiction?

Let's think for a second about what real addiction is. We can look at the medical definition, the definition in the dictionary, what behaviorists believe addiction is, and so on. For the purposes of our discussion, we are going to define addiction as this: when someone has lost the power of choice regarding their behavior. That is real addiction and almost no one would argue that someone in this state of being is not addicted. If they no longer have the choice to refuse the drug when they want to, then clearly this is addiction.

Does this happen with marijuana use? Yes it does. Most people who try marijuana get high a few times and then move on with their lives. The same would go for thousands of young people who try alcohol or other drugs for the first time in their life. It is just another experience for them and they move on and don't really think much of it.

But for a small percentage of people out there, they try a drug such as marijuana and they are hooked. They are off to the races. Marijuana gives them purpose in their life and gives them something to be excited about. They obsess over it and want to do it all the time. This is addiction. What typically happens next is that the person will start to slowly restructure their life so that they are living a lifestyle that involves heavy smoking of marijuana. In other words, they drift away from friends who do not smoke weed and start making new friends who do use marijuana all the time. They start to focus and plan their activities around smoking weed and planning and scheming for ways to buy and get more of it. This is the obsessive element that accompanies any addiction. It happens with marijuana and this is just more evidence that it is an addictive drug.

Now of course, there are some who content that weed is not really addictive because there are almost no physical side effects when you stop using it suddenly. This is actually not true in heavy smokers and some people do experience signs of a withdrawal that include sluggishness and fatigue. But also, it is obvious to me that smoking weed is very addictive mentally and many people use it on a daily basis in order to escape their reality. Another way to say it is if you are relying on marijuana use on a regular basis in order to make it through your day, then that is basically using the chemical instead of coping with real life. This is an immature way to live and if you cannot walk away from such a pattern very easily then you are probably addicted to the drug.