How does smoking marijuana affect a person's psyche, behavior and memory? In what cases can it cause depression and suicidal tendencies? When does it lead to impotence and what are the factors behind it? Read an excerpt from the book "Tame a drug addict", in which the psychotherapist Robert Rutkowski talks with Irena Sławińska about the influence of marijuana on the psyche.

To the questions of Irena A. Stanisławska aboutthe influence of marijuana on the psycheis answered by Robert Rutkowski. More information about the book can be found under the article. Poradnikzdrowie.pl assumed media patronage over the publication.

I have to ask you about marijuana. Because often even those who do not consent to hard drugs treat marijuana indulgently - just such innocent smoking pot. Did you talk about it in combination with cocaine, what if I only smoked marijuana?

Marijuana smokers have a favorite argument: marijuana does not kill! It doesn't make you get lung cancer when you smoke - so it's better than nicotine! It doesn't cause liver cancer - so it's better than alcohol! It's an abuse. On a strictly physiological level, marijuana is indeed less toxic, only it is tricky. […] you have to meet certain mental conditions, but there is one more "but" - most of the marijuana smokers (even after a dozen or so years) do not know how it works. What he doesn't know is that it takes a long time to metabolize, that it is in the body seven to ten days in someone who smokes for the first time, and up to a month and a half or two months in someone who smokes more often. Some people believe and proclaim that marijuana is found in the urine when it is active and later inactive. I have not heard any more nonsense. The tests have a certain sensitivity. Just because the test did not find marijuana, it doesn't mean there is no marijuana in your body. Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is deposited (and accumulates) in lipid cells, the fat cells that we have the most in the brain. All our electronics are immersed in them.

THC does not damage interneuronal connections (such as amphetamines and cocaine, which can permanently damage them and cause psychological disturbances), but it does temporarily disrupt the flow of information. You can tell a marijuana smoker by the way he freezes - when he tells something, speaks and suddenly loses the plot (of course, for everyoneit happens to us, but for him it is standard). Marijuana has an impact on mental and physical condition. It damages the prefrontal lobes that are responsible for emotions, planning, organization and empathy. The process of restoring them takes many months. This is exactly what the SPECT (single-photon emision computed tomography) test, i.e. the map of brain activity, shows.

The psychoactive substance contained in marijuana and hashish has really been present in lipid cells for a long time. Once a patient called me, who hadn't smoked for six months: “Robert, I don't know what happened. I was in the sauna and got out of it on all fours! Like I'm totally stoned! Believe me, I don't really smoke! ” What happened? It was simply a long session of high temperature that triggered the activation of lipid-deposited THC deposits into the bloodstream. No tests showed marijuana in his system, but it was still in him. So while you can't feel the marijuana after a while, it still acts as a gentle filter separating you from the real world. It took me 12 months to get back upright. For 12 months I was learning to function again, because this is about how long this process takes.

Can marijuana cause depression?

How we feel after marijuana depends not only on the quality of the product. As in a two-part adhesive, the two components must be mixed in order for the bond to react. One part is a commodity, the other is all that we bring to this contract: our deficits, problems, resources, shortages. And only then can we talk about whether we will feel good or bad after smoking a joint. But people don't know that. They think it will be as fun as a friend's.

As in the case of the 16-year-old (widely reported in the media), who also compared himself with others. He decided that if they were fine on the pot, why should he be bad? It's just marijuana. Light! Ass, not light! In his case, it was an ax that cut through all existence. Hanged himself. Because he didn't take into account that he was depressed, and depression didn't like marijuana. It's like trying to put out a fire with gasoline. Of course, if a person is not prone to getting caught up in anxiety stories, they're more likely to be okay. However, there is never such a guarantee. You never know if you'll be fine or if it will go the wrong way and go into psychosis. It's always a risk.

Another example? An employee of a certain important government office, 32 years old. A concrete guy, a tight mind, very efficient at work. He started smoking quite late, at the age of 24. [… ] "Notit went in the right hole ”, not what he expected, but he believed that he would manage to drive marijuana like a Mustang, so that it would be enjoyable, not depress the mood; what started to happen. Unfortunately, marijuana activated some mental disorders in him, so he ended up in Tworki for a month. He hadn't smoked for that month, but when he returned to the world, he repressed - as an addicted person - the fact that he was in a mental hospital because of marijuana. After all, some celebrities say that marijuana is an innocent weed! Not only that - it is a medicine! (Meanwhile, although we can read a lot of pseudoscientific articles on this subject in the press, such a statement is an abuse - because medicine can do without marijuana as a drug, but it cannot do without, for example, morphine. Besides, if morphine is a drug, can we take it? to improve your mood?). So according to my patient, marijuana could not make him stay in a psychiatric ward for a month. That's why he continued smoking. And there were other problems. However, he kept telling himself that marijuana was not responsible for his deteriorating relationship with his girlfriend, only the girl who turned out to be stupid. That's why he exchanged the girl for a second, then another. And again he ended up in a psychiatric ward for a month. This time at the Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology at Sobieski. For the first visit, he came to see me with his current girlfriend. He's alone for the next one. He did not reflect on himself. He did not follow his contract of abstinence because he still believed that the whole world was to blame for his being bad. And marijuana is innocent. Finally, he threw himself on the Warsaw metro tracks at the Politechnika station. Efficient.

Effects of smoking marijuana on memory

You, as I understand it, have stopped smoking after a cocaine-marijuana screening session?

Yes. But that was due to several previous events that had happened in quick succession. Because you never wake up one day and make a decision: "From now on, I change everything!". One of them was the situation that happened just before meeting my girlfriend. Came home, took the yogurt out of the fridge. The phone rang, I answered, the girl asked: "Honey, come get me. I will wait at the Crossroads. " Cheerful with the prospect of sex, I got dressed to leave because I was supposed to be there in 20 minutes. Guess what I was doing for the next hour and a half. […] I was looking for the keys to the apartment. And where did I finally find them? In the fridge!

Because a man who smokes marijuana is characterized by the so-called time-lapse thinking - some fragments of its operation fall out of memory. Short-term memory fails andcoordination of several activities at once (for example, therefore, after marijuana, the car drives very badly). Of course, a lot of marijuana smokers will argue against this. However, I could only change my mind if I found out that the declared cannabis smoker is one of the Nobel laureates, that is, someone who has spent several years in intensive conceptual work, for which the brain is mainly used.

But I doubt if it will happen, because planning, focus, consistency, consistency with marijuana unfortunately does not exist. Therefore, if marijuana smokers are drivers, pilots, operate any motor vehicles or decide about important processes, they are dangerous for the environment. I don't want the people who make decisions about my he alth or my life to smoke marijuana. I don't want a doctor smoker, lawyer, fireman, politician. If someone wants to smoke it, let them decide to play the role of a frick, an outsider, a gentleman, i.e. a person who lives, for example, with roy alties, whose work does not affect my safety.

Effect of smoking marijuana on sex life

Once a couple of thirty-year-olds came to me with the problem of completely ceasing to enjoy sex. They had the choice of either throwing themselves into sexuality outside of the relationship or doing something. They remained silent about the fact that they smoke weed all the time. And since I was observing the communication between them and me, it immediately struck me that it was not as efficient as it should be. I asked if they smoke marijuana. Confused, they looked at each other and confessed.

Their every sex was related to smoking. We had to talk for a long time to make them understand that marijuana can be this negative factor, because although it can increase the pleasure, the amount of sensation it gives at some point ends. And there is saturation. I went through it myself too. My partner reacted brilliantly to marijuana, and so did I. So much so that I had to silence the ceiling because the neighbors couldn't bear the explosion of euphoria. It was stormy and noisy. But there was a crash on Matyska. Once, during an intimate situation, when I was making these strange, funny movements, suddenly my eyes fell on the shelf with my favorite books and I noticed that one volume from Jerzy Krzyszton's triptych Obłęd is missing. There is no third volume! And immediately, because this is how marijuana works, I began to analyze what happened to it: "Who took it ?! Because I don't remember borrowing it! ”. And all the time thinking where the book had gone, I was making these funny movements at the same time.

Dear gentlemen! We all know that there is no way to combine the two. If there is going to be sex, it can't be onthe long run of marijuana or beer. Because there will come a moment when our sexual performance will drop dramatically. What happened to me once.

What about this couple? These people broke up. They stopped smoking, and then they saw each other differently than before. They became less attractive to each other. THC produces a perceptual bubble which is kind of a filter. At best, because at worst - it can become an amplifier that exaggerates things that we don't want to see. Do we watch everything on the internet? Not. We are selective. And marijuana robs us of our perceptual filters - everything comes in. Once I read a poorly written text in the newspaper about children at the Leningrad train station and cried! It's not bad when someone reacts like me, but people who are more sensitive than me, neurotic end up on a psychiatrist's couch. Like one of my twenty-two-year-old patients. For this shy, complex, but extremely handsome boy, sex after marijuana ended tragically. Marijuana enhances various stimuli, including nonsensical ones, we are less selective, we cannot focus on one thing. The boy didn't focus on what he should be doing at the moment… and he became physically disabled. In addition, the girl turned out to be not very delicate and demanding, so the guy ended up with a psychiatrist. With psychosis that he is impotent and hopeless at all, with thoughts of suicide. And it was supposed to be so fun! Because my friend, when we drank breweries and smoked a joint, told me what great sex he had.

Human stupidity knows no bounds! Someone thinks that since Kubica was driving 250 kilometers per hour in Formula 1, he could drive at such a speed on the A2 motorway, if he also pulls out so much in his car. And then it is scraped off the asph alt. There will be more such people. Because the world is constructed in such a way that stupid people fall off - either in the fumes of marijuana or on the highway, or for many other reasons. May they do as little damage to others as possible.

This will be useful to you

"Tame a drug addict"- a story about the fight against addiction, which has never happened in Poland. Robert Rutkowski is the only Polish psychotherapist who has decided to talk so frankly about his addiction and the way he went to get out of it.

In an interview conducted by Irena A. Stanisławska, psychotherapist Robert Rutkowski gives a shocking testimony of what drugs can do to people. He first used heroin at the age of 18. He took it out of powerlessness, despair, but also out of simple curiosity. The hell of the addiction he later experienced changed him completely. But he never gave up; and on top of that, he managed to staya happy and fulfilled man. He did this by constantly working on himself and then - with other addicts. It was precisely the first steps in therapeutic practice that allowed him to discover a talent for helping those in need. Today he is one of the most popular specialists in the treatment of all kinds of addictions.

The book is also an important voice in the ongoing discussion on legalizing marijuana. The author's position seems to be as distant from the one occupied by the camp of strong supporters as the one on which the fierce opponents of the so-called soft drugs.

Robert Rutkowski - psychotherapist, lecturer and educator. Former representative of Poland in basketball. He conducts therapeutic sessions for people who have problems with addictions, professional or family crises. He also helps athletes as a psychological guardian (for several years he supported the Speedway Polish National Team) and families who have problems in relations with children or among themselves. He is often invited to the media as an expert. His clients are managers, people working under pressure, people in life crises. He uses the formula of short-term therapy, effective after only a few sessions.

Irena A. Stanisławska- journalist and co-author of the books: "Man from the lining", "My child, part. 1 and 2 "," Psychological emergency "," Where does sex live? "," Be a doctor, be a patient "," How to raise a child, dog, cat … and a guy "," Set design "," Happy child, or how to avoid the most common mistakes educational "

Category:

Psychology