In my opinion, anything done habitually will cause the feel-good experience to wither on the vine. It would be interesting to know when bitey first started. I've used them distinctly for mood stabilization after some wildness of my young adulthood. I became absolutely functional on k (stopped October 2020). You're hitting the same part of your brain every single time. The bell starts to not ring as much which causes the escalation to start.
For weed, someone who smokes the same strand over and over again, they can switch it up by getting another strain. This will hit the brain differently and cause you to get higher than you otherwise would have if you smoked the one you got used to. You chase that by trying to change it up all the time, but this too starts to wither. Same with edibles. Tolerances build.
I don't take weed too seriously anymore, but it was a physical addiction for me for real. Had to quit for more than a year after more than a decade straight and the first month was brutal. I had unbelievably vivid dreams where I would wake up in a cold sweat. Breaking the cycle also meant that, where in the past I really enjoyed getting as high as possible, for a while afterwards it would trigger anxiety. Now, I genuinely don't care if I do it or not (but I still do).
This will be LOOOONG!
I first tried weed when I was like 18, but I hated it because... it felt like a lie.
You see I had watched that movie "Half Baked" and so I got it into my head that weed could somehow produce ultra-realistic hallucinogenic effects.
That's what I wanted... I wanted a drug capable of producing unexpected hallucinogenic effects that would be indistinguishable from real reality. In other words, I was looking for augmented reality before that was even a thing. For exploration. I loved the notion of being able to experience something beyond physical reality. Its been a longing all my life, I can't really explain it... it's just... physical reality seems like it's... incomplete. Like there's a bunch of stuff, reality wise, that's just missing.
That was like in 1998, so it wasn't until 2012 that I tried weed again, after I got it legalized in Washington and Colorado (where I used to own like 50 acres of farm land). Sold the farm land after and made a little profit. It was easy to legalize, I figured out how to maximize my social media presence by riffing off local news station affiliates and then I altered everyone's conceptual metrics by shifting the argument from "muh freedoms" to "muh money".
If you can make something sound insanely profitable... guess what?! Yeah, humans are greedy, so you can exploit their wanton satiation.
Only downside is that in the wake of my little magic trick all the rich slurs started copying me... but even dumber... they just started buying all the local news stations outright!
So... yeah I kinda feel bad about that.
That's the problem with being any kind of creative... the evil humans will copy you, but in really terrible ways!
I wanted to legalize non-addictive largely harmless psychotropics... they wanted to legalize hard drugs and pedophilia.
Not hard to see how badly THAT'S turned out!
But even back in 2012 I never vaped weed, only ate edibles and even then only like once a month.
Keeping in mind I was taking opiates at the time and had been for nearly a decade, for nerve damage in my thigh, shoulder and for multiple ripped discs in my back.
I mostly started taking opiates because taking 8 Tylenol at a time on a regular basis was destroying my stomach.
But then I quit the opiates cold turkey sometime back around 2016, largely because they kept making it more of a hassle to get it and because the shit was impairing my breathing.
So that was hell... but... I mean, that's like a Tuesday.
I went through cold turkey opiate withdrawal right in the middle of a decade long "pit of despair" my family subjected me to when they cut off from me (after I exposed their child abuse). Lost all my friends, most of my family... really sucked!
It sucked worse later, because... eventually my idiot sister and her idiot ex-husband wound up abusing their kids in public... in front of like 30 witnesses... nearly broke one of their kid's arms and they had to call an ambulance.
Do you know what all my friends and family did in the wake of the local paper exposing their child abusing bullshit?
Nothing.
They didn't apologize, they weren't sorry at all and they stayed cut off from me.
You see, originally I had deluded myself into thinking that people just didn't believe me. That they thought I was a liar. Somehow that made the abuse feel better, because I came up with a plausible reason for their behavior... but then when it became undeniably obvious that I wasn't lying, well that's when I realized that most people are probably child abusers.
And looking at society today, looking at all the unchecked addictions and ever growing suicide rate and all the crazy pedo shit being pushed and promoted... yeah, I don't think I was wrong.
So that was hell.
I continued to use edibles every now and again, but largely switched to Gabapentin for my pain.
I took that for like... five years, then stopped, mostly because they started doing more research on the drug and found it was linked to terrible shit.
So now I just vape weed.
How much weed I use is largely dependent upon how much money I have or whether someone buys the stuff for me.
Meaning, if I have no money and no weedy handouts... I just don't use it and don't feel any particular inclination to either.
From like 2019 to 2022 I had lots of money to burn so I vaped way more than usual.
To the point where I did start having some medical issues, mostly with sore/burning throat and I'd get little marks on my neck that didn't look good.
So then I started using the lowest heat setting and cut my vape usage in half and the problem has largely cleared up.
Keeping in mind, over a long enough period of time weed ~will~ damage your arteries... not to the extent that a lot of other stupid shit will, but it is a risk.
Long story short, I've been in horrific pain most of my life and I've been very slowly reducing the amount of effective pain medication/relief.
The pain, by the by, it's what cuts through the feeling of effective perceptual drunkenness.
It's the whole reason I can write like I can while high... because strong enough pain disrupts its psychotropic effects.
