Hi (name deleted),
Thanks for your e-mail. While your case is certainly intriguing, it is not entirely surprising. It appears that the experience of withdrawal can be complicated and influenced by a number of things, not all of which are well known or have been studies very well. Related to your report, I have had volunteers in my research studies tell me that they have an easier time not smoking if they know that they can't use for a short period of time during the study, because they know they will be able to smoke again, but that if, each day, whether they could smoke or not, was up in the air, it would be much more difficult to deal with not smoking. Expectancy is a very strong thing when it comes to use of drugs, that is why placebo-controlled studies are necessary... due to expectancies, placebo (no drug) can have very powerful effects.
In my years of studying marijuana withdrawal symptoms, I have noticed several other trends that are suggestive of the type of effect you describe. One observation I've made is that there has been a trend towards less severe withdrawal for people who participate in inpatient studies rather than outpatient studies. In outpatient studies (participants go through withdrawal at home and just come into the lab every couple days to fill out reports and do testing) there is a real opportunity to use marijuana and it is available to them if they want it, though they have been instructed that they should not use it as part of the study. Along those lines, those participants also remain in the same environment and spend time with people that they associate with using marijuana, and cues associated with drug use have been thought to significantly contribute to drug cravings and possibly withdrawal severity. During inpatient studies, there is no opportunity to use and cues associated with marijuana use are absent, which I think contributes to less severe withdrawal. Also, in recent studies I have done, people who report experiencing withdrawal in the past when they go without marijuana on their own have not reported withdrawal when participating in inpatient studies of mine. That said, it is not always the case, as I have had some of the most severe cases of withdrawal I have ever seen occur on our residential unit (vomiting, inability to eat, little or no sleep for 5 straight days, extreme irritability) all of which completely dissipate when marijuana use is reinstated.
Because you are presumably still at home, where you have been for past experiences of withdrawal, are there any other aspects of this current period of abstinence that are different? Are you avoiding people or places where you obtained or smoked a lot of pot? Are you engaging in some other type of behavior to compensate for not using marijuana (use of any other drugs or alcohol, engaging in a new hobby, spending more time with non-marijuana using family members or peers)?
You mentioned that you have "had" to quit this most recent time. What was the reason for this? In many cases our behaviors and subjective experiences can be boiled down to the choice between available reinforcers, and in some cases this is a forced choice. When your wife said in the past you could not smoke marijuana because there was not enough money in the budget, you lost a reinforcer, but did not necessarily gain one (at least nothing tangible) in return. If, for example, your current period of abstinence was brought on because you had to pass a drug test to get a new job that would make you a lot more money, you stand to gain a lot from not using marijuana, and that somehow may make it easier. There are also many anecdotal reports of drug users (tobacco, cocaine, alcohol etc.) who were never able to quit, having tried multiple times and failed, who one day are able to quit without any difficulty after receiving a bad health diagnosis or experience some type of traumatic, transformative or otherwise significant event.
Thus, your differential experience this time around may be due to a combination of expectancy, situational factors, reward contingencies, and environment. Like I said... it is not simple... Let me know if any of this seems to make sense if your case. If not, try to fill me in on some more details as I'd be curious to try to figure it out and possibly test some of this in the lab as a main focus of my research now if to figure out ways to eliminate withdrawal in hopes that it can help more people quit who want to, but otherwise have difficulty doing so.
-(name deleted)
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(name deleted), Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Johns Hopkins University
