Marijuana addiction affects everyone related to the user…friends, family, and school/work performance. The users loses interest in life and sole purpose becomes getting the high feeling. Helping someone with marijuana addiction is not an easy task as they are usually in denial of the gravity of their addiction.
How then can you effectively help someone with an addiction?
- Know the facts about Marijuana.
- Observe and know at what stage of the addiction process your loved one is in.
- Make an approach plan
- List down some specific ways in which the addiction is affecting the user and relationships. As much you can use ‘I’ rather than ‘you’ for example ‘i feel sad when you do not do well in school when using marijuana’ rather than ‘you do not do well in school when you use marijuana’. Using ‘you’ may make your loved one become defensive
- Try to find out the root cause of the drug abuse, how it started and why it continued
- Love for a cool nonthreatening environment like a restaurant, the movies and express the concerns you listed out.
- Avoid nagging or threatening. Let the person know the dangers of using marijuana.
- Be ready for any answers that may come forth after the discussion (he may either want to stop, may not want to stop or want to stop but not yet). Do not try to push the decision to quit if they do not want to. Be patient, the addiction didn’t build up in a day and won’t go away in a day. Prepare yourself for the excuses and denial.
- Be supportive but do not enable: enabling the user makes pushing the decision to quit for later. Enabling is to doing things for your loved one they can not do for themselves because of the addicition like grocery shopping, cooking, paying rents…Also having ground rules will help like no use of marijuana at home
- Once the person has agreed to quit, make a quitting plan together. This will include things like getting rid of the marijuana, change of friends, seeking professional help, and celebrating victories.
- Help your loved one through the withdrawal effects. This may include things like exercising, eating a carrot, finding other fun activities that do not involve getting high…
- Watch out for signs of relapse (similar to signs to marijuana use)
- Do not self blame (thinking it is your fault that user got addicted, people are responsible for their decisions)
- Rest: do not out do yourself and enter into stress mode. Try talking with friends and seeking help before you become the next addict.
- Seek spiritual help and pray. This works a whole lot for the spiritually inclined (and also because i wanted to make this list up to 10 😉
Hope that helped.
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About the author
Dr. Ekwoge Hilda is a trained pharmacist from Cameroon and Co-founder of HILPharma. When she is not busy creating content, she slings pills to pay the bills.
