This is what I was telling my mom today as we talked about it - even if addictive personalities are always going to find SOMETHING to abuse, pot is better, more treatable, less inclined to produce risk and abusive behavior. People who might use meth may be trained to be more stoned on pot which tends to passivize as opposed to exacerbate aggression, as you noted. So, instead of raping or fighting, the "addict" (using the most general and least accurate version of the term) is actually less inclined to beat a family member, act out sexually or otherwise become a bigger problem than they were unmedicated.
Addiction is an odd thing anyway because of the role of the mind. Something like opiates when taken for pain apparently connect into the "pain avoidance" part of the brain and not the "pleasure seeking" part of the brain. People taking opiates for pain generally do not want to continue the use because they have associations of pain with the use of opiates, even if it is only the avoidance of pain. Meth users, OTOH, seem to be activating "distraction" centers of the brain, which can probably channel either benignly into "doped up", or much less desirably, malignant "act out" centers. |
