Marijuana tends to be disassociated with the conventional spectrum of drugs in today’s society. Certainly we can agree that cocaine, ecstasy, and heroine are drugs and thus highly addictive and dangerous. But can marijuana be mentioned in the same breath as these drugs? It is not my point nor belief to disagree that marijuana is a drug that can be addictive. I place strong emphasis however on the fact that physical dependency is not nearly as common as psychological dependency among marijuana users.As I attempt to present the psychological effects of marijuana, we must first consider the concept of being psychologically dependant. When you are dependant upon something, you are not necessarily unable to do without it. Rather, you begin to rely on it. That is not to say that dependency is not addiction because I do believe dependency is a form of addiction. However, marijuana does not cause the same physical withdrawal symptoms as with drugs that are considered addictive. Drugs, such as crack and heroine require extreme measures to break the body’s dependency or addiction. This is the conventional understanding of what constitutes an addiction to a drug. Given the information that marijuana use lacks the ability for the body to develop a physical addiction in the vast majority of individuals, the concept of psychological addiction (dependency) becomes clearer.Anything psychological is understood to relate specifically to the mind and thinking. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that psychological dependency is a set of thought processes or is even thought about at all. In fact I feel that this dependency is mostly subconscious and not a set of thought processes. “Marijuana, then, produces a psychic dependency in the user which impels him to the continued and frequent use of that specific drug – a dependency that is similar in important respects to actual physical addiction” (Goode, 1970, p...
