quit-once

Vegas would be really fun.

Sky and Rick, Thanks for your responses. Two very different takes on reasons for quitting and how it was used, and niether one like my own. I didn't realize that people use weed for so many different reasons and in so many different ways. So here's where I am coming from: I have used it ever since I was a teenager and that was about 35 years ago. My use has tapered down to about an ounce every six months or so, and I smoke it on most days, but not always daily, and usually only a few tokes once in the evening or maybe twice on a weekend. I use it to unwind after work and I really enjoy the high. It keeps me from getting bored. And, like adderall, it makes cleaning the house a little more enjoyable for me. Also like adderall, I can do some really good thinking when I am high and I get some really good ideas that pass the test of evaluation when I am sober. I really don't have many friends that still smoke so there is no social aspect to it - it is something I enjoy doing alone in my home. I have never ever felt guilty about using weed nor have I encountered any health problems from it. So why would I consider quitting? I just came off a month long experiment with the Atkins diet - the hard core phase where you cannot consume more than 20 grams of total carbohydrates in any one day. While reading the book, I convinced myself I had a carbohydrate addiction. You see, I had been successful at knocking off about 25 lbs of extra body fat last summer and fall. Then came the dark season with little exercise and I started binge eating. I gained almost ten pounds during the month of November so I had to do something. I was going to stay on Atkins for the reccomended two weeks of heavy carb restrictions. But at the end of that two weeks, I had only lost about five pounds and I was still binge eating, except now it was cheese, meat, eggs and fatty sausage. You are supposed to easily be able to control your appetite on Atkins so what was causing that? By chance, I noticed on the days I didn't smoke weed I did not binge eat. Fuck. It was the munchies all along! This took me at least three weeks to nail down. So in addition to noticing my appetite was easy to control when I didn't smoke, I also noticed I was getting a lot more things done. I was able to stay up late like I prefer doing. Weed makes me crash early, and I am not a morning person so I would rather stay up till midnight. One more thing and that is related to this place - I became aware that my memory is not as good as it used to be and that it was possibly due to using weed thanks to InRecovery, Falcon and MFA. I am considering cutting back to using weed only on the weekends or maybe quitting altogether to see if that makes a difference in the four areas of my life that still need some fine tuning: eating, sleeping, doing, and remembering. Thank god weed is not physically addictive so it is only the mental urge to use I will have to resist. any thoughts from anybody?

HAHA that orange apple-jax story was FUNNY!

We were just talking about this scenario yesterday, weren't we? I am curious, neversaynever, did you already know how you would handle this situation ahead of time or did you just wing it? That's a pretty cool story and you just earned my respect.

Lately I have read a lot of posts on this forum about those who have quit weed or those who think they need to quit weed. I might be in the latter camp for several reasons. I would really like to hear from those who have quit for a while and how they think life got better without weed. I have always maintained a very defiant attitude about my weed usage but I am also open-minded to suggestions for self improvement. Thanks.

. .. .This reminded me of an experience I had about a month ago. I paid a visit to a friend and it just happened to be his refill day. When I was leaving, he asked me if I could take him to the pharmacy before closing time so he could refill -with about a half hour left in the evening. This was the friend who introduced me to adderall ten years ago. His excitement and anticipation were unmistakable, even though the conversation did not revolve around adderall. I started to get excited too, like I used to when it was time for my refill to occur. After all, we shared many visits to the drugstore over the years. It became very uncomfortable and by the time we got to the pharmacy, I just dropped him off at the front door and told him to take the bus home. I tucked my tail got the fuck out of there ASAP. The next day we were doing a project and I told him how that made me feel and he appologized for putting me in that position. It was not hard to be around him when he was high on adderall because I was kinda used to that, and we did get a lot of shit done that day. But I learned a good lesson - that those exciting and anticipatory feelings are still close to the surface and I must avoid those situations that cause me to feel those emotions and excitement.

Hey Kid, You are blindsided by your love for the effects of stimulant drugs. It is called the honeymoon phase. You need to learn your own life lessons of drug use, drug abuse and the horrors of addiction. So go out and try them all, and don't forget about Special K and cocaine and xtsy too. Go ahead, get addicted and find you own hell. Than come back here when you are ready to quit. We will still be here and willing to help you.

Have you ever heard of anybody hitting rock bottom from their caffeine addiction? Has anybody's life ever fallen apart because of their coffee habit? How many caffeine overdoses do you hear about? It is possible but you would have to take a shitload of nodoze pills to OD all the way with caffeine. Caffeine overdoses resulting in death are usually accompanied by other unknown or underlying health issues, like a weak heart. While caffeine might be classified as a drug because it creates dependence and it does produce withdrawl effects, is it harmful? Might be if you already have high blood pressure. The withdrawl time from caffeine is three days max and then you are done. There is no recovery period. Is it sinful? If you are a Mormon, the answer is yes. Admittedly, I am defiantly defending my caffeine addiction. I love coffee and everything else that contains caffeine. I like to be stimulated. But I have also developed a lifetime addiction to amphetamines and all other stimulant medications and hard drugs and all it would take is one little fucking pill or line of white powder to get me right back into an active addiction. I want to avoid that at all costs. So I drink coffee, tea, redbull and 5 hour energy as needed for their stimulant effects. I do not feel guilty about it and I believe that using caffeine it is not harmful for my body.

I got the shivering chills reading this thread. Even after 1.5+ years I am terrified I will find a pill while de-cluttering and cleaning my house. So far, I have not found even a crumb of adderall which tells me that I really kept good track of them and got rid of every last fuckin one....I hope. Every time I clean an area that has pre-quitting clutter piles I have to rehearse the disposal plan...which is to run, not walk to the toilet like I had food poisoning and flush that fucker down. Good job, Motivation. I feel like I have gained the strength to flush from reading your story...thanks.

Hey neversaynever, I dug up this post from last year for you. It has some interesting comments if your scroll up through it.

For the first few weeks after I quit, I could not control my swearing in public. It was embarrasing at work when I was working with the customers. Sometimes I would catch myself whistling or singing where others could hear me. And the repetetive tics I developed while taking adderall, those just gradually went away with time after i quit. I certainly have empathy for those afflicted with tourettes.

My relationship with music was exactly the opposite of yours, Krax. I had completely lost my desire for anything musical while using adderall, but within just a few days of quitting, I craved music again and still do. I have discovered pandora radio and I really like it. I have also re-discovered the music stations on Dish Network including Sirius/XM - it is great to enjoy music again. I hope your love for music comes back soon.

Sebastian, Get a grip and calm the fuck down, by trying this little breathing exercise: Breath in deeply while thinking or saying "breath in peace" when you (fully) exhale, say or think "breath out release" At least three times. It does wonders to calm you down. OK, now that you are a little more rational consider this: There is not a goddamn thing you can do to change the past. Nothing. What IF you never did have ADHD but you took the poison anyway? Can't change that. What if adderall really did scramble your brain? Would you just keep using it anyway knowing that? (Nope - you have already quit so check that off the list) What if it really does not "help you so much at work", but that it was actually the addiction lying to you? And finally, "It's always sunny in philladelphia" so make the most of it there and give it at least a year before you decide to bag it and go back to Jersey. I wonder if you would benefit from seeing a couinselor to get your anxiety under control? By the way, adderall scrambles everybody's brain and that is why it takes about a year or so of recovery time to get us all back to "normal" whatever the fuck that is.

Roxbury: High Five to ya for quitting and staying completely quit for over two weeks now. The worst of the physical withdrawl and extreme fatigue should be behind you by now. It'll be a slow climb up the recovery hill for the next few months, but it is better to spend months in recovery rather than serve even one more day in adderall hell. I am sure you are gonna make it. I am also sure the AA/NA folks, any addiction counselor, and even some of our members on this site would say "good luck with that" knowing you have a large stash of pills and the option to get even more next month. But quitting is a unique and individual experience for everyone and those of us who think oustside the book have to do it in a way that works for us at the most basic level. As long as your pills don't tempt you, you can keep them around for security. But you will want to unload them in your own way, in your own time and on your terms at some point in the future. I am glad your new job is going well, and I attribute your success so far to quitting adderall around the time you started it.. Do you want to see what happens to a person after years and years of heavy amphetamine use? Just look at the film footage of Adolph Hitler during his last year of life. His hands were shaking so bad from the amphetamine-induced Parkinsons disease that he almost always kept them in his coat or behind his back in public. We also know he was a paranoid sonofabitch so he likely suffered from amphetamine-induced psychosis. Hitler took daily injections of a amphetamine and vitamin cocktail they called "vitamultin" (source = the history channel).

Liltex, I have missed your smiling posts for a long time. I am glad you came back!

Damn. All this positive talk about well butrin makes me wonder if I missed the boat in my early recovery / post adderall / post nicotine depression stage. Fuck, I was taking Chanitx (i.e."thoughts of suicide" side effects) Too late for well butrin now. lol

Thanks for enlightening me on Bill W. I have never had anything to do with AA/NA before. It sounded as if he was on the same pedastal as Jesus Christ and his house was the holy land.

From what I understand, opioid addicts are highly functional as long as they are using (no pun intended). I have a friend who smokes heroin and uses adderall. If he runs out of either one, he withdraws and isolates, but much more so with the heroin. He doesn't even call it by its real name - he calls it cheva - I guess because real heroin has to be injected? I saw a TV show where they had a coke addict, a junkie and a stoner perform identical tasks (like driving and assembling furniture) before and after they were high. The junkie outperformed the other two at all levels after getting high.

I have to put my mind back into addiction mode to understand your logic, and I get it. I think a lot of us quit with a supply of pills that we later have to dispose of. I had over 150 pills stashed away when I quit. Falcon keeps his bottle on his night stand. It is some kind of wierd security blanket. My reasoning for keeping that many pills was that it would be enough to get me through until I found another source IF I ever relapsed. Is that your reason for wanting to refill even though you still have some under your brother's custodial care? I know, they are a precious, irreplacable commodity at this point for you. The more the better, right? My stash started to tempt me at five months and that is when I got rid of them all. Looking back on it, I would have done just fine without them from day one. In your last post you said your next goal was to tell your doctor you had trouble taking them as prescribed. Are you now going to delay that goal for another month? Have you stayed completely off them since your last post here on Dec 21? How is your new job going?

Who the fuck is Bill W?

As a matter of fact I have a cool quitting token, with a short story behind it: The last day I took adderall, I took a few extra because I kinda wanted to go out with a bang. As midnight approached, I had one little blue pill and one 30mg orange pill left. Earlier that day I spent (at least) a couple of hours looking for the perfect rocks with pockets that would fit these pills, and I found two that were suitable. So at midnight, I mounted the two last adderall that I didn't take into their respective rock pockets and placed them in the fireplace, along with my remaining cigarettes. I later came to regret not having those smokes around. I was staying in an isolated cabin for three days where getting more of anything would have required a trip into town. The next day I dug those rocks out of the wood stove. The orange pill had melted into this black, shiney, bubbly and crusty glob that bonded with the rock, like a piece of melted plastic. However, the blue pill (a 10 mg IR) just turned black and didn't melt at all, so I had to dispose of it the next day because it looked too much like a pill you could still take. The 30 mg oval must have had some kind of a coating that protected its inner addie. I cleaned the soot off the rock with the contorted, melted adderall glob and to this day I keep it displayed in my home as a reminder of the day I quit adderall.

Of course you are welcome here!

"....the weeners..." I almost spilled my coffee over that one, sky. Great term, and funny.

KyleChaos why do you hate new years resolutions? "Its either now or never" is a very black-and-white (judgemental) way of looking at things.

You have the most positive outlook on recovery that I have ever seen. Your post reminds me of my own feelings in early recovery. I was so relieved to be done with that awful addiction. This can be a really exciting itme in your life, looking forward to a normal life beyond the adderall lifestyle. I believe your recovery will relatively easy for two reasons. First, you have a great attitude and a positive outlook. Second, your adderall addiction ran its full course - and the ripe fruit is always easier to pluck from its tree. I remember you wrote you were taking a "non-negotiable 30 mg per day" before quitting. That says you were really looking forward being done with it forever. I remember thinking in my last few months of taking adderall "I hope I can survive this addiction until I can quit on my terms" I experienced just about every negative side effect in the book and I realized that my quality of life and my lifespan were both dependent on two things: quitting adderall and quitting cigarettes. Thanks for the update, Blesbro, and please continue let us know how you're doing as you progress through your recovery.