I’ve always been good at quitting obligations (see: piano lessons, ballet classes, infinite sports teams, and, in one memorable instance, a babysitting job that would have required me to fly from New York to Los Angeles in sole charge of an eight-month-old). But when it comes to vices, I have a hard time letting go. I love to ride the absolute wheels off the things I love—even when they stop loving me back—and, to that end, it took me about three years of near-constant cannabis use to realize that my relationship with weed was taking more from me than it was giving.
The language of recovery has been part of my life ever since I started attending Overeaters Anonymous meetings in my mid-20s to attempt to deal with what I had only recently begun to recognize as my binge-eating disorder. But it took me longer than I’d like to admit to apply the warning signs I’d learned in OA to my fondness for marijuana. Intellectually, I knew that popping higher and higher doses of edibles multiple days a week or sparking a bowl early and keeping it lit throughout the day wasn’t what one might call ideal, but I told myself it felt good whereas bingeing felt bad—so wasn’t that different enough not to be troubling? (This is even though many of my binges took place while I was high, but until recently I was studiously avoiding connecting the two issues.)
I don’t mean to succumb to weed exceptionalism here, but I genuinely think part of the reason I let myself get swept out into an ever-deeper ocean of anxiety and depression for so long was the fact that I was a fairly high-functioning stoner. I didn’t work or drive under the influence, but I did pretty much everything else high. And I told myself the fact that I would regularly clean the kitchen or go out for a long walk with my dog while stoned proved that weed was actually a good influence in my life, ignoring the many, many days when weed left me incapable of doing much more than sinking into the couch in front of Gilmore Girls reruns like the flat girl from that old antidrug PSA.
As of today—November 4, 2025—I’m two months and one day sober from weed, and in the time since I smoked my last joint, I’ve totaled my car (while sober, I might add), gotten a new one, mutually and lovingly ended my almost four-year-long relationship, started the search for a new apartment, and been buoyed through all of it by the love and support of my friends and family. It’s not that I couldn’t have done any of these things while I was smoking, but I shudder to think about how heavily I would have been leaning on weed in the aftermath of my breakup. It sucks not to be able to disappear into a cozy and comforting pot cloud when I’m stressing about my future, but it also feels incredibly good to know that I’m making one of the biggest decisions of my life (and all the little decisions that come along with it) with a clear head.
One of the hardest parts about quitting weed is how extremely normalized the drug is socially, especially in my LA friend group. I’m the furthest thing possible from anti-weed as a rule—I fully support decriminalization of all drugs, and as far as other people’s cannabis use is concerned, I operate from a “good for her, not for me” mentality—but it’s been a genuine challenge to adjust to just saying no in an environment where many people around me are saying yes with gusto.
I’ve been lucky to receive tons of encouragement from my loved ones during my quitting journey, but that’s sadly not the case for all. “The lack of support from others was something I didn’t expect and hurts me to this day,” says Liv, 28, of her own experience, adding: “I had dear friends tell me that I wasn’t an addict, I couldn’t be addicted because weed isn’t addictive, constantly ask me when I would start smoking again, or laughed at me when I said I wanted to start attending Marijuana Anonymous. I cried so many times in bathrooms at parties. I could hardly stay at a social event for longer than an hour without being severely upset. This was especially difficult given that the world was opening up around that time and we were all getting vaccinated, so I was starving for friendship and social interaction but found myself retreating more than ever into myself.”
Liv, who is currently four years and two months sober from marijuana, notes that her relationship with her friends wasn’t entirely black-and-white as it related to her drug of choice. “Before you call them shitty friends—yes, what they did was absolutely shitty,” she says. “It hurts me to this day. But among them are some of my dearest friends whom I still hold close. Over the years they have since learned the inappropriateness of how they conducted themselves, and I realized that almost all of it was completely projection. We were all dependent on substances around that time to varying degrees, and the fact that I decided to get sober held up a mirror to them for their own use.”
While my reasons for quitting weed are primarily emotional, I can’t deny that there’s a physical aspect at play too. I’ve been dealing with what I like to call pre-fertility issues over the last few years, by which I mean that I’m in no way ready to get pregnant, but I would like to be able to with minimal difficulty when the time comes. After years of searching high and low for a non-fatphobic doctor, I fully trust mine when she says the eventual process will be easier on me if I’m less dependent on weed. Hannah, 33, who recently weaned herself off daily smoking, is in a similar boat. “The main reason that I have to quit is that I am currently on a fertility journey, and I haven’t been having any luck,” she says. “My doctor said it might help to stop smoking and ingesting weed.”
Both Hannah and I have fallen victim to the snake-eats-tail difficulty of previously using weed to medicate our respective anxieties about the amount of weed we were smoking, but even knowing that weed isn’t helping your mental or physical health doesn’t always make it easier to give up. “Even though I can intellectually say I’m feeling better, I also still think about it constantly and am very bitter about having to quit,” Hannah says. “I have a severe anxiety disorder that I’d been ‘treating’ with THC, but now that I’m actually medicated by a doctor and have found a cocktail of meds that work for my anxiety, it’s become more clear that the weed wasn’t actually helping my anxiety. It was probably making it worse.”
Do I think I’ll never smoke weed again for the rest of my life? I’m not sure—and right now, that uncertainty actually feels okay. I’ve committed to myself that I won’t smoke for a year (10 months to go!), but after that, I don’t know whether I’ll be able to initiate a new relationship with cannabis or if I’ll simply have to keep going cold turkey for my own well-being.
Emma, 32, is currently a month into her third attempt to quit weed and shares my indecision but knows her limitations: “I wish I could have a healthier relationship with it, one where I could smoke socially with friends or unwind alone on my front stoop after a long day,” she admits. “But the truth is, at this point in my life, I can’t trust myself to keep that balance. As much as I wish it were different, I know I’m a better version of myself, for now, without it. And admitting that hasn’t been easy.”
I echo that sentiment wholeheartedly. It’s not easy, but for today—as we say in recovery—I think it’s right.
