Weed Addiction: Death By 1000 Paper Cuts

Added: 2026-04-29

[00:00:00]If you're someone who's currently struggling with a weed addiction or a cannabis substance use disorder like I did for several years of my life, I often describe it as death by a thousand little paper cuts. And this is one of the things that I believe makes weed addiction or cannabis substance use disorders one of the most insidious drugs to be addicted to. I think it's honestly one of the worst. And I'll explain why that is. When someone is struggling with say with say like alcohol and they're really struggling with an addiction to it or heroin or cocaine or some of these other substances, um the negative impacts of that substance use tend to be obvious and they tend to be dramatic and this creates an urgency for the person to quit or seek sobriety or make a change in their life. I describe it as like alcohol. Let's say a person gets a DUI and they lose their career. Or let's say alcohol, the person's told, "Hey, if you keep drinking, you're you're going to go into liver failure or your heart's going to stop working." That's like a vertical puncture wound to that person's addiction. Just like a straight up vertical puncture, stab wound. Okay? You feel it, right? Someone overdoses on another substance, opioids, heroin, whatever. Um, it's kind of like a vertical puncture wound. there's an urgency to change if that person values their life at that time. Weed is much more like a horizontal cut or a horizontal wound, like a paper cut. Like imagine going side to side like this.

[00:01:35]You don't feel it as you as much as you would a direct stab. And this is really what weed was for me. It was death by a thousand little cuts until 9 years of my life went by and I woke up and I said, "Oh my gosh, I feel like I'm bleeding out. My time, my motivation, my energy, all this stuff." And and I I've talked to countless people over the last seven years helping people quit cannabis who who have heavily related to this. So, in today's video, what I'm going to do is break down this concept for you and then hopefully provide you with a reframe on how to fuse cannabis. And that might start to create some urgency to to make a change versus saying, "Oh, I'll wait until 2027. That's going to be my year.

[00:02:19]I'll wait until after my birthday. I'll start quitting on Monday." How many countless times have I heard people say that and have I said that myself in the past? If you're new here, my name's Dr. Frank and we have a sciencebacked protocol that has a 98% client success rate at helping people break the dependency to cannabis in 18 days or less. This protocol is designed specifically for entrepreneurs, business owners, and other high-level professionals, people who need to do this efficiently, effectively, and privately. And we can do it without relapse. I put a link in the pinned comment in the video description where you can learn more about that. So, for me, weed was death by a thousand little micro paper cuts. Uh, first I think the first paper cut I incurred was really to how I would spend my time. Right when I first started smoking, it was fun. It was no big deal. It was something that I used to do with my friends. And to be honest, I was, you know, high school, college. My time wasn't really that valuable. I didn't have a beautiful home to pay for. I didn't have children. I wasn't in any significant relationships.

[00:03:24]you know, now I'm happily married in a very meaningful relationship with two children. We hope to have three and right, I have a lot of responsibility, but when I So, my time is insanely valuable. Whether it's for one of the three businesses that I have, whether it's spending time with my wife and the kids, whether it's taking care of my own physical and mental health, like my time is it has a a number on it. It is it's it's valuable, right? Like it's very very valuable. When I was younger, my time didn't really matter as much. Like, I'd smoke weed, I'd go to class, I'd play some video games, I'd go to the bars with my friends, try and pick up girls, which I was never successful at.

[00:04:06]And that was my time. Like, that was how I spent my time. Like, right, jerking off, playing video games, watching TV.

[00:04:12]My time just didn't matter. I worked part-time at Vitamin Shop. I was a personal trainer making min minimum wage. Really enjoyed that job, but like there just wasn't a high value on my time. And I got so used to smoking weed that over the years I really started to devalue how I used my time. And I started to lose confidence in what my time was actually worth. And time is is almost like an invaluable thing making it the most valuable thing because it's something that you can never get back.

[00:04:48]and the amount of time that I spent um that where am I going to get my weed from? When am I going to consume it? How then the time that I spend high and what am I doing when I'm high? For me, I was usually eating crappy food. I was watching, you know, movies. I was hanging out with friends, which could be fun socially, but kind of having pointless conversations. And then my night would usually end with a few drinks and uh binge watching pornography or social media. And that was largely how I spent a lot of my time high as the years went on and and I got less and less productive being high. Like that was where the first paper cut was. It started in micro increments like, "Oh, what's the big deal if I'm high on a Saturday afternoon? What's the big deal if I smoke weed every night before bed, especially when I became so physically dependent upon weed, I needed it to sleep. What's the big deal? Oh, what's the big deal if I get high and just watch a few movies? What's the big deal if I get high and just eat a few cheeseburgers?" It's not a big deal every now and then, but when that becomes a lifyle, right, this is where you start to incur thousands of little paper cuts into how you spend your time. And then over time, you might subconsciously start to devalue what your time is actually worth. And I see this a lot with people are smoking. They'll smoke. Smoking weed makes them content with situations in their life that they are running from or they shouldn't be content with. They won't face those situations. They won't take on those challenges. And then they just wind up accepting this this unnecessarily mediocre life for themselves and they don't have to tolerate it cuz they're capable of changing. They're capable of doing more. They're just not respecting how they're using their time. Uh, another area of my life where I started to incur tiny little paper cuts because of smoking weed was in with my motivation and my overall drive for life to get things done. I've always been a very ambitious person. I've even been successful throughout smoking weed, right? Still managed to build a private practice. Still managed to do a lot of things that a lot of my sober friends didn't accomplish. Okay? And that's awesome. But over time, I started to lose that drive. I started to lose that motivation. I started to lose that tenacity, that grit. I want to do more.

[00:07:03]I want to achieve more. Weed started to erode away at that for me. And suddenly just getting through day-to-day tasks was starting to feel like a chore. Oh, I got to get high to do this. Oh, I can't wait to get high at night and respond to emails. Oh, I got to get high to do X, Y, and Z thing. Oh, I got to get high to go enjoy a walk on a Sunday afternoon outside, you know, around a bike path or something like that. and just everything started to feel like I was moving through quicksand. And this is it's exhausting. It it puts a major drain on a person's motivation and drive. And I think wasting time when you don't val when you value how you're using your time, your motivation and your drive goes up because you want to be more efficient in how you do things. when you don't value how you're using your time.

[00:07:55]Um, right, the time to get high, the time spending thinking about getting high, the times thinking about when you're going to do it again, etc., etc. If it's unproductive, obviously, you're going to start to lose momentum. And when that momentum falls off in life, whether that's in your business, your relationships, your physical health, your mental health, that motivation and drive starts to slump, right? And we can look at literature out there on weed, right?

[00:08:23]It's it's very well known that for a lot of people, not everyone, but for a lot, weed is a drug of procrastination uh and demotivation. Right now, there's new studies coming out actually that are saying that saying weed, not only is it necessarily bad for memory, but people are remembering things that never even happened, like creating false memories.

[00:08:46]Imagine living your life uh based on false memories, things that you think happened but never did and you're making decisions based on that. Imagine how detrimental that can be to relationships and business and things like that. I've seen it before working with people.

[00:09:00]Where else did I incur tiny little paper cuts throughout the course of smoking weed? I would say another big one was in my physical health which eventually led to an erosion of my mental health. And look, for years I was smoking weed and I felt like a million bucks. I was like, I'm getting a great night's sleep. I'm not waking up hung over. I would say the same thing so many people say to me when they're working with me. You know, I smoke weed, but but Dr. Frank, I'm not a drinker. You know, I don't do anything else. I would say that, too. Although I was a drinker. I would binge drink often. I felt good for years smoking.

[00:09:33]But slowly, and this is the definition of death by a thousand little paper cuts, I eventually developed a condition called cannabonoid hypermesis syndrome, which is an intractable vomiting syndrome. I incurred like significant body pain, extreme weight loss. One point I was down close to 128, 130 lb.

[00:09:52]Normally I average 155, 160 lb. I physically felt like I was dying every day. Nausea. I couldn't eat until the very end of my day when I would normally smoke weed and then I'd get a little bit of an appetite and I'd eat be able to eat like one meal a day. Um, so that was horrible. And I went from feeling good to just feeling like, oh my gosh, what's happening? H, you know, I'm being tested with all these different doctors for autoimmune rheumatologist, neurology, gastroenterology, primary care. They're asking me, oh, you got this, you got that, maybe you have this autoimmune disease. It was terrifying. And this was a direct result of my cannabis consumption. CHS was now. Yes, I was abusing stimulants. Yes, I was binge drinking. Yes, I vaped nicotine, too. I had other factors involved. But cannabis was the culprit behind the CHS.

[00:10:42]Eventually, my physical health starts to erode. And and like I said, I felt good.

[00:10:46]And then one day, I woke up and I felt like I took a vertical stab. That was probably that CHS. All right. Now, I don't feel good physically. I'm wasting my time now because I don't have energy as much as I did. Right now my motivation and my drive are really starting to plummet and I'm my focus is just out the window. Right? You want to talk about brain fog. Now I'm worried about my health. I'm worried about when I can smoke again. I'm starting to watch my businesses struggle like trend in the direction of struggling because I'm not there anymore. I'm not as present as I used to be. I don't have that same motivation and drive that I started with and now I'm saying okay this this is becoming a problem. Then I went on to developed an acute state of psychosis. I had psychosis cannabis induced psychosis and now undeniable and this is fascinating for someone how these paper cuts added up for someone who felt for years that cannabis was benefiting them.

[00:11:48]I loved cannabis. I loved smoking weed.

[00:11:50]I loved everything about it. the ritual, the plant, the different tarpen, all these things, the different ways I could consume it. A vaporizer, a bong, a volcano, a one-hitter, all this. I was deep into it, okay? And I thought it was adding to my quality of life. But little did I know, it was just try quietly cutting away at all these different aspects of my life. So, here's someone who was in good physical health, in good mental health, in good standing with their career, now wakes up and says, "Oh my gosh, I there's there's more holes in my boat than I can plug now." And then you start to get the icing on the ta cake, which tends to come in the form of damage to relationships. At the time, I was dating a girl. Uh, I thought we were going to get engaged and I had stopped smoking for a period of time when I met her and I kind of changed my behaviors and then I went back to smoking weed again cuz it turned out she would occasionally smoke and you know I started up doing that again with her and eventually that just relationship just crashed and burned. I remember specifically what happened. We were driving in the car. She said something.

[00:12:56]I don't talk this way ever at all. I called her a [ __ ] Okay. And I knew in that moment it was done. I was like, "This girl is never going to talk to me again." And this was after like, I don't know, a year, two years of serious dating. I'm looking at engagement rings and I just knew my lack of emotional um regulation there toasted that relationship. Like I knew it was done over as it should have been. I never should have been speaking that way. And um yeah, I started to see it burn significant relationships like that. I started to see it burn relationships with my family, my friends. And like just here was a drug that I used to use socially to enhance my quality of life now just destroying me socially and it was truly death by a thousand little paper cuts. Um you talk about it too something else I would notice over time just not as present anymore and not even a desire to be present because life just started to lose its overall sense of joy. And they define this as anhidonia.

[00:13:58]When you no longer find pleasure in anything. When you no longer find joy in anything. It doesn't matter what it is.

[00:14:04]And that was probably like where I was starting to experience more of a vertical wound from cannabis than I was little horizontal cuts. You know, I've I've worked with hundreds of people directly. I've helped thousands of people over the years uh walk away from cannabis for good. And it's amazing how different and how similar people's stories are time and time again when it comes to this substance. Um unlike alcohol, unlike other drugs, people mock it. People don't take it seriously.

[00:14:34]People try and downplay it. They say, "Oh, it's just a plant." Well, all drugs start with a plant. Um you know, and almost everyone I work with says to me, "How did I get here? How did I go from doing something I loved to winding up in this situation? Especially a lot of the people that I work with because I do work with again like I tend to work with people who have been pretty successful, physicians, attorneys, politicians, micro celebrities, things like that. And they're like, "How did this get past me?

[00:15:06]I've accomplished so much in my life.

[00:15:07]I've made so many good decisions. How did I how did I f this one up?" I felt the same way, right? a doctorred in chiropractic, growing businesses, doing things right on the up and up. And I'm standing in my room going, "How did I get here?" Uh, smoking weed, watching porn, having a few beers. Uh, right. My life looked perfect on the outside, but it was slowly bleeding on the inside.

[00:15:30]And you know, one of the worst parts about all this is people will suffer thousands of little paper cuts hoping for that big change. Like I just had this conversation with someone the other day who's really struggling with cannabis and I had said to them like what are you waiting for to happen to change? Very successful individual uh right does very well for themselves in the hotel industry this that all that stuff. And I was like you've had bad things happen like how h how many more cuts do you need to incur before you start to find a solution before you start to put a band-aid on? And I think this is one of the worst things that happens to people when it comes to quitting weed. People are almost like waiting to hit a rock bottom. And I tell people like that. One, you don't want that to happen because that's probably only going to further your substance use. Two, with cannabis, it may not come, but you may wind up settling for a lifetime of mediocrity that you don't need to because you have so much more potential. you're capable of so much more and and that's what we try and avoid with people. So, if you enjoyed this video, you relate to any of it and you are struggling and you are an entrepreneur, business owner, highle professional, maybe you work in real estate, you're an investor, you're a physician, you're an attorney, you're a politician, whatever it is, uh we have a scienceback protocol that can help you break the dependency in 18 days or less with a 98% client success rate. If you value doing this efficiently, effectively, privately, and without relapse, check out that link in the pinned comment or the video description where you can learn a bit