To ask how common is cannabis smoking?

[Netcurtainnelly]

Brothers son smokes it. Holds down a job and his financial commitments.
Hasn't progressed to any other drugs.
Been doing it for some years.
Its never spoken about. I just know he does.
I dont really have anyone to ask but i just thought I'd ask you mumsnetters.
It is common. He's mid thirties.

Very common. Got a waft of it as I left Lidl today. Often smell it walking down the street. Smell loads of it when I travel around our local council estate.
But as pp have said it's more common to do it openly in more deprived areas.

I read once that about 2 million people smoke it on a regular basis so pretty common. I would be surprised if in reality that it is that low.

I don't see that smoking it at the weekends or maybe some nights would cause any more problems in your life than alcohol use.

There are some jobs though where you can be subject to random drug testing, so if you were in one of those it probably would not work out well.

Like alcohol though if you start using it a lot it's probably going to screw you up.

I get it legally, from a pharmacy, delivered by royal mail.... for my health.

I think a lot of people just hear or think 'illegal ' and then make assumptions. If the thread title read alcohol instead of cannabis, think of all the horror stories you could tell. A young lad fell into the canal near me and died over the weekend as a result of excessive drinking for example.
Weed doesn't make you aggressive, or leave you wandering around at 4am, youre normally safe and warm in your house.
I understand the smell isn't great, I do sympathise with that but I really think its just not understood enough, by the same people who would be happy with people drinking to excess regularly.

I get mine from a government store and pay 12% tax on it.

I think it's common I smoke it daily so do most people I know 😊 we'll have a smoke instead of a drink 💕

I think a neglected effect is that surely going to screw your lungs up though if you smoke a lot of it. IME a lot of people cut it with tobacco and are heavy smokers of tobacco in addition to being cannabis users.

Aside from the potential psychosis effects, if you smoke it it's probably at least as bad for you as tobacco use which no one would recommend for the health conscious.

Depends what age group

16-25 a high number of regular users most of ds friends do regularly (17)

30+ less so

40+ a few the regulars are usually utter cannabis bores

I'm not sure how much of what I pay is tax, what I do know is I'm paying less than I was off dodgy bloke down the road and I know I'm not going to end up being ripped off.

It’s incredibly common where we live (east London). We don’t smoke and never have but people do. Everywhere all the time. It’s quite unusual to go out and not smell it somewhere

Judging by the stink everywhere these days, too many people.

For those of us that are prescribed, smoking it would invalidate our prescription. We have to use a vapouriser/ heated nebuliser.

I actually don’t smoke it; I use an oil that’s medically prescribed. The flavor still isn’t great; apparently, they have a mint flavor but that’s been “sold out” for like a year. I take it when my pain is absolutely out of control and only then. But my partner does smoke it (also medically prescribed), and I find the whole smoking process disgusting - the smell, the way it lingers. Worse yet, if you’ve ever seen the way some kind of disgusting gunk builds up in anything used to smoke marijuana (pipe, water pipe), then it’s not a far leap to imagine all that going into someone’s lungs. I actually said to my DH that someone outside the house must have hit a skunk (lived in America for a while and you never forget the smell of a skunk that’s sprayed) and he had to remind me, we don’t HAVE skunks in the UK, so anytime you smell that, it’s always weed. I think people who subject their nearby neighbors to that smell, when there are lots of ways to take cannabis, are very unsocial.

Weed may not make people aggressive but it can make people very paranoid that can lead to aggressive. The sheer high numbers of young people with serious mh issues connected to their weed smoking is tragic#

The ignorance of the cannabis isn't that bad brigade is astounding considering that often know so much about cannabis 🙄

It's everywhere, and it is fucking antisocial and stinks. All the builders round here are smoking it continuously. They are up ladders smoking it. Then they get in their vans and drive home. Regularly drive behind vans and cars where the occupant is smoking weed. We also have weed corner, where a load of people have commandeered a piece of land, and they are smoking so much, you have to turn the Aircon off as you go past.

Our neighbour has definitely addled his brain. He's completely incomprehensible, paranoid, and his wife left him.

@EarlofShrewsbury I'm just glad it's available to you. My mum lives in the UK and has RA some days she can't even get out of bed. She comes to stay with me every summer for a couple of months. I buy her edibles, teas and a balm. She's like a different woman after the 1st week.

As others have said, depends on your social circle. It was hugely common at my school, fairly common at uni and I had a couple of boyfriends who smoked it in the past so all of their friends did too.

Nowadays I don’t hang around with people who smoke it. Smell it every so often when I’m out and about but that’s it. I never understood the appeal.

You can get it privately in the UK but they still contact your drs.

Very common around here, openly smoked in the way ordinary cigarettes were previously.

I'm 58, held down a professional job all my life.
I take edibles now rather than smoking - its less harmful.
I love it - it is a form of self medication but I vastly prefer it to alcohol.

When I cycle to work at 07:30 each morning most of Lewisham in London smells of cannabis. It's an eye opener for some people

Of the people I know, one dad does, and two sets of parents. The dad and one set are v highly educated and have serious careers (the set of parents are very into alternative theories etc though). The other set of parents don't work, dad in and out of prison.

Then I know another group of people that all still smoke (friends from uni), and they are all employed normal people, but the group is a range of more hardcore partiers who go out and do other drugs, and people who have moved on and just do it occasionally.

I'm in the UK. RA is an eligible condition. She should look into it.

I'm with Alternaleaf.

@Bluejaysforthewin

Everyone I know that smoked it had matured and grown out of it my mid 20s.

Out of 100??