So whats the general consensus on marijuana?
I see people have mixed feeling about it here. Sometimes I’ll smoke weed and be the horniest lil fucker. Other times I smoke weed and i swear it causes me to crash hard for the days following.
So this is very difficult for me to post about, as it is very hard for me to explain and even comprehend at the moment. I was never a smoker before finasteride, but I just bought weed from a friend a couple weeks back. I smoked some about two weeks ago and it had very little effect on me. Perhaps it mellowed me out a bit, but it actually led to some of the worst sleep I’ve gotten in awhile. Well last night, I had just come home from a long night of work and decided to try it again. The same weed… and the results were catastrophic and mind-altering. I am not exaggerating any of the following information… It immediately went to my head, and made me mellow for about 10 minutes. I was sitting outside and this mellowness turned into a very strange sensation in my penis that made me want to start touching it. It wasn’t necessarily pleasurable, just a bizarre pulsating sensation. No sooner had I gone inside (about 20 minutes later) did my world turn upside down. The anxiety that I used to get on finasteride has completely melted away in the year and some change that I’ve been off of it, but it came back full force and worse, with my heart rate through the roof, and I 100% convinced I was dying. I was staying at my parents’ house, so my instincts told me to wake my dad up. What should have been a slight high turned into a full on trip. There is no easy way for me to explain it, but as he tried to console me in my bed, I was telling him I was dying and that he had to tell the world what Propecia had done to me (he knows about the problems the drug has caused for me). I kept repeating that I had ended up in some alternate universe and that I was already dead. I even kept repeating the name of this website (which he already knows about), pleading him to “tell everyone”. I couldn’t fall asleep, and my penis had shrunken and turned as numb as my first crash. I literally had no sensation in it at all and it had withered away and tightened so much that it felt like a little nub and so this elevated my anxiety even more. The next two hours that he spent in the room with me were horrifying. I was basically paralyzed and could not move. I could only lay there and witness myself die. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I was going into the light. Immediately I entered some limbo or afterlife where I began having these insane revelations about my life… about friends and family in my life who were actually plotting behind my back (just ridiculous shit). There are plenty more details I could probably remember, but I am already going overboard. I wake up two hours later at 7:00AM and I can definitely feel myself coming down from an insane high. While most things are beginning to feel somewhat normal by this time, my penis has not recovered any sensitivity and is still roughly 1/3 the size of its flaccid size (which is already reduced because of PFS). Foolishly, I went and forced masturbation thinking my mind-bent state would bring me some unforeseen libido despite my penis looking almost non-existent. I also begin googling bad trips, and how long they can last. I found someone with a similar experience (in feeling like he was dying), and everyone who responded to his post assumed that his marijuana had somehow been laced with something very potent like PCP or LSD, as no high from weed should ever be that devastating. I lay in bed for about three hours until I hear my dad get up. I ask him what exactly I was saying earlier that morning, and he repeated, more or less, everything I had said. I apologized over and over, and he said he was incredibly worried about me. He smoked dope growing up and never experienced anything like that. Point is, today I am in a very strange mental state. Somewhat in disbelief, somewhat curious, but quite honestly I am disturbed. Things feel even more off today mentally. I feel less in touch with the world around me. My penis is as small and numb as it has ever been. Like I said, I haven’t seen it even remotely close to this state since my awful crash after ceasing finasteride use. A part of me is very worried that I have just set myself back permanently… I am in a bad place. I am trying not to convince myself that I have fucked myself up, because I know it will be easier for me to believe it, but I read about people who have very bad trips from mind-altering chemicals and some of them face serious repercussions. But it was marijuana, and I have no fucking clue what happened to me!!! I had to post this experience as I saw nothing even close to my results in these posts. I am sorry for sounding so dramatic, but I am 100% serious about all of the feelings that this caused. If it’s believable, I would say that period of two or so hours were worse than me discovering this website for the first time and coming to the realization that Propecia had completely fucked me up. I am also sorry for the overusage of "I"s at the beginning of sentences, but I was letting this out as a stream of consciousness.
Wow donkey boy, that’s an awful experience. Not that I’m an expert, but it sounds like you got something else mixed in that wasn’t/isn’t evenly distributed. Have you contacted your friend?
Lol, laced?
I’ve come down a lot closer to earth in the last 24 hours thankfully, and some of my penis size has returned (or… to my PFS size anyways), but it is still rather numb at the moment. I haven’t contacted my friend. I spoke to him after I smoked the first time around and he was rather surprised when I told him it didn’t have much of an effect on me. I smoked with my brother the first time as well, and he didn’t notice anything but a pretty typical high. I’m just thinking weed triggers pretty awful anxiety in me and puts me in a very bad mental state (maybe even more so now due to PFS, if that’s possible?), but either way, I don’t have any of intention of trying it again. Not at the risk of “reliving” my death. Going to attempt some sleep now, hopefully I feel a bit better in the morning. Thanks for the concern. We’ve got some good folks on this forum.
I would tend to think this experience is independent of pfs, that you would have had a similar experience if you never took finasteride, i have heard stories of people “flipping out” from weed.
My understanding is you never used pre fin, so i guess we will never now.
I still hope others give it a try as a few people have had good experiences, myself included, how ever i was an experienced pot head prior to Propecia.
None the less i hope you over come the set back.
I did claim to be a non-smoker before PFS, but that wasn’t entirely true. I had smoked a couple times at parties, but perhaps I never smoked enough for it to give me the full effects. I am not even necessarily discouraging people from trying. In fact, I still have no problem with weed, and I’m sure it can make a lot of things better for a lot of people, but I had to share my experience. Was also curious to know if anyone else had experienced something similar.
I have smoked weed for sleep. I was never a heavy user pre-fin but it never made me have anxiety. However, after 3 successful times, I experienced the most awful trip of my life. I was crying, shaking and had wild thoughts running through my mind. I have used it since then and have noticed that it helps with sleep but sends my heart rate racing at scary speeds- so much so that I feel as if I’m about to have a heart attack.
I hate the idea of using Valium to get to sleep. I’m convinced the problem of sleep is due to the malfunctioning of Gaba, as I have used Valium before and it worked like a charm, despite the fact that it supposedly depresses REM sleep. I have used Valium twice post-fin and do not want to use it anymore as I fear desensitizing my Gaba receptors.
After four nights of no sleep (at all), I am considering trying Marijuana again along with some high dose Magnesium and B complex which appears to work at calming the CNS.
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Magnesium and the Brain: The Original Chill Pill by Emily Deans, M.D
Magnesium is a vital nutrient that is often deficient in modern diets. Our ancient ancestors would have had a ready supply from organ meats, seafood, mineral water, and even swimming in the ocean, but modern soils can be depleted of minerals and magnesium is removed from water during routine municipal treatment. The current RDA for adults is between 320 and 420mg daily, and the average US intake is around 250mg daily.
Does it matter if we are a little bit deficient? Well, magnesium plays an important role in biochemical reactions all over your body. It is involved in a lot of cell transport activities, in addition to helping cells make energy aerobically or anaerobically. Your bones are a major reservoir for magnesium, and magnesium is the counter-ion for calcium and potassium in muscle cells, including the heart. If your magnesium is too low, you can experience muscle cramps, arrythmias, and even sudden death. Ion regulation is everything with respect to how muscles contract and nerves send signals. In the brain, potassium and sodium balance each other. In the heart and other muscles, magnesium pulls some of the load.
That doesn’t mean that magnesium is unimportant in the brain. Au contraire! In fact, there is an intriguing article entitled Rapid recovery from major depression using magnesium treatment, published in Medical Hypothesis in 2006. Medical Hypothesis seems like a great way to get rampant (but referenced) speculation into the PubMed database. Fortunately, I don’t need to publish in Medical Hypothesis, as I can engage in such speculation in my blog, readily accessible to Google. Anyway, this article was written by George and Karen Eby, who seem to run a nutrition research facility out of an office warehouse in Austin, Texas - and it has a lot of interesting information about our essential mineral magnesium.
Magnesium is an old home remedy for all that ails you, including “anxiety, apathy, depression, headaches, insecurity, irritability, restlessness, talkativeness, and sulkiness.” In 1968, Wacker and Parisi reported that magnesium deficiency could cause depression, behavioral disturbances, headaches, muscle cramps, seizures, ataxia, psychosis, and irritability - all reversible with magnesium repletion.
Stress is the bad guy here, in addition to our woeful magnesium deficient diets. As is the case with other minerals such as zinc, stress causes us to waste our magnesium like crazy - I’ll explain a bit more about why we do that in a minute.
Let’s look at Eby’s case studies from his paper:
A 59 y/o “hypomanic-depressive male”, with a long history of treatable mild depression, developed anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and insomnia after a year of extreme personal stress and bad diet (“fast food”). Lithium and a number of antidepressants did nothing for him. 300mg magnesium glycinate (and later taurinate) was given with every meal. His sleep was immediately restored, and his anxiety and depression were greatly reduced, though he sometimes needed to wake up in the middle of the night to take a magnesium pill to keep his “feeling of wellness.” A 500mg calcium pill would cause depression within one hour, extinguished by the ingestion of 400mg magnesium.
A 23 year-old woman with a previous traumatic brain injury became depressed after extreme stress with work, a diet of fast food, “constant noise,” and poor academic performance. After one week of magnesium treatment, she became free of depression, and her short term memory and IQ returned.
A 35 year-old woman with a history of post-partum depression was pregnant with her fourth child. She took 200mg magnesium glycinate with each meal. She did not develop any complications of pregnancy and did not have depression with her fourth child, who was “healthy, full weight, and quiet.”
A 40 year-old “irritable, anxious, extremely talkative, moderately depressed” smoking, alchohol-drinking, cocaine using male took 125mg magnesium taurinate at each meal and bedtime, and found his symptoms were gone within a week, and his cravings for tobacco, cocaine, and alcohol disappeared. His “ravenous appetite was supressed, and … beneficial weight loss ensued.”
Eby has the same question about the history of depression that I do - why is depression increasing? His answer is magnesium deficiency. Prior to the development of widespread grain refining capability, whole grains were a decent source of magnesium (though phytic acid in grains will bind minerals such as magnesium, so the amount you eat in whole grains will generally be more than the amount you absorb). Average American intake in 1905 was 400mg daily, and only 1% of Americans had depression prior to the age of 75. In 1955, white bread (nearly devoid of magnesium) was the norm, and 6% of Americans had depression before the age of 24. In addition, eating too much calcium interferes with the absorption of magnesium, setting the stage for magnesium deficiency.
Beyond Eby’s interesting set of case studies are a number of other studies linking the effects of this mineral to mental health and the stress response system. When you start to untangle the effects of magnesium in the nervous system, you touch upon nearly every single biological mechanism for depression. The epidemiological studies (1) and some controlled trials (2)(3) seem to confirm that most of us are at least moderately deficient in magnesium. The animal models are promising (4). If you have healthy kidneys, magnesium supplementation is safe and generally well-tolerated (up to a point)(5), and many of the formulations are quite inexpensive. Yet there is a woeful lack of well-designed, decent-sized randomized controlled trials for using magnesium supplementation as a treatment or even adjunctive treatment for various psychiatric disorders.
Let’s look at the mechanisms first. Magnesium hangs out in the synapse between two neurons along with calcium and glutamate. If you recall, calcium and glutamate are excitatory, and in excess, toxic. They activate the NMDA receptor. Magnesium can sit on the NMDA receptor without activating it, like a guard at the gate. Therefore, if we are deficient in magnesium, there’s no guard. Calcium and glutamate can activate the receptor like there is no tomorrow. In the long term, this damages the neurons, eventually leading to cell death. In the brain, that is not an easy situation to reverse or remedy.
And then there is the stress-diathesis model of depression, which is the generally accepted theory that chronic stress leads to excess cortisol, which eventually damages the hippocampus of the brain, leading to impaired negative feedback and thus ongoing stress and depression and neurotoxicity badness. Murck tells us that magnesium seems to act on many levels in the hormonal axis and regulation of the stress response. Magnesium can suppress the ability of the hippocampus to stimulate the ultimate release of stress hormone, it can reduce the release of ACTH (the hormone that tells your adrenal glands to get in gear and pump out that cortisol and adrenaline), and it can reduce the responsiveness of the adrenal glands to ACTH. In addition, magnesium can act at the blood brain barrier to prevent the entrance of stress hormones into the brain. All these reasons are why I call magnesium “the original chill pill.”
If the above links aren’t enough to pique your interest, depression is associated with systemic inflammation and a cell-mediated immune response. Turns out, so is magnesium deficiency. In addition, animal models show that sufficient magnesium seems to protect the brain from depression and anxiety after traumatic brain injury (6), and that the antidepressants desipramine and St. John’s Wort (hypericum perforatum) seem to protect the mice from the toxic effects of magnesium deficiency and its relationship to anxious and depressed behaviors (4).
The overall levels of magnesium in the body are hard to measure. Most of our body’s magnesium is stored in the bones, the rest in the cells, and a very small amount is roaming free in the blood. One would speculate that various mechanisms would allow us to recover some needed magnesium from the intracellular space or the bones if we had plenty on hand, which most of us probably don’t. Serum levels may be nearly useless in telling us about our full-body magnesium availability, and studies of levels and depression, schizophrenia, PMS, and anxiety have been all over the place (7). There is some observational evidence that the Mg to Ca ratio may be a better clue. Secondly, the best sources of magnesium in the normal Western diet are whole grains (though again, phytates in grains will interfere with absorption), beans, leafy green veggies, and nuts. These happen to be some of the same sources as folate, and folate depletion is linked with depression, so it may be a confounding factor in the epidemiological studies.
Finally, magnesium is sequestered and wasted via the urine in times of stress. I’m speculating here, but in a hunter-gatherer immediate stress sort of situation, maybe we needed our neurons to fire on all cylinders and our stress hormones to rock and roll through the body in order for us to survive. Presumably we survived or didn’t, and then the stressor was removed, and our paleolithic diets had plenty of magnesium to replace that which went missing. However, it may not be overall magnesium deficiency causing depression and exaggerated stress response - it may just be all that chronic stress, and magnesium deficiency is a biomarker for chronic stress. But it doesn’t hurt to replete one’s magnesium to face the modern world, and at least the relationships should be studied thoroughly. Depression is hugely expensive and debilitating. If we could alleviate some of that burden with enough mineral water… we should know whether that is a reasonable proposition.
As I mentioned before, there are only a few controlled trials of magnesium supplementation and psychiatric disorders. A couple covered premenstrual dysphoria, cravings, and other symptoms (8)(9). Another small study showed some improvement with magnesium supplementation in chronic fatigue syndrome (10). Two open-label studies showed some benefit in mania (11)(12). There is another paper that postulates that magnesium deficiency could exacerbate the symptoms of schizophrenia. However, there is nothing definitive. Which is, of course, quite troubling. How many billions of dollars have we spent on drug research for depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, when here is a cheap and plausibly helpful natural remedy that hasn’t been properly studied?
So everyone get out there and take some magnesium already! Whew. Well, just a few more things to keep in mind before you jump in.
There are some safety considerations with respect to magnesium supplementation. If you have normal kidney function, you do not have myasthenia gravis, bowel obstruction, or bradycardia, you should be able to supplement without too many worries. In addition, magnesium interferes with the absorption of certain pharmaceuticals, including dixogin, nitrofurantoin, bisphosphanates, and some antimalaria drugs. Magnesium can reduce the efficacy of chloropromazine, oral anticoagnulants, and the quinolone and tetracycline classes of antibiotics.
Magnesium oxide is the cheapest readily available formulation, as well as magnesium citrate, which is more likely to cause diarrhea in excess. (In fact, magnesium is a great remedy for constipation). The oxide is not particularly bioavailable, but the studies I’ve referenced above suggest that you can top yourself off after about a month of daily supplementation. Those with short bowels (typically due to surgery that removes a large section of bowel) may want to supplement instead with magnesium oil. You can also put some Epsom salts in your bath. In addition to diarrhea, magnesium can cause sedation, and symptoms of magnesium toxicity (again, quite unlikely if your kidneys are in good shape) are low blood pressure, confusion, arrythmia, muscle weakness, and fatigue. Magnesium is taken up by the same transporter as calcium and zinc, so they can fight with each other for absorption. Jaminet and Jaminet recommend total daily levels (between food and supplements) of 400-800mg. Most people can safely supplement with 200-350mg daily without any problems (again, don’t proceed without a doctor’s supervision if you have known kidney disease or if you are elderly).
It may help promote slow-wave sleep too:
"In addition to reducing the time it takes to fall asleep, studies show that marijuana can have a significant impact on the sleep cycle itself, by increasing stage 3 sleep and reducing REM stage sleep. Stage 3 sleep – also known as slow-wave sleep – is believed to be the most important stage for the sleep deprived. "
I tried marijuana last week and it cured my libido for two days.
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I think it helps relaxing muscles down there and help by that. Becuase I believe this poison gave me pelvic floor tension and some kind of lower abdomen tension. Freequent urination,ED,low libido all is related.
Be carefull with marihuana, since smoking frequently can make thing worse. (it did with me)
Also THC is an 5a inhibitor, so know the risks of what you’re doing.
Send source that THC is a 5ar inhibitor
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is it a joke ? Where is 5ar written?
I have PAS and i would be cured completely but temporary when i smoke weed and a morning wood a day after that.
FYI - I smoked a bit last night. It absolutely relieved symptoms overall. Not only that, I woke up this morning and also still had some relief.
I only used it at night before bed and the benefits I’ve had are sleep, lateral thinking, social, muscle relaxation and muscle recovery.
The negatives would be risk involved with psychoactive sides I initially had. If used in the daytime there would be negative impact on productivity and/or cognitive ability.
I tried it first time about a year post crash and I had no tolerance; the tiniest amount would be extremely psychoactive (maybe because I used a bong?), time would slow down significantly, thoughts/speech felt the same, moving my body felt more mental than physically driven, things looked like a cartoon, once it felt like I could see things from eagle view, sometimes I would be couch locked, creative/lateral thoughts would pop into my head, short term memory loss (only whilst high), sleep would be amazing, and with people I would have the usual sides e.g. synchronised spontaneous laughter, more social and smiling.
Thankfully I randomly at some point had increased tolerance and the psychoactive sides stopped at least at a low dosage. I hardly ever use it now, however if I’m struggling to sleep, it definitely does help - weed apparently decreases REM sleep, however if struggling to sleep not much REM would be expected anyway and I believe weed does increase deep non-REM sleep. In any case I feel very refreshed after the sleep it induces
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