The brain is adapting to the absence of cannabinoids. The symptoms and mild severity of cannabis withdrawal symptoms resemble the experience of patients going through caffeine withdrawal, a condition described in the DSM-5 as including headache, fatigue, drowsiness, dysphoric mood, irritability, depression, nausea, muscle aches and impairment of cognitive or behavioral performance. Symptoms typically start within the first two days of cessation, and stop within four weeks of abstinence. These mood and behavioral symptoms are usually “of light to moderate intensity,” the researchers wrote. Women, they wrote, tended to report stronger symptoms of CWS, and their experience included more physical discomfort, nausea, and stomach pain. The severity of CWS among humans “is dependent on the amount of cannabis used pre-cessation, gender, and heritable and several environmental factors,” the German researchers noted. If you’re stopping cannabis use after regular intake, face licking and wet-dog shakes are not likely to figure among the symptoms you will experience. So we know what CWS in rats looks like: “symptoms include scratching, face rubbing, licking, wet-dog shakes, arched back and ptosis.” Ptosis is the medical term for droopy eyelids. The symptoms and mild severity of CWS resemble the experience of patients going through caffeine withdrawal.īecause the federal government-specifically, agencies like NIDA itself-has made it so difficult to conduct cannabis research, the NIDA scientists used studies of non-human animals to describe the typical symptoms. In that NIDA study, scientists noted that the effects induced by simply discontinuing exposure “are not severe and can be hard to detect, probably due to the slow elimination of lipophilic compounds like THC from the brain.”
Symptoms of cannabis withdrawal “are much less severe than those associated with withdrawal from chronic opioid or depressant use,” researchers with the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) wrote in a 2015 study, “but aversive enough to encourage continued cannabis use and interfere with cessation attempts in some individuals.”
(It’s a wide percentage range because different percentages were found in several separate studies.) How severe are cannabis withdrawal symptoms? Dysphoria, a feeling of general unease or dissatisfactionĪny combination of those symptoms occur in 35% to 75% of patients who quit cannabis after longtime regular use.
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