Most people who wish to quit smoking weed find that it is quite difficult once their lives have started to revolve around weed.

I know because I was one.   It became so entrenched in my life, it was beginning to be more important to me than my family.

Despite the fact that weed may not be a "hard" drug like cocaine and heroin but it can still be very addictive and destructive.

It can become a habit that fills a gap in people's lives. The habit becomes such an important part of their lives that they feel like they are living in their own world, often missing out on some very important parts of life. My family and social life became secondary.

Unlike heroin or cigarettes, there is no physical craving that occurs when you do not smoke the drugs. The drug, weed does not affect the receptors in your brain unlike these other hard drugs and the effects are also less vivid, making it seem not an important matter to many smokers to quit smoking weed.

The main addiction to smoking weed is a psychological addiction. So the mental state that you associate with smoking weed makes you want to try to smoke again to get back that particular state of mind. The smoking goes from a pleasurable habit in the beginning to a habit with no real benefit in the end.

Lots of smokers who try to quit smoking weed after a long prolong period of use, are surprised by the strength of the cravings they experience and find it hard to try to quit smoking weed. Cravings can in effect control you and your behavior.

So when you want to quit smoking weed, you are not in fact trying to overcome a physical need but a psychological need. Although it may seem easy, it can be very difficult in practice as the habit can become very entrenched especially for those who have been smoking for a long time.

When you quit smoking weed, it can usually be accompanied by anxiety and depression as you have got used to a routine of smoking which has been soothing and relaxing to you in times of stress. The solution is to find something to replace this addiction, obviously not another addiction but something creative and fulfilling.

Some points to remember if you wish to quit smoking weed is as follows:

1. It appears more effective to gradually decrease your use.
2. Pay attention to your thoughts and don't let your negative thoughts or thoughts of cravings get the better of you.
3. Decide to quit smoking weed and have a plan. If you commit to a plan, it will help to avoid many of the traps that lead back to a weed smoking lifestyle.

Sometimes however, it is difficult to keep a commitment to quit smoking weed as your friends offer it to you and over time your commitment becomes less clear and you eventually give in and start smoking again. If you've tried to stop with pure will power, you will find it not easy.

There is a program that teaches what they call "weed annihilation technique", and I found it very helpful to help quit smoking weed. The method identifies all the triggers that can get me to start smoking again and it tries to find new responses to these triggers that are more desirable to replace them.

Smoking weed can be very addictive and often destructive in the long term. Although many say that to quit smoking weed is not important as it is not addictive chemically, it can affect us just like the hard drugs and cause problems in our social and family lives.  It happened to me.