Cannabis Detox
Cannabis detox isn’t simply about waiting for the drug to leave your system. Find out what happens when you stop, when residential support may be useful and how treatment at Abbington House works.
01438 583222
How cannabis detox is different
Cannabis detox is not usually built around medication.
substitute medication for cannabis dependence and, unlike alcohol or some prescription drugs, there is no standard reducing prescription.
stopping cannabis is not physically dangerous in the way stopping alcohol can be. That doesn't mean withdrawal is easy. The problems are more likely to show up in sleep, mood, appetite, anxiety and the way the day feels without cannabis in it.
for what you should expect from a place like Abbington House. We're not going to tell you that everyone who stops cannabis needs a medical detox, because that isn't true.
Sleep
Sleep is usually the part nobody warns you about.
You stop, and then you lie there. When sleep does arrive, the dreams can be vivid enough that you’d rather have stayed awake.
Early on, you’re running on the decision itself. It’s later, once the decision has worn off and sleep still hasn’t come back, that stopping can become harder to stick with.
What helps with that isn’t something to work out from a website. For what people generally experience after stopping, and roughly over what period, our cannabis withdrawal guide covers it properly.
What cannabis detox lookslike here
How long does cannabis detox take?
There isn’t one timeline that fits everybody.
How you feel after stopping depends on how heavily you’ve been using, how long it’s been going on and what else is happening physically and mentally.
Sleep can take longer to settle than people expect. Other symptoms may come and go differently from one person to another.
That’s why the full timeline sits on our cannabis withdrawal page rather than us giving you one number here and pretending it applies to everyone.
Cannabis leaving your system doesn’t deal with everything that had become attached to using it. The stay gives us time to start working on that too.
Stays at Abbington House are usually around 28 days and assessed individually. How long people stay explains what that depends on.
Stays around 28 days
Will I have to start therapy straight away?
No
If you’ve barely slept and feel awful, putting you in a therapy room just because you’ve reached a particular day of your stay doesn’t achieve much.
Therapy starts when you’re settled enough to get something from it.
That doesn’t mean everybody waits for detox to be completely over. As you begin to feel better, you start becoming part of what’s happening in the rest of the house.
How quickly that happens depends on how you’re doing.
What happens after the first few days?
Stopping cannabis removes the cannabis. It doesn’t replace whatever cannabis had gradually become part of.
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If it was how you slept, sleep still needs dealing with.If it filled every evening, the evenings are still there.
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If it was what you used when you were anxious, angry, bored or didn’t want to think about something, those things don’t disappear because you’ve stopped smoking.
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That’s where the rest of treatment comes in. Cannabis rehab at Abbington House looks at the work that follows, including the routines, triggers and reasons cannabis kept finding its way back into your life.
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If it's the anxiety or paranoia that's frightening you
If what’s worrying you isn’t sleep but the way you’re thinking — paranoia that hasn’t settled, feeling very confused, hearing or seeing things, or anxiety that feels far beyond what you expected — get medical help rather than trying to work it out from a website.
Cannabis and psychosis covers the relationship between cannabis and psychotic symptoms in more detail.
Where there’s already an anxiety, depression or ADHD diagnosis in the picture, treatment for both together is the more useful page.
If private treatment isn't an option
Private residential treatment isn’t within everyone’s reach, and it isn’t the only route. Your GP or local drug and alcohol service can help you access community treatment and other support available in your area.
If you’re managing to stop, things are beginning to settle and you’ve got good support around you, you may not need somewhere like Abbington House.
If things are settling
If the same attempt keeps ending in the same place, that’s when it may be worth asking whether changing the environment as well as stopping would give you something you haven’t had before.
If it keeps repeating
Is it worth coming here for cannabis when other people are here for alcohol or heroin?
Yes, and it’s a fair question.
People come here having used very different substances and with very different histories. What they are here to work on often has far more in common than the substances themselves do.
Nobody ranks it.
Talking it through
If you want to talk through what’s been happening with cannabis and whether residential treatment would actually add something, call 01438 583222.
You don’t need to have decided that you need rehab before you call. Tell us what has been happening, what you’ve already tried and what usually happens when you stop.
Sometimes residential treatment will make sense.
Sometimes it won’t. We’ll tell you that.
- Written by Michael Williams, Treatment Manager at Abbington House, in recovery since 2011.