Substitutes
Do vaping, CBD or nicotine help you quit, or just move the problem? An honest look.
A natural instinct when quitting is to reach for a replacement, something to stand in for the cannabis. Some substitutes genuinely help. Others just swap one dependence for another, or aren't the thing they're marketed as. Here's the honest breakdown of the three people ask about most.
CBD: promising, but read the small print
This is the one with the most nuance, because there's real evidence and a real catch. A proper clinical trial found that CBD helped people cut down their cannabis use. That sounds like a straightforward win until you look at the dose. MIXEDEvidence strength In a phase 2 trial, pharmaceutical CBD at 400mg and 800mg per day helped people with cannabis use disorder reduce their use compared with placebo. It's promising early evidence for CBD as a treatment, under medical supervision, at those high, controlled doses. Key study: Freeman et al. (2020), Lancet Psychiatry. The catch: that's a world away from a shop-bought CBD oil. The FSA advises healthy adults take no more than 10mg a day of high-street CBD, roughly one-fortieth of the trial dose, and those products are unregulated and often mislabelled. So the trial does not mean a £10 CBD oil will help you quit. The honest position: prescribed high-dose CBD is a genuine and developing avenue worth raising with a doctor. Assuming an off-the-shelf CBD gummy will do the same job is not supported. The CBD page has the full picture on the shop product.
Vaping: usually just a swap
Two versions of this, both with a catch. Picking up a nicotine vape to get through cannabis cravings is trading one addiction for another. Nicotine is more addictive than cannabis, and you can end up hooked on the vape long after the cannabis is gone. And switching from smoking cannabis to vaping cannabis isn't quitting at all. It can be easier on your lungs, but the THC (and the dependence) carry straight on, often at a higher dose because it's so easy to do (see Vaping & Carts). Neither is a route to stopping. Both are easy to mistake for one.
Tobacco: the quit-within-a-quit
If you roll with tobacco, as most people in the UK do, you're actually carrying two habits, and that cuts both ways. On one hand, stopping cannabis is a natural moment to drop the nicotine too, and doing both at once means you're not left holding the tobacco ritual (and its cravings) that pull you straight back toward a joint. On the other, keeping the tobacco keeps the exact hand-to-mouth cue alive. Either way it's worth a deliberate decision rather than defaulting into rollies. The tobacco-cannabis tangle is covered in Mixing, and the NHS has strong, free support for the nicotine side specifically.
The principle underneath
Here's the rule that sorts the helpful substitutes from the pointless ones: replacing the function works, replacing the drug usually doesn't. Something that fills the evening, calms you down, or marks the end of the day, like a walk, a routine, a proper wind-down, covers the job the cannabis was doing (that's the whole of Using to Cope). Swapping in another substance to chase the same hit tends to just relocate the problem. Aim for the first kind.