Ok here goes ... The jury is still out for me on TSM, but it definitely appears promising on day six. For the past few years I have used light marijuana use as a means to curb the drinking. I live in California and have a prescription for this. When I smoke in the midst of a drinking session, however many drinks in, or even before starting a session, it loses a lot of its appeal. It is not a solution to my problem because there are many inherent issue for me with weed - like my family and young kids, my job, serious motivation inhibitor, bad allergies, etc. Now on Nal and feeling the effects, I am curious about my future relationship with pot. If I could waive a wand and never smoke it again I would. It's a love hate relationship for sure. But even on Nal I have found that it stops the already altered drinking session in its tracks. Last night I was physically done drinking, just didn't want any more. But I craved ... something, if that makes any sense. I smoked and bingo, craving gone, fell asleep. Am I cheating? Am I kidding myself thinking I am following TSM protocol while smoking occasionally? Has anyone else carried pot baggage in to TSM? Thanks for reading.

Hi Triplab, I've just had the exact same experience. Well, almost the same, anyway.

The difference for me is that I don't like pot at all and have smoked fewer than a dozen times in my life. However, I'd been experiencing a lot of nausea in the last few weeks (reason still unknown) and a few days ago I took a small puff of my partner's stash to try to take the edge off. Not only did it instantly alleviate the nausea, I had no desire to drink for the rest of the evening (I smoked around 5 or 6 p.m. and had nothing for the rest of the night -- normally prime drink time). I did not smoke enough to get buzzed, because I don't enjoy a pot buzz, just felt a little mellower and pretty much forgot about drinking. It just didn't seem important enough to warrant the effort.

I talked about the experience with my psychiatrist a couple of days ago (we're in a state where it's legal for rec use). She knows I'm doing Sinclair and although she's less well-educated about it than most of us on this board, she's all about harm reduction and didn't think it would hurt to do a little experiment to see if pot could indeed help suppress craving. I haven't smoked since, because as I said I don't enjoy it and I'm wary of adding yet another mind-altering substance to my regimen, but I'm not ruling it out in the future if NAL seems to need a boost. You might have seen from some of my other posts that I'm not a quick responder, and that's been very frustrating to me.

I say whatever works, works, as long as you're not just substituting one dependency for another -- which is something only you can decide. Best of luck on your journey!