be used as a form of “self-medication” in maintaining addiction, in that individuals go through withdrawal in-between use and, to alleviate these symptoms, use cannabis. Negative reinforcement, or the reversal of withdrawal symptoms due to the deficit produced in the allostatic state, maintains the perception of self-medication. In reality, however, the user is only medicating one’s abnormally low affective baseline due to the neurobiological changes mediating allostasis that is observed in addiction. Moreover, based on the dual process model of addiction [146], an individual’s automatic processes, also described as one’s impulsive behavior, overshadows more executive, controlling cognition, which also maintains addictive behavior.
