the marijuana-withdrawal catalog: nature's humblest buzz — "the endless symptomatic gauntlet of Withdrawal…"
the endless symptomatic gauntlet of Withdrawal from delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol: i.e. pot-detox: the loss of appetite, the mania and insomnia, the chronic fatigue and nightmares, the impotence and cessation of menses and lactation, the circadian arrhythmia, the sudden sauna-type sweats and mental confusion and fine-motor tremors, the particularly nasty excess production of saliva
Context
The book's definitive clinical portrait of marijuana dependence, and the theme's insistence that the Disease is defined by the relation, not the drug's reputation. The psychic half is precisely Erdedy's own case (scene 004) generalized — "the paralytic stasis that results from the obsessive analysis of all possible implications of both getting up from the couch and not getting up from the couch" — and the physical half is a full withdrawal syndrome, "pot-detox," itemized with the same gravity the book gives heroin-kicking. The point is the refusal of a hierarchy of substances: the ruin from "nature's humblest buzz" is total, and the added cruelty is the stigma — the shame that neither doctors nor hard-drug addicts respect it as real addiction — which the meeting exists to lift by showing these casualties "how completely nonunique and unalone they were."