As the legal use of marijuana grows in popularity, people often tout this drug as a magical cure-all for countless disorders and diseases. What isn’t often talked about, however, is the other side of that coin -- marijuana addiction. The prevalence of marijuana use doubled between 2001-2013 with 3 in 10 people developing a marijuana use disorder. While we are not experts in the fields of psychiatry or addiction treatment, we still want to develop a tool to help those who have already begun their journey to sobriety. When some days are harder than others, having a community to provide non-judgemental support is invaluable. We hope to facilitate that by leveraging an already existing platform where users can and do go to connect with others going through recovery-- the Reddit community (subreddit) /r/Leaves.
This is a full-stack application that allows the user to document:
- How they're feeling on a scale from 1-10.
- Their craving level.
- Their thoughts as they go through recovery.
Other than these core features, we've implemented a few other tools to aid a user going through recovery:
- Custom goal creation. Not every user has the same motivation to get sober, so a person using this application can create a goal that falls into three categories: Monetary, sobriety, and time. If the user wants to be able to save $[x] dollars by abstaining from cannabis consumption, refrain from consuming [x] units of their normal consumtion facilitator (e.g. bong hits, joints, edibles, etc.), and lastly make it to a certain date without consuming cannabis products.
- Personal achievements. This feature has not been fully implemented yet, however the goal is to reward the user with some sort of digital medal for achieving certain goals, such as using the application for x days, checking in for a x day streak, or refraining from consuming x quantities of cannabis products.
- Lastly, interact with an active community of users who are also attempting to recover from a cannabis use disorder using Reddit as a facilitator.
This application does not retain or transmit data to any non-Reddit server, and to ensure that this is the case this project has been made free and open source. Reddit was chosen for 2 reasons:
- It takes time to build a community. In that time, users may not want to use our application due to that lack of community.
- Reddit already handles user profile creation and provides API to connect with all of the public subreddits. This way, it's not on us (the developers) to handle user profiles and user data.