why does weed dry out your eyes?

[fastforyou84]

I have dry eyes as it is and when I wear contacts it's always bothering me and I can never have fun later on at night becuase then they really get dry and make me feel 1000x more tired than I should be. I HATE glasses so I wont wear them out. But when I smoke weed it makes the contact situation unbearable and I'd like to be able to smoke and go out. Yes I have tried every single contact drop they have and nothing works. Any idea? or an explination of why it dries your eyes?

[birdgirl73]

I'm not sure what the formal, official medical reason is, but smoking of any kind is drying to your body, and I know weed smoking is definitely that way because it's often recommended medically to help dry up secretions and saliva. I have dry eyes, too, and it's miserable. My eye doctor put in some tear duct plugs to try and improve the situation, and they were more miserable than the dry eye problem itself. I took out the plugs with some tweezers and now just use lubricant eye drops every chance I get. I'm not a current weed smoker, so that doesn't trouble me, but if I were, I know it'd make the problem worse.

The Erowid Web site (link below) said the drying effects of cannabis can vary from strain to strain so you might try a different strain and see if that makes a difference. Also, adding more essential fatty acids to your diet can help the dry eye problem, too. Those include Omega 3- and Omega 6-rich foods like salmon, tuna, nuts, and flax seed oil. Might be worth a try.
http://www.erowid.org/plants/cannabis/cannabis_effects.shtml

[fastforyou84]

I was going to try the tear duct plugs but I guess I shouldnt. Yeah this strain of weed seems to be very much more drying to my eyes. Its pretty good weed too. I do have some fish oil pills which have omega 3 in them. I will start taking them again

[fastforyou84]

I was thinking about trying these...

http://www.theralife.com/relief.html

[birdgirl73]

You could definitely try those, but they sure are charging a lot of money for those supplements, and the sad thing is because they're not regulated by the FDA, they don't necessarily have to contain one iota of the stuff they claim to contain. So the truth is they may or may not have all those ingredients. (When tested a couple of years ago by a consumer magazine and news network working together, most natural supplements like that were found not to contain the ingredients they claimed to.) You'd probably do just as well trying your fish-oil Omega 3 capsules, and definitely don't rule out the option of trying the tear duct plugs. Lots of people find them easy to tolerate and wear them comfortably, and they have two or three types of plugs. Some work better than others. I'm going to try another type because the doctor told me not to rule them totally out till I'd tried all my options. Another thing that helped me was to increase my water intake. Good luck!

[fastforyou84]

Thanks. I drink tons of water as it is and I thought that site said they were "FDA registered since 2000" but idk if that means FDA approved?

[birdgirl73]

FDA-registered means they have their company name on file with the FDA and can claim FDA-registered status. Sorta like being able to say "Official vitamin of the World Cup" or something like that--a claim that's meant to be impressive but doesn't actually prove much. It still doesn't mean the FDA or anyone else tests their ingredients. Until the laws about dietary supplements change, which we're working on here in this country, none of that stuff gets any objective laboratory scrutiny. However, that Web site did say they'd done some effectiveness testing on that product, which is a claim they couldn't make unless it were true, and they have to have the results on record in order to make that claim. If you have the money to spend and want to try them, it probably wouldn't hurt to try that supplement. I'm not totally opposed to such things and have been known to try supplements myself; I'm just highly skeptical of most of their claims.

[qdavid]

So, if you buy those fish oil tablets, there's a good chance that there is little or no fish oil in them? That just sucks, they ain't cheap either. I guess if you break one open and it smells like fish, you should be good to go.

[fastforyou84]

no I dont think thats what is being said. I buy fish oil pills alot and they have always been fine. Just saying its possibly the claims arent true but i do research on supplements before i buy so i know im not gettin ripped off. I buy bottles of fish oil for like $10-15

[friedbanana]

i feel like an outcast reading these messages. I find that marijuana actually help my dry eyes. Weird huh? However, i dont smoke weed, i vape concentrates and hash like wax bho pure gold, stuff like that. NO COMBUSTION. So, no smoke going into my eyes (even though back in the day i remember that even smoking it helped with my dry eyes but only whilst being high). I also hold in the hits so i dont exhale any vapor. I picked up vaping in february after having quit smoking weed for 2 years. I started vaping everyday for wrist pain, but recently since ive decided to quit, ive found that it indeed was helping me with my dry eyes. I dont have any wrist pain anymore (which was a pain i had carried for more than a year without any progress, so i think the credit for being pain free goes to marijuana but who can be sure) so i decided to stop as it was digging heavily into my current financial situation. Ive been off of marijuana for 2 days and my eyes are as dry as they were before i picked up marijuana again. So i wonder if marijuana was really helping me or just relieving me temporarily of dry eye pain. Any thoughts are welcomed. Would like to know that im not the only one who finds that it helps.

[dananeal]

I think it’s the cause of dehydrates you and your eyes red. Smoking is also the cause of dry eyes. You should take the advice of any eye specialist doctor; he can give you a good example.