Having witnessed this second hand in certain family members, I think some people are just better at getting away with managing their addiction than others. My family member hid it from us for years until for a variety of reasons it was no longer possible; it still came as a surprise to some of their friends after they died (including at least one roommate).
I wouldn’t be surprised if there are people who can manage their addiction indefinitely (although I have no idea what percentage of people would fall into this category). Having said that, I suspect it’s a bit like walking along a tightrope. One slip…
One of the things about studying people who manage it well is that it helps us understand people who do not. It’s a shame my colleague (and, according to him, others who studied the same thing) had trouble getting funding. In the US the NIH wasn’t interested in seeing studies about people who could take heroin recreationally with no ill effects.
I had similar experiences with edibles in the past. Since it was legalized in Canada, I can buy consistently potent edibles. It has really changed my experience. Like being able to have a beer and comfortably predict the outcome. So much better.
One of the best aspects of legalization is testing & honest, accurate labelling. Annoying that every 10mg THC chocolate or gummy is individually wrapped in child-resistant packaging, but I put up with it to be sure what I’m eating.
My process for making edibles: make “budder” in crockpot, 2lb good trim into 1lb butter, add water to fill crockpot, 4 simmering. Strain thru cheesecloth, let cool; “budder” rises to the top and can easily be removed. Store in freezer.
Make either cookies or brownies from prepared mixes, both of which use 1/3cup “oil”, which I substitute with this budder. Make 16 cookies or cut the brownies into 16. Almost no cannabis taste.
To test, my wife has a cookie/brownie. She’s fearless, and her preferred dose is 30mg (mine’s 10mg); she reports her level of stonedness after an hour, and we adjust our consumption accordingly.
In 5 years of making edibles from our homegrown cannabis, never had a bad experience.
I’m super jealous of her fortitude! Sometimes even taking one extra puff when smoking can make me think I’m having heart palpitations for 45 minutes (I’m not, it’s a weird psychological effect.)
Edibles have scared me ever since a couple intense experiences, but I like your approach. I think I might try that.
My father was a tobacco smoker. Unlike his brother, the cancer that killed him wasn’t lung cancer, though we’ve got no way of knowing if the smoking aggravated it. Fortunately, he didn’t have much nausea from the chemo, so I didn’t have to either haul weed across the country (medicinal weed was legal here in CA) or find a source back East where he lived (“there was this dude in high school nicknamed Bear” was about as close I knew of.)
And of course, Becky died from injecting the marijuanas, which is obviously what Ricketts must be ranting about.
Weird. I don’t recall this type propaganda when Michigan legalized recreational use. Maybe they didn’t bother sending such obvious BS to those of us in the ‘blue bubbles’? Kind of a shame, sometimes I need a good laugh, and anti-weed zealots never fail to deliver.
My mother smoked fairly heavily for most of her adult life. She was diagnosed with a cancerous bladder cyst, successfully removed. Her doctor told her she would have to quit smoking. When she asked why, he responded, “Where do you think all the toxins filtered out of your body go when you get rid of them?”
She quit smoking immediately (with difficulty) and could not have a cup of coffee for the rest of her life because it was such a trigger for ‘coffee and a cigarette’. She switched exclusively to tea to get her caffeine hit.
Yesterday I got high after not having done so recently.
I then went back to what I was doing for the day, which at that moment meant bringing in some fifty pound bags of animal feed. I carried the first one in the house, then noticed that the left side of my chest and my left arm felt… well, just very faintly different from the right, but nothing truly alarming. However, being a male pushing fifty who was home alone at the time, I carefully took stock of myself and what I was perceiving.
I developed a hypothesis and then tested it… yup, slinging the next bag over my right shoulder left me feeling perfectly symmetrical again.
Cool. But I’m totally guessing the second field, THC% in the raw cannabis. It’s home grown, from clones of unknown origin. Sadly I don’t have keen enough eyes to determine the THC% from eyeballing it.
I’d really like to have this stuff tested. But I’ve not found a lab that will test it at a cost I’m willing to pay – perhaps $25/test? Maybe I should start a small-scale lab? Send me a 1/4oz, I use 0.1g to test, keep the rest for… science?
There are a few things to remember, the trichomes (the crystals on your flowers and adjacent leaves) are where the THC is, but it’s not just THC in there, there are loads of other compounds, some psychoactive, some not, plus the wax holding it into that shape.
More importantly, THC percentage alone is not a good indicator of how high something will get you, interactions with the terpenes, the multitudes of CBDs and other psychoative compounds combine to create a unique high for most strains, and we won’t get into the sorts of variations nature can cause (temps/lights/stress/etc).
Would probably be worth testing your butter, at least you’d have a good idea of how potent that is, I don’t imagine you’d get much useful information touching a reagent strip to a bud.
The edibles in gummi form (from dispensaries) that I’ve tried are very different from eating friends’ home made ahem baked goods w/added pot. The latter have always hit me hard, w/a usually unpleasant period of coming down, but the gummies have invariably provided a far milder buzz w/no noticable come-down. The main difference between them is each gummi always contains the same amount of THC and/or CBD extract as printed on the package, whereas that cookie in your hand may have a lot more pot in it than the next one you grab.
Same thing with blotter acid: some hits have absorbed a larger droplet of LSD than others on the same sheet.
This is why most politicians are idiots, especially the ones who insist on playing the fear card. His claim is as valid as the rumor that voting for a governor in Nebraska will give you rickets.
Well, in this case, maybe . . .
No, this shouldn’t get to be waved off as a most politicians thing. At this point there is one party in America that is completely unmoored from observable reality on pretty much everything, and they don’t deserve the pass of pretending that is just politics as usual.
I’m all for holding the Democratic party to account, too, but the GOP is so far on the fringes now in the mainstream of the party, that we do need to do something about that.
