Eat it. Lots of it. Find a place. Mellow out. Paranoia is only what you make of it. It’s all in your head.
Fo sho
You guys are making this inordinately complicated.
I bet Emerson smoked weed.
For me it’s alcohol by far, but something I say to anyone who might be hesitant to smoke, but who has drank is that if you’ve ever been really drunk then you’ve already done a drug far harsher than marijuana. Being really drunk is way more extreme than any level of high, I’ve never known a high person to black out and do any number of terrible things black out drunks do (everything from running naked through your neighbors yard to waking up in an alley having shit yourself and being placed under arrest–these aren’t my personal experiences but real things drunk people do that you’re probably not ever going to go off and do just because you smoked.)
The first probably 4-5 times I smoked in high school I was drunk, and consequently I didn’t perceive being high as anything at all. When you’re good and drunk, at least for me, it’s very difficult to notice the effects of marijuana. Specifically for me I usually fall asleep very, very quickly if I smoke after being already drunk so even if I were to feel the effects I’d be asleep instead.
Also, the first few times you smoke you probably really don’t know “how” to smoke properly. It’s not like smoking a cigarette or a cigar, you take a much deeper hit and customarily hold it in for a bit. Once you’ve taken a few hits, while not under the influence of any other substances, you can relax for a little while and experience THC itself. The first time I really feel I ever got “high” from smoking was a situation like that, no other drugs in me and just sort of relaxed and taking a few big hits. Recreational drugs are fun for most people, and marijuana is no different. But for me personally the chemical effects are significantly inferior to alcohol.
I speculate, and I could be wrong, since I’m never someone who has really loved smoking, that a lot of people who are really into it are into it for reasons beyond just its chemical effects. It’s something they’ve habitually done in combination with other things like listening to music, watching TV etc and the combination of those things hits a lot of good buttons for them. For me with alcohol, I find the euphoric effects of alcohol to be enjoyable by myself, in a bar, at a ballgame, watching a movie etc. For me it’s enjoyable in any context, marijuana is less so.
I, for one, am shocked.
I got halfway though answering this at work and then thought, maybe this can wait until I get home. It’s my personal computer, but still…their servers!
I’m used to not discussing it here, but the mods seem OK with it, so what the hell. It’s legal under state law where I live (California). I have a medical recommendation. I use marijuana fairly regularly. Unfortunately, my lungs can’t tolerate much smoke since I had a reaction to the dust in the San Joachim Valley, so I almost exclusively consume edibles these days. I’ve never done a variety sampling like you have, but it sounds fun!
I don’t dispute that there are different highs, but I very much doubt that it has anything to do with whether a given strain is marketed as a sativa or an indica. I am fairly confident in saying that those terms, when applied to cultivated marijuana strains, are scientifically meaningless, and that whether a particular plant has most of its genetic makeup from a sativa landrace or an indica landrace has absolutely no bearing on either the kind of high you’ll get or the levels of cannabanoids the plant produces. How the plant was bred, what it was bred for, the conditions under which it was grown, what was harvested, how it was treated and stored all contribute far more to the end product than the specific genetic strain of the ancestors from which it was bred. Cannabis sativa and Cannabis indica aren’t considered separate species anymore, and no one today knows the pedigree of a specific plant unless they went out and collected seeds in the wild and bred them from scratch.
Remember, all dogs are the same species. All citrus fruits are cross-fertile hybrids. So are almost all green, leafy vegetables. Green and red peppers aren’t even different cultivars necessarily; you can get them from the same individual plant. And you can get sour and sweet strawberries from the same carton picked at the same time by the same workers from the same field.
So if there isn’t really Indica weed and Sativa weed, what about the different chemicals? Well, sure, but there are only two that have been identified as having any significant role. There may be others, but as long as breeders select for high THC and CBD levels, anything else is going to be minimized. And until very recently, all breeders selected for consciously was THC. Look at those numbers I linked to earlier. Most modern strains have enormous amounts of THC in them, sometimes more than 25% by weight! Most strains have around 1% CBD, often much less. CBD would have to be far more potent than THC to have much of an effect in those proportions, but of course, CBD is supposed to be a mellower, more subtle high. Arguing that’s what accounts for the differences people notice is like claiming that you can get a mellower high from crack cocaine if you mix it with 5% caffeine. Sure, if you take 5% of the cocaine out to replace it with caffeine, but that’s not even what’s going on here, since the strains with the most CBD often have the most THC. And again, you can see there is practically no correlation between the ratio of CBD to THC and whether a strain is recommended for energy or for sleeping. And other compounds are likely to be even less psychoactive and less present than CBD.
So what accounts for the different experiences? Well some of it probably is down to different quantities of THC, and even down to different ratios of THC to other stuff, including CBD. Not differences between strains, mind you, but to differences between one particular sample that was grown under particular conditions and stored under particular conditions for hopefully not too long and another sample, whether it’s the same strain or not. But that mostly just covers the difference between good weed and bad weed, with some extra variation in appearance, aroma, flavor, etc. Weed that was grown or stored sub-optimally (or comes from a poorly selected plant) will just get you less high (unless you use more of it); it won’t get you differently high.
What’s left? Well before I get to that, let me remind you that I was never able to become a connoisseur of smoked weed, I have tried different strains. I’ve also eaten a ton of edibles, mostly carefully calibrated (according to the label) to contain an exact amount of THC and CBD, identical from one dose to the next. And the differences I’ve noticed between different instances of taking a measured amount of a standardized, mass-produced edible are at least as great as the differences I’ve noticed between strains. Clearly, these differences are due to factors external to the weed itself: the time of day, what else I ate, where I was, when I last partook, my mood, my expectations, etc. All of these clearly have a huge impact on the effect of pot on me, and my friends tell me I’m not alone. The fact that these factors, while themselves somewhat predictable in their effect, are hard to quantify, makes them also susceptible to the claims of marketers. What a dispensary tells me about a product is likely to influence at least a few of those factors, especially my expectations.
It’s very similar to the situation with alcohol. Sure, there’s some very slight evidence that histamines in red wine can give you a headache, or that hops makes you sleepy, but that doesn’t stop everyone you meet, including me, from making claims that go far beyond that: Champagne makes them giddy, red wine makes them sleepy, whiskey makes them black out, tequila makes them crazy. The last two are particularly easy to debunk; there is nothing in tequila that would make people act any differently than whiskey or vodka. We know what’s in it, and ethanol is ethanol. But I guarantee you that if booze were outlawed except for medical purposes, we’d see bars advertising some alcohol for before work pick-me-ups and others for putting you to bed, some for pain and others for depression and others for treating cancer.
Take the example of absinthe. Until recently it was supposed to have had dramatic effects, far beyond normal alcoholic drinks. The blame was placed on wormwood, one of the herbs used to flavor it. It was even made illegal. But then people started finding old bottles and recipes, and they discovered that the amount of wormwood was far too small to account for the stories of hallucinations and crime and moral depravity. So what led to absinthe’s horrendous reputation? The people who drank it, who were the kind of people already prone to hallucinations and crime and moral depravity, and who were often seeking hallucinations and crime and moral depravity when they decided to drink it, and went to the sorts of bars that were known for allowing hallucinations and crime and moral depravity when they wanted to order it. The drink itself is just flavored ethanol. And ethanol’s ethanol.