So, on 4/20, there’s been a huge number of people openly enjoying cannabis. The news articles are saying there’s a huge variety of people having a great time. Apparently, a Marijuana “bar” is a much friendlier place when people start getting loaded than a bar serving alcohol.
So far so good. But then I read about a guy who decided to take a monster hit of a “dab”, which is apparently an oil extract that contains very concentrated THC. He passed out and hit his head.
Doesn’t sound like it’s smart to take a hit off a dab while standing up.
Why do people lose consciousness? That sounds ominously bad. Have researchers even figured it out, or are they not able to experiment with high dose THC at the handful of places licensed to research MJ?
Also, apparently there may have been a well publicized Marijuana Murder! It’s reefer madness! Apparently, a man may or may not have purchased a marijuana candy bar, chowed down, hallucinated, and blew his wife away! We better make it illegal, fast!
Off hand, I’d say it has more to do with the mechanics of taking a “monster hit” and less about what you’re smoking.
I’ve seen people exhale forcefully to get as much air out of their lungs as possible so they can then inhale the largest quantity of smoke possible. If that inhaled smoke is poor in oxygen, and then you hold your breath to keep the smoke in as long as possible, then you’re setting yourself up for oxygen deprivation, which could easily lead to passing out.
I’m not so sure it’s dab, per se, that is the issue.
There may be more to it than that. In particular, many people ‘bear down’ when they’re trying to hold in a toke* . In other words, it’s like they’re trying to blow out against their closed lips and mouth (try it yourself - pretend you’re trying to hold in a deep toke - and I think you’ll see what I’m trying to describe).
In any case, when a person bears down like that, it tends to inhibit the blood from returning to the heart, and that leads to low blood pressure and hence a (possible) faint.
Matters can be made worse if the person holding the toke in has been lying around stoned, with the ‘lying around’ bit tending also to keep the blood pooled and thus not returned to the heart. I suppose it’s also possible that if you hold the toke in for a very long time, the resultant rise in the concentration of carbon dioxide in your blood could cause enough dilation of your blood vessels to lower your blood pressure which, you guessed it, could cause (or contribute to) a faint.
Years ago I smoked a joint that had been soaked in hash oil. Don’t know if “passed out” is how I’d describe it, but I slept through a Frank Zappa concert.
Early 70’s. One evening a friend brought over a rather fat joint that was “laced with opium.” Of course we believed anything in those days, and for all we know it might have been catnip soaked in ant poison, but he did occasionally deal in some exotic drugs, was an old and very close friend, and I’ve chosen to believe it was in fact opium enhanced.
I remember the experience clearly: took one hit, got very high very quickly, took another small hit, told the friend “This stuff is really good” and the next thing I know it’s morning.
(About eight hours later.)
A college student on Spring Break in Colorado ate 6 times the recommended dose of a pot cookie, freaked out and jumped to his death from a hotel balcony.
Its like running across the railway line… you can do it 200 times, and be perfectly fine. On that basis, you might say “well then it must be safe enough” ??? No,that doesn’t make it safe.
When you get hit, you get hit bad… And if you do it every day, you only last a year.
What a bunch of rookies. The only time anyone gets “freaked out” or loses consciousness-from ANY form of marijuana-is when they are using it for the first time or they use it so infrequently that they’ve developed no tolerance. Tolerance for marijuana builds up very fast and it would only take a couple days of using it for those “scary times” to be looked back upon with laughter.
Only time I ever (really) freaked out, and passed out, and everything else was when someone laced a joint with PCP and didn’t tell me. Actually, that happened two times.
This is something I have always wanted to do a controlled test on. So far I have met no one that agrees with me on this issue. I am just speaking form my own experience. If I smoke a little pot I will stay high until I go to sleep and wake up again at least 2 hours sleep seems to kill it. If I smoke any pot at all after the first smoke of the day I have a very shortlived effect and then I start rapidly comming down. I can really only get high once durring an awake cycle.
I know several friends who smoke off and on all day and really are not getting that high. I have tried to talk them into just smoking once and seeing what happens but they don’t really want to wait. I can stretch out 10 grams to last about 3 months and pretty much feel good the whole time.
If you take a break from weed for a bit you lose tolerance and you’ll get crazy high from just a little bit of decent pot. Do that every day for a month and you’ll be inhaling as much as you can every twenty minutes and barely getting to a 5 or 6 (on a 1-10 highness scale). Take a few days off and you’ll easily hit a 10 again.
