Pubdate: Thu, 10 Jul 2014
Source: Boulder Weekly (CO)
Copyright: 2014 Boulder Weekly
Contact:  http://www.boulderweekly.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/57
Author: Leland Rucker

WHY NOT USE COMMON SENSE WITH EDIBLES?

After reading about all these horrible experiences visitors are 
having with edibles, I decided to find out what all the fuss was 
about. Everybody's heard about Maureen Dowd's eight hours of hotel 
terror by now, but even ace cannabis correspondent Jacob Sullum had a 
negative experience recently with an edible while passing through the 
state. I chose Dixie Edibles THC Infused Dixie Rolls. There were two 
rolls in the package, both about the size of a Tootsie Roll, clearly 
marked as containing 50mg each of THC. On the back of the package it 
suggests single servings of 10mg for beginners. So the two rolls 
included 10 full servings at recommended dosages. The budtender asked 
if I was experienced and reminded me of the recommendations.

I cut off what I considered three servings. It tasted like a Tootsie 
Roll with a definite cannabis overtone. We walked over to a 
neighbor's birthday party, and about an hour and a half later I began 
to notice a pleasant relaxation in the muscles in my neck at about 
the same time the conversation became more animated. We came home and 
watched an episode of House of Cards. The intensity level began 
dropping off within three or four hours of ingestion, and I had no 
problem sleeping. I repeated the experience the next night with 
nothing negative to report.

So why the bad experiences? Two things seem to be at work here. The 
first is ingesting an edible at the prescribed dosage and then 
ingesting more before the first dose takes effect. The second is 
being caught in a place you don't want to be - say, an out-of-state 
hotel room - by yourself when the edible takes effect.

In 1972's The Natural Mind, Andrew Weil suggested that humans are 
innately drawn to alter their consciousness, and that we do this 
beginning as children. This made perfect sense to me back then, and 
it still makes perfect sense to me today, especially when I'm 
watching someone like Ann Coulter explain that people don't drink 
alcohol to get "high" and therefore cannabis must be worse than alcohol.

Weil didn't advocate drug use in The Natural Mind, but his suggestion 
that it wasn't deviant or unnatural to want to alter your 
consciousness ran counter to my upbringing but made so much sense. 
Using ideas developed by Timothy Leary and others, Weil touted the 
concept of set and setting to help determine a subject's reaction to 
mind alteration, be it with drugs or meditation. "Set is a person's 
expectations of what a drug will do to him, considered in the context 
of his whole personality," Weil wrote. "Setting is the environment, 
both physical and social, in which a drug is taken."

The set/setting concept seems helpful when approaching edibles. The 
best advice, of course, is to always use common sense, something the 
government itself can't legislate, by the way. But you can control 
your set and setting.

If you're curious, before dabbling in edibles, I would suggest 
smoking bud marijuana first. Smoking cannabis is the fastest way to 
experience the "altered consciousness" that THC provides. More 
importantly, it's an easy way to control your dosage - if you feel 
your consciousness changing too much or too quickly, you can stop. If 
you don't like smoking, substitute a vaporizer, which uses cannabis 
vapor instead of smoke and which you can easily control dosage in 
much the same way.

So you've tried it and liked the change in consciousness, and you 
want to try an edible. First, temper your expectations. The packaging 
says that for individuals not used to cannabis, try 10mg and see what 
happens. Don't take more just because you don't feel it for a while. 
It took more than 90 minutes for the Dixie Roll's effects to begin 
happening to me.

Even more importantly, plan something pleasant for the setting: a 
picnic, a walk in the foothills, a movie, working on your lawn, a 
fine dining place. Don't drive. And don't plan something you've never 
done before. Cannabis tends to complement your feeling and your mood, 
so doing things you enjoy is perhaps the most important thing to 
remember. Being in the wrong place, as Dowd's night in Denver shows 
us, could make the experience much worse.

For tourists and anyone else, eating edibles is one of the few ways 
to consume cannabis legally. Which brings up the topic of where 
people will be able to legally consume cannabis, something that will 
most certainly have to be revisited in Colorado as legalization moves 
along. The city of Denver's raid and closing of a private cannabis 
club last week isn't promising, but we're going to need to have that 
conversation, or we'll continue to have problems with edibles for tourists.

While I sympathize with the legislature's attempts to keep edibles 
away from kids, the packaging was almost comically wasteful. The two 
small candy-barsized rolls were inside a sturdy, reinforced package 
eight inches by 33/4 inches that I had to cut with a pair of scissors 
to get inside. That bag was stuffed into a plastic container more 
than six inches high. Without the packaging, the plastic container 
alone could hold several dozen of the edible rolls.

Somehow the idea that a container that could hold probably 80-100 
Dixie Rolls is being used to transport two of them seems ridiculous. 
Besides driving up costs, it's just wasteful, especially since 
children aren't getting cannabis at retail stores. I don't want Dixie 
Rolls in the hands of children. But are giant plastic tubs that hold 
tiny amounts of edibles and then wind up in landfills the best answer?
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom