Smoking marijuana is the fastest way to deliver THC and other cannabinoids into your body and mind. But many marijuana users are wondering if it’s better to eat marijuana as pot edibles (“medibles”
rather than smoke it.
What’s behind the interest in marijuana medibles? People are tired of coughing, throats hurting, having to buy and use pipes, bongs, or vaporizers.
The smell of smoked marijuana, or a big cloud of marijuana smoke, brings unwanted attention that can harm your privacy and freedom.
Making pot edibles is a good way to salvage THC from trim, defective buds and other harvested marijuana that usually goes to waste because it’s not good enough to toke.
The same can be said for putting inferior marijuana materials into alcohol to extract THC.
But those aren’t the only reasons more and more marijuana smokers are starting to eat marijuana instead of toking it. It’s also because eating marijuana gives you a different kind of marijuana high.
Why is it so different? Here’s why. When you smoke marijuana you’re converting a non-psychoactive “acid form” of THC into a psychoactive form of THC called delta-9 THC, which produces a unique set of effects.
Please note, when we say “acid form,” we’re not talking about LSD acid.
When you eat marijuana, your digestive system converts the inactive form of THC to delta-11 THC, a compound that produces different effects than delta-9.
If you smoke marijuana but as yet you do not consume pot edibles, here’s a summary of the differences in these two methods of marijuana intake:
- Smoked marijuana comes on within a few seconds or a minute or two. The noticeable high lasts for 1-3 hours; then you become “un-high.” Depending on whether your stomach is empty or not, eaten marijuana could take 30-90 minutes for you to feel the effects. Eaten medical marijuana effects last for 3-7 hours, and then you gradually descend. The burned-out, tired feeling you sometimes get when you come down from smoked marijuana is far less noticeable when you eat marijuana.
- When you eat marijuana, it produces more body-centered effects compared to smoked marijuana, and effects are more evenly distributed throughout the body.
- Eaten marijuana works better for pain relief, muscle spasms, and similar conditions…but takes longer to work than smoked marijuana, and is thus not as useful for people needing immediate medical marijuana relief.
- Because you can’t feel the effects right away when you eat marijuana, it’s easier to under-dose or over-dose. The way to get it right when you eat marijuana is to start with a dose-measured marijuana medible, eat a small amount of it on an empty stomach, wait at least an hour until it takes full effect, then decide if you want to eat more, and how much more you want to eat.
- When you eat pot edibles instead of smoking marijuana, the process of preparation and ingesting is more complex. Instead of just drying and curing your crop and smoking it, you have to dry it, cure it, prepare it as a food item, eat it, wait for it the medible to take effect, evaluate the effect, and determine how much you can eat to get the effects you want.
- When you prepare marijuana to make it into a medible so you can eat it, you have to know what you’re doing. I suggest you read this BigBudsMag.com article about marijuana medibles. I read this fine article and got the medical marijuana cookbooks recommended in it. They gave me marijuana medible info I couldn’t get anywhere else, and helped me make delicious, dose-measured marijuana medibles without guesswork or mistakes.
- Making marijuana into medibles is a great way to get value from marginal marijuana such as shake, stems and ugly buds that you would not usually smoke.
When I eat marijuana the effects are more “total” than they are when I smoke. The high is more like mescaline or mushrooms, pain relief is better, the high lasts longer, your lungs and throat are happier, nobody smells marijuana smoke and calls the police, and you come down off your high easier.
I can’t say for sure that if you eat pot edibles it will be as fun for you as it is for me. But it’s worth a try, because it will give you a different marijuana experience!
