Hi there! It’s time for another Q&A with our good buddies Blaze and Puf. These two potheads are here to answer all of your burning questions about cannabis, legalization, and other weed-related inquiries. That’s basically all they’re good for — that and smoking weed — so you might as well take advantage of their useless knowledge as you see fit.
This month, we have all sorts of awesome questions to answer for you. From what to expect at a dispensary to why your body thinks indicas are sativas (and vice versa), here are your questions about pot for our in-house potheads.
Have questions to ask these two fools? Send them to editor@ dgomag.com and we’ll do our best to answer them. And, feel free to send them allll over — your wild, wacky, and just plain weird questions about weed.
Nothing shocks us at this point. And we do mean nothing.
Whenever I smoke indicas I gain a lot of energy, but when I smoke sativas I get tired. When I researched, I found that it’s supposed to be the opposite. Is something wrong with me?
Blaze: Absolutely not! The anticipated effects of a strain are pretty generalized. There’s no hard and fast rules for how marijuana is supposed to make you feel, think, etc. In fact, I think it’s pretty common for people
to have various experiences depending on the strain.
I think it would actually be pretty boring if everyone had the same reactions, to be honest. I myself have had plenty of times when I’ve had a sativa and passed out on my couch immediately after or smoked an indica then proceeded to clean my entire kitchen. I say go with the flow and don’t let expectations ruin your experiences.
Puf: Yes. Everything is wrong with you. (I kid! I kid! You’re totally normal.)
Here’s the thing about weed. It kinda does what it wants in our bodies depending on the strain, the dosage (i.e. how much we smoked at the time), how much we’ve eaten (or drankety- drank), and other factors.
It also totally depends on the mode of ingestion, too. For example, I say eff bongs. Bongs ruin my life. Or, rather, I ruin my life with bongs because I don’t know and or care about my limits when I’m smoking a fat bowl out of a bong. And then, 20 minutes after that thing is cashed, I’m sweating bullets, high out of my mind, and — on occasion — am also super nauseated.
Same thing goes for most edibles. I can smoke a ton, but if I eat a few edibles, I get very, very high to the point of non-functional and then find myself aimlessly wandering the aisles of a rural Nebraska gas station looking for a specific type of pickle popcorn. (Just ask Blaze.)
Now, is that the weed’s fault? Nah. It’s my body’s fault. I overdo it and my body reacts accordingly. Or, in the case of the edibles, my body just processes them differently than other people’s bodies process them.
That said, I don’t have the same reaction as you do to sativas and indicas, no matter how I ingest them. Sativas make me wired and hyper-focused, and can give me anxiety too. Pretty textbook.
Indicas, on the other hand, make me sleepy as a mug. And hybrids? Well, who even knows what those do. Depends on the strain.
But just because your body reacts differently doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. It just means that you may process your weed a little differently than I do. If I were you, I’d just swap the strains accordingly. When I want to get wired and focus, I’d smoke an indica. If I wanted to crash the heck out, I’d smoke a sativa.
Does it sound weird? Yeah, kinda. But who cares. It’s a cool party trick. I’m impressed, anyway.
I’m planning to go to a dispensary for the first time, but I’m not sure what to expect. Do you have any advice for first-timers?
Blaze: Ah, I remember my first time in a dispensary. It was in a small Colorado border town and I had no idea what I was doing. Luckily for me, the budtender could sense I was a fish out of water and took pity on me. I vaguely remember panic ordering.
So, in light of that, I highly suggest being honest with your budtender, tell them it’s your first time, and ask them what they recommend. To give you some context, sativas typically give you head highs and tend to make you feel euphoric. Indicas can give you body highs and make you feel relaxed while hybrids can give you the best of both worlds. However, everyone is different and may have different reactions so feel free to experiment!
Puf: This is always my favorite question because I get it a lot in real life and I LOVE schooling people on dispensaries. Like, no snark at all. I love it.
To echo Blaze’s sentiments, going into a dispensary for the first time is intimidating. It can feel a little bit like you’re doing something illegal, and a LOT like you’re a dumbass. Don’t let it feel that way.
Part of the intimidation factor is that it feels like everyone else who’s ordering knows exactly what the hell they’re doing. Don’t let that fool you. We’re all noobs about weed — all of us except for the budtenders.
Before I get to that, though, lemme tell you how the process works. You’ll step inside and someone will ask for your ID immediately. You’ll need to produce that before you can get in. Don’t try to get around it. If you do, no weed for you.
Once that’s done, you’ll wait in a line, either in the front of the dispensary or in the dispensary itself, to get called up by a budtender. Easy peasy.
And, once you get to the budtender, you can ask allllllll the questions in the world. Don’t know what an indica is? Your budtender can educate you. Don’t know whether you should try an edible? Your budtender can tell you their opinions or experiences.
And the same goes for any other cannabis- related question you may have. Budtenders are your tour guide to the wide world of weed, and you shouldn’t be embarrassed to ask them questions, no matter how basic they seem. (You also shouldn’t be stingy about tipping them. They work their asses off to keep you stoned. Hook them up like they’re hooking you up!)
I had to have this same conversation with my dad, my mom, and like 15 other people, too . The truth is that the unknown, whatever it is, is scary. But once you encounter it a couple of times, it becomes less intimidating, which is precisely what will happen with dispensaries.
I want to use cannabis but I don’t want to feel high. What sort of products should I use?
Blaze: To be clear, the CBD in cannabis is the non-psychoactive ingredient in cannabis while THC is the psychoactive ingredient. What this means is that THC will get you high while CBD won’t. However, marijuana dispensaries cannot sell CBD-only products — all products must include THC. However, some dispensaries do sell products that contain high amounts of CBD and a small percentage of THC. Most likely, these products will not get you high, but just to be on the safe side, try them in small amounts. If you want to use cannabis but avoid THC completely, you can also visit CBD-only stores that provide products with zero THC.
Puf: Umm, OK, so I’m gonna be honest here. I like being high and I don’t know if I’d love ingesting or smoking something that didn’t make me high.
But while I don’t quite understand the aversion to “feeling high,” I guess I can try to help out here. Like Blaze said, the THC in weed will get you high. It is the cannabinoid that has psychoactive properties, so if you’re smoking or eating something with any THC in it, you’re probably going to feel at least some effects.
That said, you can keep that feeling to a minimum by smoking or ingesting a cannabis product or strain with a low amount of THC in it. For example, there are specific products that allow you to microdose like 1 milligram of THC at a time. A normal dose is 10 milligrams. So if you’re wanting to keep the THC in the product but don’t want to feel high, I’d suggest starting with one of those and seeing how you feel about it. But if you want to avoid THC completely, you’ll probably want to just go with a hemp-derived CBD product instead. I will warn you, though, that my pot-averse mom, who (bless her Texan soul) wanted to get relief for her arthritis, tried CBD because she didn’t want to feel “high” like she thought she would from cannabis. Well, it turns out that CBD makes her super sleepy, so she didn’t love that either.
My point here is that if you don’t want to feel “altered,” you just have to try and see what works. It’s trial and error, and what you think might work for you may not. Just like what you think might be annoying or make you feel out of control might not make you feel that way at all. So don’t rule out THC or any other cannabinoid til you try it out. On
Why does marijuana feel different when I smoke it rather than eating it in edible form?
Blaze: When you’re smoking marijuana rather than ingesting it, your body is absorbing THC in a completely different manner. When you smoke marijuana, the THC is going directly to your brain rather than being processed using different organs. This is why, when smoking, you tend to get stoned much faster than when you ingest it via edibles. On the other hand, when you take edibles, your body processes the edible using your liver, creating a chemical called 11-hydroxy-THC. The digestive process may take longer for you to get
high, but it will be a more potent high.
Puf: I know this one!
OK, so while I am not a scientist, I do know that the reason your body reacts to smoking differently than it
does to ingesting cannabis in edible form is the mechanism in which you’re taking in the THC.
When you ingest an edible, your body is breaking it down and processing it via the lining of your stomach — and the digestive process plays a huge part in how quickly you get high (and how high you get).
But when you smoke your weed or vape or whatever, the THC goes right to the old chrome dome, so you get stoned much more quickly. However, you’re typically trading in some of the more heavy-duty effects you’d get with an edible for the faster high.
Anything other than that is well above my head and well above my pay grade. All you have to remember is that the method of ingestion directly impacts how you feel when you’re stoned and you’ll be fine
