I had occasion to observe two interesting phenomena of cannabis consumption in the last 24 hours. Neither one was particularly new to me, but it occurred to me that I may not have explicitly described or explained them in the past, so I thought they might help someone understand a bit more about how cannabis can work in the body.

The first was on Sunday. Father’s Day is always somewhat stressful for me, due to passive-aggressive (and sometimes flat-out deliberately antagonistic) behavior on the part of my eldest son. So I always make sure I use plenty of my favorite all-purpose anti-anxiety medicine, and I used way more than usual Sunday, anticipating some serious stress. I did experience things I could have gotten upset about, but I managed to get through it pretty well.

In any case, it was quite a long day, and it was a full 10 hours before I felt anything from this hefty (for me) dose, and at least 6 hours after all the drama had been over! I thought it was an excellent example of the principle that even a strong psychoactive dose of cannabis can be “burned through” without feeling it. Our hypothesis is that its power goes towards fighting your stress rather than activating your brain’s receptors somehow, but naturally we have no idea how this might actually work. If you think this is too unscientific, feel free to propose an alternate hypothesis, but by all means, make sure to explain how a 6-hour edible dose lasts for 10 hours and isn’t felt until the end!

And then today (I’m writing this Monday evening), I decided to try some crumble from a new strain, and it gave me a headache. I’ve only had this happen to me once before (ironically with the Headband strain), and that time there was no “cure” other than to never smoke, vape, or eat it again. This time, it happened that I had recently written a section in my book about the biphasic dose response curves of both THC and CBD, which means that they both can cause entirely different effects depending on whether you consume a lot or a little. Well, I had already vaped, so I couldn’t have less, but I could certainly try more. And as it turned out, more was the answer, my headache went away, and all was right with the world!