I’ve been writing about my experiences of being a Medical Marijuana patient for two years now. I’ve often talked about the way I use cannabis: in small doses, not enough to get high, but enough to make a change.

Suddenly (in the shower, of course!) a word came to me out of nowhere: microdose. I had never heard it in my life as far as I knew, but it was clearly time to do some research using the old Google. Turns out that microdosing is indeed a thing on your planet , and it has some relevance to psychedelics (coincidentally or not, some of the related experiences sound a lot like happy cannabis users), but there’s relatively little talk about the word “microdose” in connection with cannabis. So it’s time for us to claim it, because it’s one of those words that almost explains itself. Almost…but not quite.



So, for the record, Wikipedia defines microdosing as “a technique for studying the behavior of drugs in humans through the administration of doses so low (“sub-therapeutic”) they are unlikely to produce whole-body effects, but high enough to allow the cellular response to be studied. ” In the medical cannabis context, I’d like to similarly define microdosing as “a technique for using cannabis in humans through the administration of doses so low (“sub-psychoactive”) they are unlikely to produce gross body or mind effects, but high enough to allow the subtle and positive changes in thinking, feeling, and pain relief that the patient desires.”

What do I mean by subtle changes? Well, you might not want to go numb, but you’d want your pain to disappear. You don’t want to get giddy and high, you just want your depression and brain fog to go away. You don’t want to feel stoned, you just want your anxiety to go away. That’s right, world: we medical marijuana patients don’t want what you think we want. And the proof is right here in what we’re talking about.

Microdosing Techniques

The trick is to develop a procedure for a dose, measured in some way clear to you, that works consistently to get you to the appropriate level of consciousness: that place where you can feel something different in your body and mind, but you’re not feeling high or impaired or stoned or in any way out of control. For most people, this will be somewhere between [1] and [3].

Finding the right dose is called titrating, and the procedure varies based on the method of medicinal intake you prefer: