Felicity and I both had our turn in the barrel last weekend.

For me, it was Friday night. I had a long week and a lot more running around and physical stuff to do than usual, so towards evening I had myself a bit more infused cookie than normal. Not too crazy, but a little too much more than I usually do. So I spent most of the evening watching movies and TV, which is a nice calming thing to do when trying to take your mind off your internal self.

But when we ran out of pending shows to watch, it was time to go to bed. That’s when it got interesting, because my mind now had nothing else to distract it, and so I was seeing lots of extra colors in my already-darkened bedroom…colors that weren’t actually there. Your mind tries to see patterns when it gets random or incomplete visual input — such as a dark room — and when you add cannabinoid-induced sensory enhancement to the mix…well, you see extra colors and patterns that aren’t there, that’s all. It’s not like a real hallucination, and it’s certainly not scary.

Anyway, I lay there and enjoyed it for a few minutes, and then enjoyed curling up with my cat, who sleeps under the covers with me, sleekly purring. This always makes me grin silently in the darkness, until I laugh because it seems incongruous. Then I eventually fall asleep.

The next day was perfectly normal, but Something was bugging Felicity. So, sometime in the late afternoon, she took one of the Mt. Everest Skunk capsules I made awhile back, which we jokingly call “Dammitol”, because their usual effect is simply to make you not care about whatever might be emotionally troubling you. These are good for occasional use, but I suspect a certain kind of person might quickly become dependent on them.

Anyway, as we later figured out, Felicity took her capsule between meals, which caused her to avoid the First Pass Effect. As explained by none other than Granny Storm Crow, your liver usually works to help process most drugs taken orally, by filtering out toxins. This causes some drugs to be far less effective when swallowed. In the case of cannabis capsules, the liver turns THC into 11-hydroxy-THC, which is actually even more psychoactive than THC, although some is lost in the process. This is one of the reasons that the effects of edibles are usually stronger and last much longer than smoking or vaporizing.

Eat and Fly

But if you happen to eat a small portion of activated cannabis 45 minutes to an hour after eating a meal, your digestive process and enzymes have already been busy digesting your food. So one little capsule, or bite-size edible (like a firecracker) will often just slip unnoticed past the stomach and into the intestines, where there’s a large number of blood vessels directly connected to the lymphatic system. The cannabinoid-packed lipids, after a somewhat longer journey than usual, hit this area, where they eventually spread through the bloodstream directly without being changed or lost by liver processing.

That explains why capsules taken at this critical time will (a) take longer to feel effects (b) seem to hit you suddenly all at once (c) give you much more intense (but less predictable) effects than the same edible taken with food — up to 400% or so, by my calculations.

And that’s why Saturday night ended up a lot like Friday night, except that Felicity was the one who had to walk carefully to bed.