Recently, I began a light detoxifying regimen, meant to gently clean out “stuff” that’s built up in my body over the last six decades without causing undue gastric distress (the dreaded “colon cleanse”).

As I’m pretty sensitive to the effects of everything going on in my body, I noticed an inability to focus and mental fogginess. To me, these are often the signs of some sort of imbalance or other. To my detox guide, these were part of an expected “disconnect” for a first-time detox user.

I’ve gotten over the detox effects by “cannabinizing” myself. That’s a word I came up with to describe the practice of keeping a low level of cannabinoids in your body for an extended period, in order to help balance things internally.



The best way to cannabinize yourself is with some kind of edibles, because they will last a longer time than smoking or vaping cannabis. In my case, I did it with cannabutter and tincture for 36 hours and never went above a level [3].

If you do this properly, it won’t cause any tolerance buildup. How do I know this? Because I can still get high by taking twice my usual medical dosage, and this hasn’t changed since I started using medical marijuana daily almost 1½ years ago!

While I’ve found interesting personal data that supports my theory that your body and brain need the right level and balance of cannabinoids to function properly, there is also some scientific data to back it up. So a day or three of cannabinizing to rebalance your levels every once in awhile can keep you from being marijuana deficient.

The keys to cannabinizing yourself properly are twofold. First, you should use a totally different, and if possible, “opposite” strain of what you’re used to. This will insure that you’re building up the cannabinoids that you haven’t been ingesting regularly. So, since I use Sour Diesel daily, which is a mind-stimulating sativa, I go to the opposite end of the spectrum to Purple Kush, a body-heavy indica.

Secondly, you must know your medicine well enough to give yourself a light dose, preferably one that you feel comfortable and can just “cruise along with”. You’re shooting for something between “I can feel it in my body, but it isn’t affecting me at all” (level [1]) and “oh, I’m actually high” (level [4]). You don’t want to be high, and certainly not for 3 days!

The word “cannabinized” came to me after hearing one of the top 25 psychedelic songs of the 60s, “Time Has Come Today” by the Chambers Brothers, come up on my random iPod mix:

This song has the possibly immortal line, “And my soul’s been psychedelicized”. If you say “And my body’s been cannabinized” just right, it will fit in with the song. Nugs and hugs!