Cannabis (medical marijuana) can be a perfectly good and safe medicine when used correctly. But there are always people who find fault with everything, and they complain:

It’s unsafe (not really)

It’s illegal (not in 16 states)

It’s not effective (that’s not what dozens of studies have shown)

People will pretend they are sick to get it (that never happens with prescription drugs?)

Smoking joints isn’t medical (I agree: use a vaporizer or edibles)

But, but…people are getting high from it! (generally, no, but what if they are? It’s just a harmless side effect)

Perhaps I can’t solve all the world’s problems, but there’s one thing I know how to do and that is put ideas together. So I put together Canna Caps, added a cannabis strain that’s high in CBD, mixed with an irresistable predilection for alliteration and got Pot Painkiller Pills*.

Pot Painkiller Pills take a lot of objections out of the discussion. They’re safe, effective, inexpensive, provide a consistent dosage and predictable effects, are in a form that most people associate with “real medicine”, and will not get the average person high with a single dose. So, once you’re familiar with the effects, you might just be able to go about your day pain-free without having to worry about being too loopy to drive, work, or talk to people without giggling.

The Search For The Holy Green

The seeds of the idea for Pot Painkiller Pills were planted — no pun intended, I swear — when I first found out about the function of CBD, one of the primary components of cannabis. CBD works alongside THC, and at certain ratios provides pain relief far greater than even typical indica strains that are noted for this particular benefit.

I found two strains available in Northern California to experiment with. Omrita-RX3 had the highest CBD level I could find anywhere, and worked better than I expected: all pain simply disappeared, without any feeling of numbness. I heard about another high CBD strain called Harlequin that was also supposed to work wonders. The bad news was that there was none to be found anywhere; the good news is that a friend of mine was able to acquire some Harlequin clones and started growing them.

So, fast forward a few months and I finally got hold of 1/4 ounce of Harlequin fan leaves, which is about my favorite kind of stuff for edible products (especially because I’m heavily into recycling and a lot of people just throw this stuff away!). Harlequin leaves have high CBD levels even before flowering, in fact, so it’s ideal for this sort of thing.

Capsules Made Simple

And by now, I’ve developed an even easier method of preparing oil for use in Canna Caps than the one in my original article:

Grind the cannabis to coarse powder. I call this “small particle size”.

Put it at the bottom of the cooking vessel (I use a mini Crock-Pot).

Add enough liquid coconut oil to cover the cannabis.

to cover the cannabis. Heat at 180°F to 220°F for 2 or 3 hours, mixing and stirring every 15 to 20 minutes.

Let the mixture cool to about 100°F, then filter and load into #0 capsules (see the original article for details; I’m using the smaller-size capsules now).

The End Result

What you end up with — or at least, this is how it worked here — are single-dose capsules that will remove pain without getting you high. There is relatively little THC in these capsules due to the already low level in Harlequin.

Of course, everyone’s body chemistry, tolerance level, and pain level are different, so people who need more than one capsule for their pain might end up with enough THC to get them high. But these will be still and always safer than any of the addictive prescription opiates available…which generally get people high anyway!

And speaking of recycling…after I filtered the oil, I was left with an oily mass of ground cannabis and before throwing it away, wondered if there was any useful medicinal properties left in it. So I stuffed some into the larger #00 capsules and tried one. It turns out that even though I had extracted much of the active CBD, the larger #00 capsule size and the actual plant material combined to make this an “extra strength” capsule that’s essentially free! Take that, Tylenol!

For those who are interested in numbers, I started with the 7 grams of ground leaves and ended up with 30 ml. of infused oil, which yielded 44 capsules (#0 size). The recycled plant material gave me another dozen or so “extra-strength” #00 capsules. These didn’t exactly get me high, but I could feel them (and of course they were even better for pain). Pretty good results for an afternoon’s work.

Pot Painkiller Pills may not be the Holy Grail of medical marijuana, but they solve a lot of problems that many people have, without causing more.

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*I generally never use the word “pot” any more unless I’m being facetious or reminiscing about the 60s and 70s, but there you are.