I don’t smoke marijuana any more, but I do tend to vaporize cannabis on a daily basis for medicinal reasons. The problem is that even with this low-impact method of inhaling, I occasionally end up with an irritated throat, courtesy of numerous bouts of bronchitis and strep throat due to smoking schwag and Lebanese hash (cut with camel dung!) in the 1970s.

Another thing is that smoking and vaping are fine for recreational use when you only want to be high for an hour or two. I need my medicine all day and for enough of the night that I’ll stay asleep. Vaping every two hours quickly becomes a chore, and you can even forget to do it at the proper time (first world problems, eh?). Anyway, that’s why I often use edibles, generally in the form of Canna Caps, tincture, or some form of oil (cannabis cooking oil and cannabutter are the two most popular choices here). Edibles last much longer — up to 6 or 8 hours — and you are assured of getting more of the essential cannabinoids, because you’re swallowing them!

No Brownies, Thank You

When the average person hears “marijuana edibles”, they invariably think of brownies, solely because of the Peter Sellers movie “I Love You, Alice B. Toklas” which brought “pot brownies” into the national consciousness back in 1968 (I confess that I’ve never seen it). Good pot brownies are fun and tasty, but unfortunately the very nature of brownies makes them an inconsistent method of dosing. Online forums are full of stories where people ate only half a brownie and ended up tripping, or they ate four of them and nothing happened and they are mad because they wasted their precious weed.

Pot brownies may sound exotic to the layman who has heard only of joints and bongs, but serious weedists are creative, and once you realize that almost anything can be cooked with either oil or butter, the sky’s the limit. Most good dispensaries sell cannabis-infused coffee cakes, caramels, cookies, chocolates, and I’ve even seen pretzels, pizza, and ice cream!

The secret to success with edibles is simple, at least in theory. If you mix a known quantity of the same strength, strain and batch of cannabis into another known quantity of high-fat oil and heat it to a known temperature for a certain time, you’ll extract the cannabinoids into the oil. Then you can throw away the plant matter (since eating it causes gastric upset in many people), and eat a known quantity of that oil, and it will work the same way on you every time. This is why I prefer Canna Caps for the most consistent effects, rather than something measured in “slices”.

In the real world, there are different strains grown by different growers for different amounts of time and cured in different ways, and then you might prepare it a little differently too, because we’re all humans and not robots. But even with all that possible variation…cannabis is still generally safer medicine than a great many of the pharmaceuticals you buy with FDA approval! Your goal in making your own edibles is to keep as many of those variables as consistent as you can, so you can predict the effects. That way, you’ll have a better chance of getting the results you want.