So there are these cannabinoid receptor thingies in your brain, and when you smoke enough, they get clogged or tired out (conceptually, anyway) and you start developing a tolerance.

Now here’s the interesting part.

Before I started using MMJ, I had an almost constant “fogginess” in my head (there’s really not much of a better way to describe it). After much experimentation, which has been covered here, I found that a small amount of Sour Diesel several times a day would keep this fogginess away and help my concentration, mood, depression, blood pressure, and a few other things.

However, after about five weeks of this treatment, I noticed an odd effect. Sour Diesel wasn’t working properly any more. In fact, I was getting the old “fogginess” back after using it, which had never happened before (and yes, it’s the same batch). So I tried a few other strains. Lo and behold, almost any other strain I tried seemed to banish the fog (although they weren’t all equally good at the other problems).

By now, pretty much everyone who’s tried multiple strains of marijuana know that they have different effects (imagine if different brands of beer or liquor had wildly different effects!). So here’s my theory: the different strains have different cannabinoids, which affect different receptors, which cause different effects. And if one strain, used repeatedly, causes its receptors to shut down due to tolerance effects, that explains why switching to a different strain allows your body to respond again.

But wait, there’s more.

Since the “fog” created by using the tolerance-bound strain (for lack of a better term) seems to be similar to the “fog” of depression, doesn’t it make sense that one of the aspects of depression (if not the cause!) is that brain chemistry is also overloading receptors somewhere? That’s perhaps the difference between true depression and the “Wow, man, I’m so depressed, we had a pop quiz at school today” stuff. Only true depression goes on long enough that your body is going to build up a tolerance to these chemicals (whatever they are), and the tolerance itself, or the overloaded receptors, is the true direct cause of the fogged feeling.

More research is clearly needed here, and of course I don’t pretend to be a neurochemistry expert, even on the web, but if this gives some insight to one of those folks…that’s why I wrote this.