Cannabis, used as a medicine, is unlike most other medicines. Not just because it can help people with so many different conditions, not just because a bunch of ignorant or corrupt politicians have been insanely suppressing it for 75 years, but because it’s absolutely necessary for the patient to take an active role in his or her treatment.

Cannabis can help your body, sure, but it also affects your mind. It’s important that you are very aware of how you’re feeling and thinking, because when your dose of cannabis affects you, you’ll want to be able to judge the effects as objectively as possible. This will let you adjust your next dose more accurately.

Medical marijuana is not a pill that you can just take and it always works the same way, either. There are so many factors involved — from the strain itself to the way it was dried,  cured, and consumed — that it’s more accurate to say there’s no such thing as marijuana. That is, there’s no one single “marijuana” that always works the same way on everybody, because there are an infinite number of combinations of all these factors, and so an uncountable number of ways any particular random “marijuana” can affect any particular person.

So a wise (and cautious!) patient will not hear that “marijuana is good for my condition”, then run out, buy “some marijuana”, smoke a joint or two, and then decide whether or not to continue treatment based on the results of that single instance. It doesn’t work that way, just as taking a single pill from a pharmacy bottle generally won’t cure your problem.

You Can’t Just Take It Without Thinking

If you’re (relatively) lucky enough to have a brief and minor illness, possibly all you need is a single treatment of antibiotics, which lasts for 10 days or so. If you have a long-term or chronic condition (no pun intended), you may be on whatever medicine your doctor prescribes for the rest of your life.

Your use of medicinal cannabis could fall into either of these categories, or both. You might take some high-CBD cannabis for a pain that lasts a few hours or a few days, with no side effects or danger to your liver, and without getting high. If you’re suffering from depression or “brain fog” whatever the cause, you might need a sativa cannabis strain with more THC. If you had problems with anxiety, panic attacks, or high blood pressure, you’d probably need an indica strain instead. You could decide to take these when you feel you needed them, or take them all the time as a preventative measure (generally at a lower dose).

But here’s the problem. These last three are all totally different plants. Should you wait for breeders to come up with the perfect strain of marijuana that will solve all your problems? You’d be waiting a long time, because nobody knows more about how you feel than you do, and besides…by then, you could change!

So the most logical, useful, and reliable method is to get access to a number of different strains that have different effects, and then simply mix and match them to get the exact effects you need.

Ended: The Eternal Search For The Perfect Strain

This is one of my favorite tricks to get custom effects. I’m a medical patient in a medical state, and I know exactly what resources I have available. Instead of an eternal search for the “perfect strain”, I find myself two or three strains that I know the effects of well, and use them separately, or mix them as needed.

Lately, my breathing has been bothering me a bit and I haven’t even been vaping, so I’m using my Canna Caps (now available in three strains! :-). But it works on the same principle if you’re smoking or vaping, although you’ll want to grind and mix the strains together in your desired proportions before lighting up. Don’t try to take one toke from Strain A and two from Strain B…trust me, that won’t work!

So when I’m under emotional stress, I’ll take two to four indica capsules (Purple Kush). And even though two of these particular capsules get me to a [3] under normal circumstances, taking four on serious occasions won’t do any more than that. If I’m freaked out enough (family can do that to you :-), the stress almost literally burns up the THC and I don’t feel any high whatsoever.

I also have Harlequin caps for occasional pain, and Odyssey (sativa) for normal workdays. Lately my daily ritual has been one sativa and one indica capsule with morning coffee (replacing my usual two MFLB hits of Sour Diesel); this gets me to about [2.5] every time and I don’t even consider that “high”. It just helps me manage my demons or brain chemistry or whatever so I can work. I work out of my house, but I’d feel totally comfortable driving to an office job at [2.5].