Can You Smoke Like A Patient?

The Magic-Flight Launch Box, aka MFLB (click for larger)

In my travels across the planet and the Internet, I’ve run across any number of people who smoke marijuana regularly and get high, but are using cannabis for what are essential medical reasons. In other words: social anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, calming, chronic pain, depression, etc.

If you’re one of these people, I believe you have an excellent chance to get a lot more from your weed — by smoking less of it.

As I’ve discovered for myself since becoming a Medical Marijuana patient, many of these conditions simply don’t require you to actually get high to control them. You just smoke/vape/ingest as much as you need to take care of the problem, and in many or even most cases, you end up not getting high when you’re done.

“But, Old Hippie, I like to get high”, you might say.

Not a problem. My point is not that you shouldn’t ever get high, but that if you need your symptoms taken care of every day — especially several times a day — it can kind of wear you down getting high all those times. Not to mention that being high that much can affect your school or work performance, to say nothing of endangering you and others if you have to drive, or the fact that using so much weed generally costs some significant amount of money.

Challenge To The Recreational User

If you’re someone who uses marijuana to “take the edge off”, relax, calm down, or just feel better, you may actually be using it for medical reasons, whether you’re a “legal” Medical Marijuana patient or not.

In that case, why not try this: just ingest your cannabis the way you normally do, but do it one hit at a time,  trying not to go “one toke over the line”. Simply go slower, and stop when you feel better rather than aiming to get high.

Try this for just one week, and you will likely feel better, healthier, more in tune with yourself, and more productive.

So if you’ve got the idea in your head that “using cannabis = getting high”, and you’re really using cannabis for other reasons, think about using it differently!

P.S. One more advantage: despite ingesting multiple times a day every day, I still have the same tolerance (virtually none) as when I started on this journey almost two years ago!

http://BeyondChronic.com

Old Hippie is a father of two boys and thankfully living in California where all this kind of thing is legal. He started smoking marijuana in 1967 in high school, experimented with mind-expanding drugs of all kinds, and then straightened out 15 or so years later to become an airplane pilot. After being diagnosed with depression in 2000, he lost his job and most of the following decade to prescription medications (such as antidepressants) which sapped his energy and will. Finally, a chance conversation with a friend led to a doctor’s recommendation for medical marijuana (MMJ). This changed his entire life, health, and outlook for the better. BeyondChronic.com is his continuing story. It’s also his way to provide experienced advice on using medical marijuana effectively and responsibly, as well as advocacy, activism, and support for others. Old Hippie teaches about safe use of cannabis edibles, Canna Caps, vaporizers, dosing, and even microdosing.

8 comments

Very nice read, and I agree 100%. The calming effect of less weed is great. I got alot of stomach issues that goes away after I had my first volcano bag of the day and I don’t have to get another one before the evening. It helps alot! As a part of my next experiment, I’ll cut it out for a week and see how it goes.

You recommended this to me on reddit quite some time ago. I never got around to looking at it until now. I’m glad I did. Thanks!

It’s always a pleasure to read your posts. I remember reading this in a hazed stupor almost two years ago. Last year I started packing my MFLB trench to 1/4 capacity and began to enjoy feeling the buzz as opposed to being high. Quick question about using smaller doses though.

Imagine Person A and Person B.
They are the same height, weight, have the same body fat %, eat the same amount of the same kinds of food, everything about them is identical except for one thing. Person A smokes about an 1/8th in one week and person B smokes an 1/8th every six weeks. They both smoke every day, Person A just happens to smoke more than Person B. Now imagine they both stop smoking today.
Who do you think would pass a drug test sooner?

Ha, good question, and thanks for reading!

The amount of THC metabolites in your urine (which is what most “drug tests” actually measure) is dependent on how much THC is ingested and how quickly it’s metabolized, as well as how often it’s used. So normally, all other things being equal, someone who doesn’t smoke often would have the edge over a regular user, because a regular user keeps a constant level in their system.

The way you’ve written this, however, they’re both regular users, so that distinction is out. So the only variable left is the amount, in which case Person B, the microdoser, would logically get their system cleared first, simply because there’s far less to clear.

That makes sense.

Every study or survey I’ve come across so far that documents how soon metabolites clear out of a person’s system always separated users into groups based on how frequent an individual ingests cannabis. I’ve never come across a study that measured the volume of an individuals cannabis consumption. The variable of how *much* an individual ingests per use could be just as important as the variable of usage frequency.

Time to get scientific and buy some drug tests from Amazon when my first paycheck comes in.

Hugely enjoyed this post :), keep up the great authorship and
I’ll keep reading. Will be sharing this with my twitter followers and I’m sure
they’ll love it as well!

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