For many people who use medical marijuana, edibles can be a great way to
relieve pain, appetite loss or nausea. Yet determining how to properly use edibles can be difficult for new users. Edibles are potent and
take time to start working, which can easily lead to an incorrect over dosage
of cannabis. Fortunately, consuming edibles correctly is possible when
the following tips are considered.
Understand Potency
When consuming cannabis in food, the body metabolizes it over a period
of time, resulting in a stronger effect than smoking. Additionally, the
cannabis used in edibles is often stronger. This means that a single
brownie or cookie with cannabis in it can potentially equal two or more doses of
medical marijuana in other forms.
To further complicate matters, most people don’t know the proper dose of
edibles for their body, so some experimentation is needed. The easiest
method is to ingest a small amount of an edible after a meal, and then
wait up to two hours before eating more.
Symptoms
that someone has over-ingested cannabis can include a fast heart rate,
red eyes, dry mouth, labored breathing, anxiety, or paranoia.
Know How Long To Wait
Eating marijuana is a different experience than smoking or vaporizing
the product. Smoking is a much faster way to feel the effects of the cannabis,
making it easier to control the dosage. When a person eats cannabis, it
can be hard to tell when he or she has reached the correct dosage,
because the effects take longer to appear.
The reason for the delayed reaction is the time it takes the liver to process the cannabis within
the edible. This means that someone with a
fast metabolism will feel the effects sooner than someone with a slow
metabolism. For those in the latter category, it can take two or more
hours to feel the effects, while those with a fast metabolism might only
need one hour to notice the presence of the medication. To be safe, a patient should wait at least
two hours before adjusting dosage.
Read Labels Carefully
Edibles are not yet subject to FDA rules, as marijuana is still
federally illegal. Therefore, labels on cannabis products are not
consistent. In fact, a study by Johns Hopkins showed that 75% of
edibles were
mislabeled
regarding the amount of THC in them. It’s up to the people ingesting
edibles to carefully read the label of each product to find out the
correct dosage, as potency can vary widely, and a single cookie may
contain multiple doses. Of course, not all companies that sell edibles
use labels, so it helps to specifically look for the ones that do to
avoid an incorrect dosage and still consume less of the product rather than more.
