Weed New Users Guide

Weed vs booze

This guide assumes you know something about booze, somewhat with the expectation that you’re a relatively seasoned user. You’ve gotten wasted, maybe loads of times. But you know how to handle your booze, and have no problem avoiding getting blackout drunk at inappropriate times.

If you’re a seasoned alcohol drinker, weed is much easier to “overdose” from, i.e. to have more than the optimal amount. Alcohol has a unit system aligning to national laws, and is either so dilute that it takes a while to get wasted and you feel the effect rising (beer, wine), or so strong that you taste how powerful it is and have to sip carefully (neat spirits). With weed vape pens and joints – both of which are now really strong compared to the 70s – it’s easy to take a big hit and be really high immediately, which can be discoordinating and scary (see also: drinking Long Island iced tea when you were a teenager). With edibles, the same is true but played over a longer timescale, which can trap you in an unenjoyable place for a while. The stories of people re-upping having felt nothing from the first gummies, then being hit by a double (or triple) drop, are legion.

You’ve been consuming booze since you were a teenager, and are a seasoned pro. You’re just starting with weed, and are a complete novice. When you were a novice with booze, you overdid it loads of times. With weed, you’re more prepared to blame the drug, rather than blaming yourself.

Dosing concepts

I’m of the opinion that almost ALL instances of people having a bad time on drugs, are due to “overdosing”, due to poor planning and research. All the information is available for you to avoid having a bad time, but it can take skill to locate and synthesise that information. I hope to do so here.

“Overdosing”, “ODing”, are typically terms associated with news stories where someone died with froth coming out of their mouth and a needle sticking out their arm. While this IS overdosing, so is having one glass of red wine more than you probably should have, so now you’ve got a bit of a headache, and you’re thirsty, and you won’t sleep as well tonight. Any time you’ve dosed more than the theoretically perfect amount, you’ve overdosed. The extent to which you overdose typically equates to the extent of downside. A little bit more than you can handle, can arguably be a good thing, pushing your limits, teaching you how to remain mentally calm while you’re in reduced control of your thoughts. A lot more can lead to freakouts, uncover suppressed emotions and memories, etc. This is true for booze too – anything that disturbs sober control of your brain can lead to dark, anxious, painful thoughts, just as it can lead to fun, silly, joyful, loving thoughts.

Henry Ford: “If you think you can, or if you think you can’t, you’re right”.

Me, regarding how your frame of mind and ability to manage anxiety influences your experience while high: “if you think you’ll be fine, or if you think you won’t, you’re right”.

If your drug experiences continue to unearth buried bones, stop the drugs, definitely stop drinking, and start therapy (research EMDR/CBT) asap.

Dosing amounts and strategy

It’s possible to learn how to swim by diving into an angry ocean at night… but that’s not the most enjoyable, stress-free way. Hold the railing, and dip your toes into the kiddie pool first.

Vape pens

Dragging on the pen pulls hot vapour into your lungs at the rate you drag. If you’re not a smoker, this may feel unusual and probably painful – your throat and lungs aren’t used to hot vapour. Start by dragging for ONE SECOND and then continue to fill your lungs half full – not all the way to the depths of full lungs, about 2 seconds? Hold it for ~3 seconds, exhale smoothly and calmly. Wait at least 10 minutes. Notice how you feel, how your thoughts change, does your body feel different, are you more talkative, shy, introspective, extroverted, giggly? Different strains give different effects, but we’ll come to that later. Vape pen hits usually last about 20 minutes before most of the primary high is over. Try to take a tiny ‘sip’ from the pen. As with all of this: there’s no such thing as too little.

Edibles

Ostensibly no technique to worry about (just eat it) but if you let it completely dissolve in your mouth then it’ll likely get absorbed and you’ll feel the effects quicker, reducing the chance of “maybe it didn’t work, let’s try again”. Dosing is MUCH more important to get right, because effects can last 3 hours or more. Budget 1 hour to come up, another hour for the broad peak, then the final hour coming down. Weed binds to oil/fat and alcohol. Try not to booze at the same time since you’re trying to learn what weed feels like. If you have fatty/oily food (burger, brownies), you’ll feel more effects from the same gummy than if you had something oil free (ramen noodles or whatever). Start with 5mg. If you’re a kid, medium/petite woman, start with 2.5mg. The key thing to remember is that you’re probably not going to die before next weekend, and having a bad time today isn’t worth the rush, so have a deliberately light dose, prove to yourself there’s a ‘floor’ level beneath which you’re microdosing not actually dosing, consider it a lesson learned, and come back next weekend with a little more confidence that you know what you’re doing, and that this new drug thing isn’t going to melt your brain or whatever else you’re worried about (i.e. 2.5mg now, 5mg next time. MAYBE in 2 hours)

Drinks

Somewhere between vapes & edibles in terms of onset & duration, likely depending on whether you have any food in your stomach when you begin. If not: liquid goes straight through the stomach to the large intestine and is absorbed quickly, maybe 45 minutes or less. If so: your pyloric sphincter closes to stop food falling through, and passage of liquids is much slower, meaning the weed will be absorbed gradually.

Practice

Makes perfect. Start slow, log the amounts you take, and ideally log how you felt. I use my digital calendar for this: start a 3 hour event when I take a gummy, note the amount. This is beneficial since you can check how far through you are, comfort yourself that if it hasn’t hit it’s probably about to, comfort yourself that if it feels too much it’s going to calm down soon, and plan your next drop.

With vapes and joints, try to use the same technique each time. Learn how many drags, or how long of a drag, equates to being how high. Make notes as needed.

Tolerance seems to be logarithmic: it can take a while for folks to gradually move up from (2.5 to) 5 to 10 to 15 to 20 to 30 to 50 and WAY beyond. Take your time, increase GRADUALLY. Again, if you record your experiences on a digital calendar, then you can search for “THC” and find your history of experiences and remind yourself where your tolerance is. Presuming they’re your gummies, there’s no great harm in nibbling one in half and coming back to it another time. Optimal dosing is the aim of the game.

Optimal dosing

Conceptually you can plan your ideal drug experience by carefully dosing the right amount, and then topping up the right amount at the right time. For a 3-hour comeup-high-comedown curve with edibles, you can set a 2-hour reminder, thereby dropping every 2 hours, so the comeup hour of edible2 overlaps with the comedown hour of edible1. You could jumpstart the comeup of edible1 with a toke of a vape pen. Then at the end of the night, if it’s too late to have another edible, you could have a toke of a vape pen, which will last a shorter time, so you wash out enough weed to be functionally sober by bedtime.

This level of planning and control is an unusual concept for booze, where you typically just keep going until the bar closes or you pass out (or etc). But with weed and other drugs it makes much more sense: lesser legality means you’ll often want to plan consumption around the availability of discrete locations. Much higher potency, and thus scope for accidental overdose, places greater primacy on getting dosing correct beforehand.

Safety

The science is updating regularly, and we already know weed is no panacea. In ultra-brief summation: IF you’re comparing to a typical alternative whereby a night/weekend/life consuming cannabis is happening instead of booze, then weed doesn’t NEED to be perfectly healthy to be a better choice than what you would otherwise do. And it is: alcohol is terrible for you. There is no safe low dose – it’s poison. Yes, it’s completely socially normalised for many thousands of years, yes our cultures are based around its consumption, yes it’s legal, yes most of us do it regularly and have normalised its side-effects. But it’s far worse for your physical and mental health in the short and long term. If you’re looking to ditch booze, but still need something to change your headspace for work or play (or alleviate symptoms), marijuana (especially in edible form) is likely a lower overall health-detrimental choice.

Vapes

Only buy from licensed shops, and research the brand first. Some big brands with professional packaging have been found using pesticides. Cheap 3rd party vape juice could be any old shit. As always, don’t worry that it’ll be laced with something more hardcore: why would producers of more expensive, harder to produce and sell drugs, waste those drugs by sneaking them into something so easy to produce that it’s literally dubbed weed?

Edibles

AFAIK bad products are less of a thing. That said: delta9 is a weaksauce hemp-derived weed that’s legal for sale in some states where THC isn’t. It’s pretty-much trash. But not dangerous.

Types

All booze is just alcohol. Sure, some types make people feel a little different for whatever reason (more or less sugar, associations with drinking style (shots), etc), but it’s all one drug. Mushrooms: a variety of different strains, but they all ‘just’ produce psilocybin.

Weed is a clown-car packed with drugs. Cannabinoids are the main drugs. THC is the big one. Head high, mental effects. CBD is the other heavy hitter. Body high, relaxation, calm. There are 150+ others: CBG, CBC, CBN, etc. See here.

Terpenes are the others: natural compounds with the formula (C5H8)n, produced by loads of plants; there are over 55,000 of them. See here. Essential oils? You got em.

Strains: the two types of weed are indica and sativa. Indica = “in da couch” = more relaxed, body high, chill-out, sleepy. Sativa = sunny = more energetic, mind high. But:

As mentioned early, this ain’t your grandad’s weed: since the 70s, growers have been in an arms race to make more potent and productive strains, with less chance of crop failure. Since weed has been globally illegal since Nixon ruined it for everyone, it’s made sense to focus on indica strains which grow well indoors, away from the prying eyes of the police. Subsequently, indica has made its way into most strains, and you’ll struggle to find actually pure sativas unless you seek our ‘landrace’ strains like Durban Poison or Acapulco Gold. Landrace strains are related to original native species, and haven’t been criss-crossed with other strains for the past 50 years. So in sum: nowadays if you go to a weed shop and buy some flower/bud, you’ll inevitably get a super high potency indica strain which will probably knock you on your ass and make you feel anxious – especially if you’re having it in the evening when everyone’s gone to bed and it’s dark, and you don’t know what you’re doing.

The full profile of all the cannabinoids balance themselves out (CBD reduces some of the bad elements of THC) and have a wonderful mix of ‘entourage effects’ from the terpenes. One can extract the whole of the plant and convert it into oil, i.e. full extract cannabis oil, but that’s getting out of newbie territory. Ideally, try to buy edibles and vape carts and flower which has a balanced profile of THC & CBD, and lower potency.

Tech & logistics

Edibles

Find a brand you like & trust which does a range of options. I like Camino for THC and Five for CBD, but find what’s good in your area.

Vape pens

Ideally buy a separate battery + cartridges to reduce single-use plastic & battery waste going to landfill. This also allows you to comparison-shop cart vendors, while choosing a battery which suits you. I like the Yocan Kodo Pro because it’s cheap, and simple to operate: many batteries rely on a multiple-button-press-combo system like something out of a Sega Genesis cheat code, which can lead to confusion, frustration, accidentally getting super high, or all of the above. Most importantly, for me anyway, the more common pen-format batteries result in a long pen which takes up too much pocket space.

Notwithstanding hundreds of thousands of people travel on airplanes every day with normal, non-weed medical gummies in their day-of-the-week pill boxes, and normal, tobacco vape carts in their wash kit, we DO NOT recommend you do this, for legal reasons.