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April 20, 2023 5:59 AM   Subscribe

Cannabis scientist Dr. Amber Wise answers Twitter's questions about cannabis in a seasonally-relevant video for WIRED.

posted by uncleozzy (25 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
Watched this yesterday and thought she did a very measured job. The question about sleep is accurate for me.
posted by terrapin at 6:29 AM on April 20, 2023 [1 favorite]


Weed science is where it's at!

I'm what I call a "rec-dicinal" user. Strong edibles for sleep, a nice toasty 1:1 buzz via joints or my two bongs for anxiety and depression. (The bongs are a black ceramic pig I call Waddles; the other is a very millennial style bong with frosted glass and rose gold bottom, I call her Madisynn). I am particularly fond of doing housework while stoned; it makes it more entertaining. A couple of tokes and let me at that overspilling laundry basket, bay-bee.

Cannabis only becamer part of my life with Canada's legalization in 2018. (I wasn't a citizen yet and you're damn right I wasn't going to risk my immigrant status by doing something dumb like buying weed.) I won a scholarship in early 2020 to become a certified cannabis educator and coach. So I really did have to learn about cannabis properly and for real, and I love that one of the things I have access to is CannaKeys, a growing database about real cannabis research.

Now time to wake and bake. Keep on truckin'!
posted by Kitteh at 7:27 AM on April 20, 2023 [7 favorites]


As a middle-aged person, I'm maybe a little too upset that I have important work to do today and need to be responsible and can't enjoy 4/20 properly, all day. And it's an obnoxiously beautiful spring day here, too. SIGH.

Dr. Wise is great, the videos are succinct and thoughtful.
posted by LooseFilter at 7:34 AM on April 20, 2023 [1 favorite]


Yeah, I'm working today too, the kind of work that I know (from accidental experience) I can't do buzzed, let alone stoned. The cannabis hyperfocus gets me down internal rabbit holes too deeply to juggle tasks.

I am particularly fond of doing housework while stoned

Which leads to this! The hyperfocus rabbit-holing is great for housework, for me. It's done before I realize I've started.

Will I vape a bowl later, though? Yes! But probably a small one.
posted by uncleozzy at 10:27 AM on April 20, 2023 [1 favorite]


My head is spinning! She said so many things I didn’t know, I don’t know what to say.

And to think I almost skipped the links . . .
posted by jamjam at 10:33 AM on April 20, 2023


I went on a trip to Denver a few years ago and giggled at all the billboards advertising that they'll bring you snacks and cleaning supplies 24/7.

Get high, clean your space, then forget about when you wake up the next day is totally a thing.
posted by VTX at 11:00 AM on April 20, 2023


I totally forgot the date, even though I set some seeds to soaking this morning.
posted by MtDewd at 11:23 AM on April 20, 2023


OMG she's totally stoned in the video!!
posted by sid at 1:11 PM on April 20, 2023 [1 favorite]


The part about why edibles hit different is interesting. One time I ate an absurd amount of an edible, like, waaaay too much. I was lost, and completely out of it. Two Guinness brought be back from feeling like I was dying and unable to talk, to actually being able to speak again. I actually said, “guys, holy shit, I’m back.”

Since then, a couple Guinness or beers if I accidentally have had too much edibles has been my go to.

Kitteh, curious if your research link has anything about exercise and cannabis.
posted by glaucon at 1:22 PM on April 20, 2023


Today is the first 4/20 since 2014 that I haven't partoke (if you will), because I got top surgery today! But in honour of the day I somehow managed to wake up in recovery at bang on 4.20pm.

I suspect my anesthetist of being a pothead; after asking if I'd smoked within the last week and me mentioning I had on Monday night before we flew out on Tuesday, he then said 'do you have some here? were you smoking in the room? can I have some?'. Which, no, but also lol. Definitely the single best response I've ever had to that particular disclosure from a medical professional.

Very much looking forward to getting home in a couple of weeks and vaping again, but I had surgery overseas and have to stay here for a fortnight for post-op followups. A wee puff would have been just the ticket when I was in the post-anaesthesia hurling hole earlier.
posted by terretu at 1:37 PM on April 20, 2023 [12 favorites]


because I got top surgery today!

CONGRATULATIONS!! I hope it went well and that recovery is as easy and uneventful as possible.
posted by LooseFilter at 1:51 PM on April 20, 2023 [8 favorites]


Interesting that she says cannabis is not psychedelic, because I’ve taken LSD almost as often as I’ve smoked, and never hallucinated on LSD, but have had a number of vivid hallucinations on pot.

I’ll never forget the time my black leather briefcase sitting on the couch suddenly turned into a snarling black panther, although it was a little deflating when my first thought was ‘you’ve seen cats and pictures of cats in their hundreds and thousands, and this is the best you can do?', because it was a pretty crude representation.
posted by jamjam at 2:18 PM on April 20, 2023 [1 favorite]


This was really educational!

I have been trying to get into weed after avoiding it most of my life. The biggest problem for me is the munchies. I feel like I literally cannot control eating! The only thing that seems to help is using less, which, I am already using pretty small amounts. Suggestions??

I also feel like given the wide availability of high potency weed we should speak with more frequency about cannabis hyperemesis syndrome - I had a patient with burns all over his back from his lengthy hot showers which is classically the only thing that receives the symptoms of this debilitating and increasingly common condition. I also think there is pretty clearly a link with worsening anxiety (or rarely, psychosis) for some frequent users. (Both of these effects seem to only be an issue for very frequent users)
posted by latkes at 2:24 PM on April 20, 2023


I am in menopause and it's awful.

Cannabis is something I was quite snotty about all my life. (Oh, you stoners, still on the couch in your mum's basement, smoking weed, watching anime, and playing video games. Wasting your life!)

Menopause.

Without cannabis, I seriously think I would have committed suicide. I already have depression, then menopause and Covid landed at the same time, now it's 2023 and fascism's back, the New Gilded Age is making us peasants... Collapse has started.

I'm a daily user now, and I am not ashamed.

I also take back everything I said about video games and anime. Whatever you need to find some comfort and joy. Got a Steam account, an anime collection, and I'm a daily user. My younger brother must find it hilarious.
posted by Savannah at 2:57 PM on April 20, 2023 [6 favorites]


Despite listening for decades to the most drug-addled music ever recorded, I am utterly ignorant about the noble weed. My wife suffers from clinical depression that is barely sanded off by SSRIs. She tried smoking a sample a few years ago but it did nothing. I think edibles might be more her speed. Maybe I should pursue this in AskMeFi but does anyone have any experience with using edibles for depression, did it work, and what strains/strength did you find most effective?
posted by Ber at 3:19 PM on April 20, 2023


I used to luv the stuff. Now that I'm getting older, I'm starting to get allergic to it. It's ironic because now it's legal and inexpensive where I live.
posted by ovvl at 4:04 PM on April 20, 2023


This thread got me looking into the best ways to make cannabutter or cannaoil. I found the Instant Pot method to decarboxylate the flower then infuse the chosen fat.* But OH MY GOD there's a bunch of wacked-out weedheads making some seriously half-assed, disjointed (sorry), and flat-out annoying posts and videos on the subject!

So for interested Instant Pot owners, here's a non-baked TL;DW (full disclosure: I have not tried this yet, this is just the essence of what I found online. I'll probably try it this weekend, but in the meantime y'on yer own, no deposit/no return):

1 Put the desired amount of hand-crumbled cannabis flower in a Mason jar. No point in grinding it to powder, that's overkill; just split up the buds a bit...the finer it is, the harder it'll be to strain it out later.

2. Screw on the lid barely finger-tight - you want to keep out the pressurized steam, but you don't want to tighten the lid so much that it's dadgum impossible to remove later.

3. Put the canning tray (or in a pinch, a folded towel) in the bottom of the Instant Pot to keep the jar off the bottom (THIS APPEARS TO BE IMPORTANT). Set the lightly-sealed jar on the tray/towel.

4. Pour enough water into the pot to just cover the flower in the Mason jar, or at least the minimum level required for the Instant Pot model. You don't want the jar floating, but the water needs to be below the level of the lid.

5. Close the Instant Pot, select Pressure Cook, choose the "High" setting (har de har), turn off "Keep Warm", and set the timer to 40 minutes. This is the "decarboxylation" part of the process - lots of explanations online of why that's necessary. The trick is that the water at full pressure gets up to 240°F/115°C (or so they say) which is the right temp for extracting THC.

6. Toward the end of that 40 minute period, melt the butter/ghee/coconut oil...if you're using something like olive oil, no melting needed of course. I couldn't get a good bead on a specific ratio, but most people seem to be using just enough liquid fat to cover the decarbed plant material.

7. Once the Instant Pot beeps that the high-pressure process is done, manually release the pressure - CAREFULLY! - then open the lid.

8. You may want to let the jar cool down before handling, but however you do it, use an oven mitt or similar to remove the jar from the Instant Pot. Unscrew the lid and pour in just enough liquid fat to cover the decarbed plant material, then replace the lid (again, loosely/no more than finger-tight) and give it a couple of swirl-shakes for good luck.

9. Put the jar back in the Instant Pot. You may need to add a bit more water to just cover the plant+fat level in the jar. Close the Instant Pot lid and set it to high-pressure cook (again turning off "Keep Warm") for another 30-40 minutes. This step infuses the fat with the THC in the plant material. This time let the pressure release naturally at the end.

10. Once the pressure has reduce enough that you can open the Instant Pot lid, open it and remove the jar (IT'S STILL HOT! Use care!).

11. Ideally using something like a layer or two of cheesecloth with maybe a strainer underneath for support, strain the still-liquid (and still hot!) fat into a clean airtight container, pressing the plant material with a spatula to get as much fat out of it as possible. You can even gather up the corners of the cheesecloth and twist it into a little ball, maybe even squeezing it to get yet more fat out if you're feeling industrious and thrifty.

12. Cover the container and pop it into the fridge for use in your desired edible recipe.


* Incidentally, "The Chosen Fat" is my street name.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:03 PM on April 20, 2023 [7 favorites]


11. Ideally using something like a layer or two of cheesecloth with maybe a strainer underneath for support, strain the still-liquid (and still hot!) fat into a clean airtight container, pressing the plant material with a spatula to get as much fat out of it as possible. You can even gather up the corners of the cheesecloth and twist it into a little ball, maybe even squeezing it to get yet more fat out if you're feeling industrious and thrifty.

Do you think using an Aeropress instead of cheesecloth and a strainer would be more efficient in terms of getting the last drops of fat, Greg_Ace?

I don’t own one, so I can’t be sure there isn’t some wrinkle that would foil that approach.

You could even use an Aeropress stainless steel filter to obviate any possibility of absorption.
posted by jamjam at 1:11 AM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]


In the Spring of 1976 I was 11 and tried cannabis the first time and got a terrible headache and then, even though most of my friends have used cannabis all these decades since, it wasn't until last October that I tried it again. I've pretty much been using it every day since — edibles, vapes, and tinctures — and I actually watched this video earlier today, hoping to learn something I didn't know. Which I mostly didn't, given that I've always been pretty knowledgeable about recreational drugs even though I didn't use them.

What I was hoping to learn is why does cannabis not do anything to me beyond mildly relaxing me and degrading my short-term memory? It's not dosage — after going slow the first week because I'd heard all those stories of novices taking way too much, by the second week I was taking like 60mg of THC a day in edibles, plus vaping. Maybe four times or so I've been a bit lightheaded, but I've otherwise not experienced anything like what I was expecting after having been around very high people all my life. I don't find things funnier, for example. I should mention that opioids and alprazolam don't affect me much, either, right up until they affect me a lot, which I don't like.

Even the relaxation is much more subtle than I expected, though I like it quite a bit because I think I'm pretty stressed and tense most of the time. The first couple of nights I slept really well — six or more hours straight through, whereas I normally wake up every hour or so. But after a few days it reverted to my norm. My sleeping is extremely irregular and I spend far more time in REM than is normal — so I think maybe cannabis is helping me that way. (I'm using a tincture of 20:1 CBD to THC along with the edible and vape THC.)

The bad and unexpected thing is that if I stop taking cannabis, I get almost immediately nauseated. I had thought there were no withdrawal symptoms from cannabis, but apparently about half of heavy users do report some. I also find that it makes me less motivated which, to be frank, is impressive.

It's far too expensive for me to get this little benefit, but I do feel like I'm more relaxed.

Overall, though, I'm just really surprised at how subtle the effects are for me. Is this unusual?
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:51 AM on April 21, 2023


I'm just really surprised at how subtle the effects are for me.

It may be slow metabolization if edibles? I've long noticed that any drugs take longer than indicated to have effect on me (prescription meds, anything), and edibles of any kind (even tinctures) take at least two hours to really have any noticeable effect, and then it's kind of spread out over several hours so never really too intense. My experience is that people have a wide variety of sensitivity to cannabis generally, and some will develop tolerance with regular use, some won't. Given that the chemicals in cannabis are generally acting on "cannabinoid" (CB1) receptors in the brain (rather than altering or hijacking brain chemistry in some way), I expect there is the same variety of sensitivity to cannabis that is found in human neurochemistry generally (i.e., the need for reuptake inhibitors and such).

For sleep, see if you can find CBN & THC instead of CBD & THC--I find that CBD, while an effective anxiolytic, actually disrupts sleep through the night.
posted by LooseFilter at 6:59 AM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]


Since the products are becoming more widely available, things like live resin and distilled products get decarbed as part of that process.

So all you need to make edibles with those is to heat your fat and heat the oil to they're liquid enough to mix together and then mix them together real good so the fat binds to the THC, CBDs and all that good stuff and then you're done!

You're probably going to lose the terpene profile either in the process or just lost among the other flavors so there shouldn't be a good reason to pay big bucks for the fancy stuff.
posted by VTX at 7:09 AM on April 21, 2023


Given that the chemicals in cannabis are generally acting on "cannabinoid" (CB1) receptors in the brain (rather than altering or hijacking brain chemistry in some way)

Not sure what other mechanisms of altering or hijacking brain chemistry you’re imagining - pretty much all psychoactive drugs act on receptors that also bind some endogenous molecule. But yeah baseline tolerance to anything can vary a lot.
posted by atoxyl at 8:27 AM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]


Interesting that she says cannabis is not psychedelic, because I’ve taken LSD almost as often as I’ve smoked, and never hallucinated on LSD, but have had a number of vivid hallucinations on pot.

I have mild auditory hallucinations when I'm stoned pretty much all the time, but I chalk them up to pattern-matching errors. There's always some white noise somewhere, and my brain is like ... is that Third Eye Blind? (It is rarely, if ever, Third Eye Blind.)
posted by uncleozzy at 8:30 AM on April 21, 2023 [3 favorites]


Do you think using an Aeropress instead of cheesecloth and a strainer would be more efficient in terms of getting the last drops of fat

I suspect that attempting to push oil or melted butter through a paper filter would be an exercise in frustration. A steel filter might work, but it still seems an awfully fussy method for a minimal return - plus, then you'd have to very carefully wash the Aeropress (unless you like greasy coffee...). Honestly I think just pouring it through cheesecloth then hand-squeezing out as much as you can would be enough.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:37 AM on April 21, 2023


The last time I made tincture (so, not budder, but similar enough) I strained it through an old t-shirt and twisted until the bud felt pretty dry. Worked great.
posted by uncleozzy at 8:44 AM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]


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