How to use it

Smoke it, eat it, vaporize it, cook it…you name it, there’s probably a way to take marijuana like that. Most people smoke it, which releases about 400 components into your body. Many of these components are known to cause cancer. Wait! We don’t want the cure to be worse than the disease! The experts that I’ve consulted all agree that a better alternative is vaporizing. It releases hundreds of medically useful components (not just THC, the most well-known ‘active ingredient’) , but avoids those elements associated with actual combustion of the plant matter. Vaporizers work by heating up fresh, green, ground marijuana until the active ingredients vaporize, leaving the herb dry and brown. The vapor is captured in a bag or routed from the vaporizer through a tube (a ‘whip’) and inhaled. The active ingredients are passed safely and comfortably to the bloodstream via the lungs.

I’m not going to focus on smoking much, because I believe that it’s bad for you. In fact, a lot of the ‘problems’ held up to justify keeping marijuana illegal are specifically related to the smoking behavior instead of the plant itself. I’ll focus on what I know — vaporization and occasionally edibles. Maybe later I’ll put in a chart with pros and cons of different methods.

So what equipment do I suggest? A bag-based vaporizer, an herb grinder and a small flat round brush. Below is a detailed view of what you’ll do with your vaporizer to medicate yourself. I use a Volcano, made by Storz & Bickel in Germany. It’s widely considered one of the best, but it’s a bit pricey. I was going to go with a much cheaper and vastly inferior version, but my wonderful wife pulled me around on the sidewalk and lectured me about this being about my health and how we were NOT going to cut corners when it came to my health, etc. God, I love that woman!

But returning to the subject at hand, know that other vaporizers will work quite well, although somewhat differently than I may present in this blog. The basics are the same. Just follow your vaporizer instructions carefully.

Note: You can easily say the wrong thing when you’re buying your vaporizer and other equipment. Because of the weirdness of the laws, officially NONE of the equipment is officially made for marijuana. I’ll write a blog entry on this and link it here later to explain further, but for now understand that when you’re buying equipment, do not refer in ANY way to pot. Say ‘flowers’. When you’re talking about kief (for example when buying a grinder that collects it), use the word ‘pollen’. I got thrown out of a head shop once just for asking if ‘that chamber is where the kief is collected’.

Once you have your equipment, you’re ready to go. The next step is fun, at least for me. I like the process of grinding up the herb and placing it just so in the bowl to prepare it. Take approximately .6-.8 of a gram of flowers (buds) and place them in your herb grinder. If you don’t have a scale, just put about 3 or 4 small (2 cm) buds in there. Be sure they don’t hang out over the edge of the grinder. Then smash the grinder closed with the buds inside and turn it first one way several times and then the other way several times. Bump it (still closed) on a table or something to help the ground bits fall away from the grinding teeth, and spin it a few more times both ways. Then open the grinder and carefully move the ground flowers into the filling chamber.

I also brush out the grinder carefully to get all the useful bits out and to ensure I don’t mix strains. Wouldn’t want a sleepy indica getting into my Jack Herer!

At this point you have ground the  fragrant flowers and put the ground material in the filling chamber. The next step is much more dependent on which vaporizer you have. The directions I’ve seen are generally pretty good, so you’ll be able to figure it out from there. For the Volcano, I put the filling chamber on top of the vaporizer main unit, which I have turned on and warmed to 190 degrees Celsius. Then I start the fan and let the hot air blow through the herb for about 2 seconds before I click the bag in place to collect the vapor. This extra pause helps you get less ‘plain’ air in the bag so that you have a good concentration of medical vapor. The vapor fills the bag quickly and I stop the fan and remove the bag and filling chamber when the bag is full.

As you use your vaporizer, you’ll develop your own short-cuts and techniques to make this work for you. This is about getting medicine into you, after all, and you want to learn to be as efficient as possible because you may be doing this in the middle of the night if your symptoms hit you. I can’t even describe how wonderful it is to kill violent nausea and cold sweats with a breath of marijuana vapor at 2 in the morning. But I digress..

Now it’s time to BREATHE. You can do it — you were born knowing how!  If you’re using a bag vape like me, you just follow the instructions to breath the vapor in. Some vapes may use a ‘whip’, or tube that allows you to draw the air through the ground marijuana and breathe it immediately rather than store it in a bag for a few minutes. Either way, when you breathe in, let the vapor sit in your lungs, as deep as is comfortable, for as long as is comfortable. The key is COMFORTABLE. Although this vapor is not going to hurt your lungs like smoke will, it may still irritate your lungs because it’s not just air. You might have felt had a similar effect when breathing steam to help clear a bad cold. In any case, don’t feel like you have to expand your lungs until it hurts, or hold until your eyes pop out. Be easeful, and enjoy the experience. Try to let the vapor out through your nose, slowly, so that you can begin to enjoy and experience the flavors and smells of the flowers. Marijuana is a strongly scented plant and each strain gives us a slightly different flavor.

The only remaining question, really, is about dosage. How much is right for you. As you inhale the vapor, it immediately goes to work and in my case would eliminate nausea in less than a minute. However, this effect only lasts 3-4 hours for me if I breathe 2-3 bags of vapor. There are stages to your reaction to pot. First is what most people call ‘buzzed’. You feel a slightly altered effect, very similar to what you’d feel after your first beer or two after a long hard week. With more marijuana you will proceed to the ‘high’ stage which frankly I think is misnamed. It’s not ‘high’ at all, but an overall feeling of relaxation and of course the absence of unpleasant symptoms. There isn’t, for me at least, any kind of energetic ‘high’ at all, just a peaceful, comfortable feeling that lasts for 3-4 hours.

Another note on timing. For the first 15 minutes after you inhale, the impact of the medicine on your body will increase slightly. Then you’ll have the strongest impact generally for about an hour or two, with a gradual falling off from there that generally leaves me at least feeling completely clear in about 4 hours from the original dosage. The interesting part about this formula is that 15 minutes. When you start using this plant, you may be nervous. Let me restate that you CANNOT overdose on marijuana. But you can still have an unpleasant experience if you approach it with fear. One way to allay this fear is to experiment slowly. Get in a comfortable, peaceful place, take a single breath of vapor, hold and exhale it comfortably and smoothly, then wait for 15 minutes. Now you know exactly what you’ll feel with one breath. If you’re comfortable, try another breath. Be mindful of the experience, paying attention to what’s happening in your body, and you will give yourself the best chance for the medicine to help you. I personally believe that a big part of the benefit of marijuana comes just from the relaxation effect. We’d be so much healthier if we could just spend some focused time breathing deeply and relaxing, yes? Well now you have a good excuse!

This article is living, so please check back occasionally for new info as I learn and others comment and boost our collective understanding. Thank you for reading this article, and thank you for visiting The Plant Rant. If you need more personal help, please contact me. I love to help!

-MindfulHal