[5k] Cannabis and you! A newbie guide

Cannabis is a naturally occurring plant that developed a mechanism for itself to protect against the sun's harsh UV rays. The flowers of the plant (and to a lesser extent the leaves/stems) secrete a resin containing Tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. This resin forms into crystals on the surface which are called trichomes. Here's a super closeup of what trichomes look like:


This is why good quality cannabis buds will "sparkle" in the right light:

The cannabinoids in marijuana are lipids. This means they're fat-soluble (as opposed to water-soluble). Thus (if I understand it correctly) they can pass through the fatty-acid barrier that protects your brain and mess with your brain chemistry. The THC will snag onto receptors in your brain and alter the way they transfer information. This is especially common in the parts of the brain that control your short-term memory, your appetite, your mood/emotions, and your ability to fall asleep. I'm not a scientist, so apologies but if you want more in-depth information I'd suggest checking out wikipedia or one of the hundreds of documentaries made about cannabis.

Common effects of cannabis include (but are not limited to):
Positive Effects:

• Improved creativity - Cannabis often removes limiting preconceived notions we have. A (not great) example would be that we take for granted the way our eyes receive light, but when high you might imagine what it would be like if this were different, or perhaps simply ponder how it happens at all, etc. I'm not great at explaining this, but it allows your brain to freely wander and consider possibilities previously ignored.
  
• Increased appetite - You may have heard the word "munchies" thrown around a lot. Cannabis is well known for increasing appetite and reducing nausea (one of the main reasons it is used during chemotherapy is to combat the constant unbearable nausea so that patients can eat the food they need to regain their health)
  
• Increased awareness - This affects all forms of awareness. All 5 of your senses may seem enhanced or altered in subtle ways. You may notice colors and textures more in your vision and appreciate nature's beauty. You may really feel the taste of food more and your preferences for food may completely change while you are under the influence. You will most likely enjoy music to a degree not usually experienced while sober, and often cannabis helps you be able to listen to all parts in a song at once, rather than primarily focusing on one part (such as the singing, as most casual music-listeners do). Some surfaces/textures may feel pleasant to the touch. Sex is fucking amazing while high. One side effect of the increased awareness is that you may notice things you didn't notice before which can lead to minor paranoia. Perhaps you think people are looking at you, or you notice someone behind you while walking and think they are following you, etc. Usually once users get used to this side effect it no longer bothers or affects them.
  
• Improved ability to sleep - Many people enjoy using cannabis to help them sleep (especially indica varieties... I'll get into this later). Enough cannabis can sometimes make people fall asleep involuntarily (pass-out), though this is pretty rare, and usually requires large amounts.
  
• Improved mood/humor - Most people find they naturally feel happy and content when under the influence of marijuana, and it will often make certain things more funny than they may seem to be when sober. This can be purely due to the uplifting nature of cannabis, but can also be due to finding unlikely or unusual connections between things that you normally don't make the connection between while sober (this goes back to the increased creativity point).

Negative Effects: (depending on how you look at them)

• Inhibited short-term memory - Cannabis can really mess with your short-term memory temporarily while under the influence (and sometimes afterwards as well to a much lesser extent). This is the main reason why cannabis smokers seem "stupid" to sober onlookers. You may have some profound or intriguing thought process, but if you try to explain it or discuss it with someone else you may forget what you were talking about just moments ago. This may seem like a bad thing, but when under the influence this can help you forget about any worries or concerns you may have that have been stressing you out, and it can also really affect your sense of the flow of time. If you forget what has been going on for the past 5 minutes you may think the time simply flew by. I feel like I'm not explaining this in the best sense, but until you've tried it, it's hard to convey.
  
• Inhibited motor control - Cannabis can prevent you from having accurate, precise motor control and can overall produce a bit of a numbness across the body. This also affects how people seem to view cannabis smokers. If you get really high, you may have trouble accurately controlling your fingers (there's a joke made quite often about how passing a joint is like docking a space station in that it's extremely difficult and you have to put your full concentration into it if you're really fucked up), your tongue to speak clearly, etc.
  
• Reduced motivation/drive - Many people think cannabis makes people lazy. While we all probably know at least one burnout who smokes all the time and doesn't get anything done, this is not usually the case. Generally speaking, while under the influence you may feel a bit lazier than normal (and if you're really messed up you might want to just sit where you are for a while, staring into the distance pondering your reality...), but this highly depends on the person and the strain of cannabis itself. Many people actually find they love activity while high, such as riding a bike, cleaning the house, etc.

Side Effects:

• Dry Mouth/Eyes - For whatever reason (probably has something to do with pulling hot smoke through your system) cannabis can often make your mouth and eyes feel very dry. This is commonly referred to as cottonmouth. If you are going to experiment with cannabis for your first time, I would recommend having a nice drink (iced tea, lemonade, fruit juice, etc) ready, and if you really want to be comfortable, eye drops are fantastic.
  
• Red Eyes - This is partially caused by the above effect of dried out eyes, but also I am fairly certain something in the way cannabis affects you causes blood vessels in your eyes to fill up more than normal which causes the appearance of reddened eyes.
  
• Uncontrollable Giggling - This can be a side effect of a buffered mood and humor. Not a problem certainly, although if in the presence of sober people you may seem a bit silly.

First I feel some perspective on things needs to be added. Caffeine, alcohol, nicotine(tobacco), and over-the-counter medications are all drugs. The government might not label them as scheduled/dangerous drugs due to lobbyists/etc, but they are just as much drugs as cannabis is. Most are actually much more addictive and dangerous than cannabis. If you already use one or more of the drugs listed, yet you have a negative stigma towards cannabis due to it being labeled by the government as a dangerous drug, I'd advise you drop any negative attitude about cannabis, forget everything you learned about it in school, and research it on the internet with an open mind. It's a drug that has no physical addiction (though certainly has potential for psychological addiction just like video games and fast food do), no recorded deaths, ever (despite it being used for literally thousands of years), no physically possible overdose, and almost no negative long-term health effects (obviously inhaling smoke into your lungs of any kind is not good for you, but the negative effects are negligible when compared to tobacco. If you ingest or vaporize your cannabis you completely avoid any and all negative health risks).

I've gone over why you shouldn't be afraid of cannabis, but not really why you should actually use it. Personally I find cannabis to be an amazing relaxant. It helps me unwind after a long day of work, forget my worries, and really enjoy some good music+food. Almost all activities are somehow improved by cannabis in a way that is hard to convey until you have tried it. You will see things in a different light, understand concepts in a different way, and overall just have a great time.

However, be aware that people with a family history (or other predisposition) of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia or psychosis/etc may have some serious issues with cannabis. If you are one of these people I'd advise doing quite a bit of research before taking the risk.

First off you're going to want to grind up the buds. When you purchase quality cannabis you want solid "nugs" as opposed to loose "shake" at the bottom of the bag. You can either pick apart these buds with your fingers (not recommended, you'll get sticky fingers and you'll have large uneven pieces), use scissors, or use an actual herb grinder. If you start smoking on any sort of regular basis I would definitely recommend purchasing a grinder. They're not overly expensive, and the nice ones have a screen that catches the herb and allows fallen trichomes to drop into the bottom chamber of the grinder. This powdery collection of highly-concentrated cannabinoids is called "kief," and can be smoked/vaporized/cooked-with just like normal buds.

Once you've ground up your cannabis, you're going to need a method to get it into your body in a way that will "activate" the THC. You can't simply eat raw cannabis, as there's a process called decarboxylation (sp?) that needs to be done first. If I understand it correctly, heat removes the carbon from the trichomes and exposes the cannabinoids (such as THC) in an form that can be absorbed in your body. This is why you have to either smoke, vaporize, or cook your cannabis to get the effects from it.

The most popular ways to smoke cannabis are with papers (roll a joint or use a cigar's tobacco leaf to roll a blunt), with a pipe, or with a bong, which is essentially a complex pipe with water filtration.

Many cigarette smokers suck smoke into their mouths and then blow it out without actually inhaling into their lungs. If you've heard the rumor that "you don't get high your first time smoking cannabis," this is probably the reason. Most newbie smokers will not fully inhale the smoke (as it burns the first few times you do it), and unlike tobacco you won't get anything out of marijuana smoke being held in your mouth. Keep this in mind when reading the next segment on how to smoke out of a pipe/bong.

I won't get into how to roll joints as there are a million videos on youtube that can teach you. Personally I generally prefer a bong or pipe to papers as you just get the taste of the cannabis without any extra paper taste.

How to smoke from a pipe: Your standard pipe (or "bowl," which refers to the bowl shaped area you put your ground cannabis in to smoke) should look something like the one below:


The part on the bottom right of the pipe in the image is the mouthpiece. The large opening facing towards the camera near the top left of the image is the bowl of the pipe. Put your ground cannabis in this bowl (if you want you can put in a screen to prevent getting ash in your mouth). You don't want to pack it too tightly as you won't have good airflow, but you also don't want it to be too loose as some can either blow away in the wind or get sucked through into your mouth. The small hole on the left side of the pipe next to the bowl is called the carb (short for carburetor). When you smoke from the pipe you want to hold your thumb over the carb so that no air gets in through that hole. Put your mouth on the mouthpiece while holding the carb shut, start sucking in air (do this slowly or yet again you'll get ash in your mouth), and light some of the cannabis with your lighter (bic lighters are actually recommended here since zippos are hard to light bowls with as you can't turn them upside down, and matches are the biggest pain in the ass ever when using a pipe). Don't simply stick the flame all the way into the herb. Hold it a little above the bowl and the suction from inhaling should pull the flame down into the cannabis. For more advanced methods, see below for how to corner a bowl. As soon as you see the cannabis ignite (easiest in the dark, you can see it brightly glow red), stop using your lighter, as butane is not very healthy to inhale so you want to minimize this (also you don't want to needlessly ignite more than you have to). When you think you are about 3/4 of the way through your inhale, release your thumb off the carb. This will allow air into the pipe which does two things: it prevents as much air from getting sucked in through the bowl and thus helps let the embers burn out, and it also clears the pipe of smoke left in the chamber so you don't pass the pipe (or if you're alone let it sit) with smoke spewing out. If your pipe doesn't have a carb, it will take a bit more skill to use without wasting cannabis, but you basically have to light a small enough amount that it'll go out before you stop inhaling so you don't leave smoke in the pipe. After you inhale all the smoke, take your mouth off the pipe and keep inhaling air for another 2-3 seconds. This is to ensure all of the smoke gets into your lungs, as if you don't do this you'll end up holding a lot of smoke in your mouth and throat, which is not only unpleasant but also wasteful as none of that smoke will affect you. At this point you don't need to hold it in long. There is a common misconception that the longer you hold your smoke, the higher you'll get. This is true to a certain extent because you'll get high from oxygen deprivation, which is quite unhealthy. After about 2-3 seconds of holding smoke in your lungs you won't absorb any more THC anyways, and all you end up doing is absorbing more tar in your lungs and depriving your brain of oxygen. Needless to say, this is bad; don't do it. Look in the advanced techniques section below for how to properly corner a bowl (a great skill to have).

How to smoke from a bong: A bong is like a pipe that sucks the smoke through water to filter it and cool it down. Due to the amount of air you have to inhale to take a hit, bongs are great for beginners because they force you to inhale the smoke into your lungs instead of just sucking it into your mouth. Also, since the smoke will be smoother and cooler than through a pipe, it will be easier to take a larger hit than you may be used to due to it not burning your lungs as much. I'm not going to take the time to get into all the details of all the parts of a bong (though maybe I'll add that later if people request it), but basically instead of a connected bowl like with a pipe, you have what's called a slide, which is basically a bowl that can slide out of the downstem of the bong (the part that goes down into the water). This allows you to clear the chamber without the use of a carb (see above in how to smoke a pipe). Simply remove the slide from the bong once you are ready to clear the chamber and keep inhaling. Other than that, it's pretty much the same as smoking a pipe in terms of procedures.

Advanced Method: How to properly corner a bowl: This is a skill that will earn you respect with other smokers and will make for a much more pleasant smoking experience in my opinion. Many people will simply "torch the bowl" or put the lighter flame right in the bowl and light a lot of the cannabis at once, but generally your lungs can't absorb this much in a single inhale anyways, so you end up wasting a lot of weed and burning your lungs in the process. Instead, try to only light a small amount of the cannabis at a time. You want enough lit that you get a full hit of smoke, but think of it this way: if you light too much, you'll be wasting weed and it'll be hotter and less pleasant for your lungs. If you light too little, you end up having to take more hits to finish the bowl, which by comparison isn't a big deal. Thus I usually personally err on the side of less per hit and then just take more hits but smoke the same amount of cannabis (i.e. 1 bowl). So all I've really talked about here is why you should be cornering your bowls, rather than actually how to do it properly, so here's what you have to do:

-First off you want to be holding your lighter upside down. This is so that if wind hits the flame it won't blow over onto your thumb and burn you.
-Next, hold the lighter a little outside the edge of the bowl.
-Light the lighter and inhale. This is easier on a bong than on a pipe because you can really rip it hard (aka inhale quickly) and have a lot of suction to pull the flame in.
-The act of inhaling is going to pull a lot of air into the bowl, and thus the flame should get pulled in right around the edge or corner of the bowl.

This will allow you to light the bits of herb right on the edges as well as have a ton of control over exactly how much you end up igniting. Here is a diagram I sloppily made in paint to show you what I mean by having the lighter upside down and how the flame should get pulled into the bowl:


This technique of cornering is something I feel the majority of people either ignore or are unaware of, but it's incredibly useful for being as efficient as possible with your cannabis. Plus, when you're at a party, no one likes when you pass the bong and the last guy torched the whole bowl and you already have to repack. If you learn to corner accurately you'll be able to share more easily with friends and have longer smoke sessions per bowl while still getting just as high

This post has gotten pretty ridiculously long, so I'm going to try to wrap it up with some of my favorite things to do while high. Experiment! You may be surprised, but many activities can be made much more enjoyable through the responsible use of cannabis.

• Listen to music -- Any music you like will be even better while high, but certain types of music generally work better than others. Personally I like complex music with a lot of subtlety as when high you seem to be able to listen to all musical parts at once, which allows you to notice things you may not have ever noticed before (even on songs you may have listened to many times!). Classical music is fantastic. I love metal as well, though that may just be me. Obviously some classic trippy rock (how the fuck do I classify this?) can be cliché but always great, such as Pink Floyd.
  
• Eat good food -- It may be tempting while high to eat junk food, but really great meals are like orgasms in your mouth when you are high enough.
  
• Play games -- I love playing starcraft 2, league of legends, various n64 games, etc while high. It changes the way you think. Don't expect to be overly skilled, however. Especially on your first few times getting high you will most likely be abysmal at games you are used to being skilled at, but generally you don't care that you are losing and you end up having a fantastic and fun time regardless.
  
• Outdoor activities -- Things like riding a bike, going canoeing on a lake, or going hiking can be great fun when high. There's something about cannabis that really makes you appreciate nature in all its glory, so I definitely recommend trying your favorite outdoor activity while under the influence.
  
• Drinking -- Don't overdo this. If you drink too much and get high as well, you will likely vomit. However, if you can keep yourself under control, the overall body buzz you get from the combination of these drugs is a truly fantastic feeling. Generally even as little as 2-3 drinks (I'm a lightweight, but still usually need more like 6 to get drunk) with weed can make a huge difference that you will definitely feel.

This goes back to listening to music again, but specifically if you deprive some of your senses, obviously the others get amplified, and this happens even more under the influence of cannabis. One trick I got from a reddit thread (by the way check out reddit.com/r/trees ... awesome chill subreddit to hang out in when high) is to turn off all your lights, get in bed, put the covers over your head, and listen to music on headphones in pitch blackness (after smoking of course). The first time I tried this, I had some really awesome kaleidoscope-esque visuals eventually appear in my vision. Those of you habitual smokers may read this and laugh and call me dumb or a liar, but I can tell you I am telling the truth. Cannabis is classified as a psychedelic (among others) for a reason. If you use it in the right circumstances (pitch black darkness, low tolerance, high dosage) you can absolutely have what are generally referred to as CEVs, or Closed-Eye Visuals.