Nowadays, there's legalized medical marijuana for anyone with a prescription (available only in certain parts of the country). From what I hear, if you can cast a shadow, then you can get a scrip. Not here in Arizona, but not far away.
During a recent visit to a legalized pot collective in Venice Beach, California, I was blown away by the amount and types of weed available these days. The place I went to had three glass cases, two stuffed with bud and the third with the newest innovations in edibles. Edibles are exactly what they sound like, things you eat that have pot in them.
Hey, smoking is bad for you, remember? In lieu of smoking, there are healthier ways to get the beneficial effects of marijuana without smoking it. There's pot honey, pot lozenges, pot cookies, the all-too-familiar pot brownies, and even the prescription wrapped-pot chocolate bar. I swear if this were just a few years ago, I'd be chasing it all down with some bourbon and running toward the beach naked.
Too much of a good thing can be bad! I have to remember this, like the time I ate three pounds of fresh beets and thought I was dying — with red coming out of every orifice. This mantra takes me back to my college years when I first experimented with my own edibles.
My girlfriend and I had just scored a fat bag of kind bud and decided to make pot brownies. We referred to some friends for direction and we quickly cooked up the weed in some butter (remove the stems and seeds and grind it fine) and then used the pot butter to replace regular butter in a brownie recipe.
At this juncture in my life, I hadn't baked much, but I'll tell you that I've never been so careful not to burn something in my life! We impatiently waited the 30 minutes of cooking time. I must have poked the thing 10 times with a toothpick to see if it was time to take them out.
(The toothpick test, for anyone out there who's stoned as a bat or who grew up homeless, is this: To tell if the food you are cooking in the oven is ready, you put a toothpick in it; if you can pull out a clean toothpick, without any chocolate or dough on it, then the food you are cooking is done.)
Clean toothpick, fresh warm brownies on the counter, Alice in Wonderland in the VHS (yes, I'm old), and my eager girlfriend and me alone for a romantic wonderland . . .
Warning: Eating pot and smoking pot are two totally different things! First off, never eat a whole brownie right out of the gate, let alone two! Eating pot is different because you can't tell how strong the dosage is in the butter. Is one brownie equal to three hits? Three joints? Start with a quarter of a brownie, wait a half-hour; if you aren't getting desired effect eat another quarter, and so on.
What not to do: Gobble two brownies each after not eating all day. My girlfriend and I inhaled two brownies apiece, laughing about how high we were going to get. What no one told us was that pot is digested, so you are going to be high for around six hours, depending on how much you eat and how much you weigh. My fat ass ended up being lucky, and I was stoned out of my gourd (stoooonnnned out offfff my gouuuuurd) and could barely grasp the singing dandelions in the movie. My girlfriend, on the other hand, being fashionably thin, ended up being scared, then paranoid, then vomiting until her insides almost came out.
(The key here, in case you are stoned as you read this: If you have low body weight, then don't eat as much as the fat guy.)
Apparently, if you are super-stoned, you can't stop thinking about the brownies swimming in your stomach and you actually try to reach down your esophagus to fish them out. I told my girlfriend through the door, "Just reach down your throat and try to grab your asshole, I guarantee you will throw up!"
Whatever she did, it worked (from the sound of it).
If you're looking to cook with weed, be careful indeed. A wise Indian chief once told me, "Everything in life should be done in moderation, including moderation." So if you are going to let loose once in a while, stick to garlic or chocolate, or at least something without weed or beets in it.
