Methods of cannabis consumption

2009.04.08

For thousands years humans have been dealing with cannabis. That means they had plenty of time to find out the best ways to consume this plant in order to get maximum from its psychoactive effects. I would like to give you a small overview of different ways of cannabis consumption that are used nowadays.

First method is, undoubtedly, smoking. This method is the most common and widespread due to its availability and efficiency. It can be done in great variety of ways. The most well-known is, of course, smoking through a joint that is created by rolling up cannabis. In some areas like Russia its also common to put marijuana into a cigarette from where tobacco had been removed. Another common method is rolling a blunt – when marijuana is put inside a tobacco leaf from a cigar. Pipes are also wide-used, especially ones with water chamber that filters and cools the smoke. It's slang name is bubbler. There are far too more variants of smoking cannabis, but that is the topic of the separate article.

Second common method is vaporisation. It includes using a vaporizer – a special device that heats marijuana without actually burning. THC turns into gas and can be inhaled easily. That helps to get rid of all smoking negative effects on lungs – no smoke, no cancer danger.

An inexpensive and portable version of a vaporizer is e-cigarette. It is mostly used for medical purposes because only in hospitals clean THC is available. It's loaded into a cartridge instead of nicotine. E-cigarette also is a good way to control the dosage.

Another way of consumption of cannabis is actually eating. That allows to save a significant amount of THC that is lost due to burning while smoking. We can divide oral consumption into two main branches: actually eating or chewing marijuana or hash and eating specially made cannabis-containing products like bakery. Eating hash is not so efficient because THC most easily gets into the blood when combined with water of lipids. Therefore, cannabis foods, really spread in Netherlands (they are legal in there!) contain THC already combined with different kinds of oil. That allows to make special bakery or butter. Such way of consumption has one disadvantage – full effects may be reached only in 2-3 hours after eating. That may be not really convenient. However, the effect last for much longer time as well. Depending on the dose of cannabis in the product, some of them can keep you high for 24 hours.

As cannabis can be leached in high-proof spirits, some alcohol drinks with cannabis exist. Therefore they are not that popular because of mixing of effects of ethanol and THC. Another way to actually drink cannabis is to make a tea from its leaves. But that will be a waste of product as THC is just slightly water soluble.

Human mind can invent outstanding things in order to get what it wants. Different ways of consumption of cannabis just prove one mere thing – if you really want to do something, you can do it in so many different ways depending on your preferences and tastes. So its up to everyone to decide.