Can You Smoke Like A Patient?

In my travels across the planet and the Internet, I’ve run across any number of people who smoke marijuana regularly and get high, but are using cannabis for what are essential medical reasons. In other words: social anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, calming, chronic pain, depression, etc. If you’re one of these people, I believe you have an excellent chance to get a lot more from your weed — by smoking less of it. As I’ve discovered for myself since becoming a Medical Marijuana patient, many of these conditions simply don’t require you to actually get high to control them. You just smoke/vape/ingest as much as you need to take care of the problem, and in many or even most cases, you end up not getting high when you’re done.

“But, Old Hippie, I like to get high”, you might say. Not a problem. My point is not that you shouldn’t ever get high, but that if you need your symptoms taken care of every day — especially several times a day — it can kind of wear you down getting high all those times. Not to mention that being high that much can affect your school or work performance, to say nothing of endangering you and others if you have to drive, or the fact that using so much weed generally costs some significant amount of money.

Challenge To The Recreational User

If you’re someone who uses marijuana to “take the edge off”, relax, calm down, or just feel better, you may actually be using it for medical reasons, whether you’re a “legal” Medical Marijuana patient or not. In that case, why not try this: just ingest your cannabis the way you normally do, but do it one hit at a time,  trying not to go “one toke over the line”. Simply go slower, and stop when you feel better rather than aiming to get high.

Try this for just one week, and you will likely feel better, healthier, more in tune with yourself, and more productive. So if you’ve got the idea in your head that “using cannabis = getting high”, and you’re really using cannabis for other reasons, think about using it differently!

P.S. One more advantage: despite ingesting multiple times a day every day, I still have the same tolerance (virtually none) as when I started on this journey over two years ago!

Republished with special permission from Beyond Chronic. Copyright © 2010-2013 Old Hippie.