Take a break

I’m a medical marijuana patient and have a crazy tolerance. Do you suggest tolerance breaks? Or is that a myth?

I am not a doctor, just so you know. Now, I suggest tolerance breaks for everyone and for everything. Too much time at the office? Take a tolerance break. Addicted to social media? Take a tolerance break. Not getting high like you used to? Tolerance break!

Your body’s cannabis receptors can only do so much. You gotta let them rest and smooth out every once in a while. According to David Downs, an editor at Leafly.com (which has an amazing series on the vape crisis) and the author of The Medical Marijuana Guidebook, heavy cannabis use leads the human body to shut down the cannabinoid receptors in your brain, which leads to serious cannabis tolerance. He says that you only need 48 hours for your receptors to start growing back, but longer breaks are probably better. Fortunately, weed isn’t physiologically addictive, so there is no danger in stopping for a while. Good luck.

Do you believe we’ve gotten too concerned with strains rather than overall quality? Also, I equate dabs to smoking crack, due to the nature of how it’s done. Thoughts?

There are definitely some folks who want to follow the fads. Way back in the day, White Widow was all the rage. Then it was OG Kush, then Bubba Kush, then Diesel, then Cookies, then cake. Yadda yadda. All these new strains are great, but I would much rather smoke a well-grown cut that I have never heard of than some mass-produced, poorly grown cut of a popular strain. The thing about weed is that the way you grow it (and the way you cure it) has a gigantic effect on the quality of the bud. You could give three different growers the same clone, and you could end up with three vastly different buds. Technique is important. I’m not sure that the general public is ready to embrace full weed nerddom, but it’s up to folks like you and me to make sure that quality grass gets some recognition, regardless of the strain name.

To answer your second question: Meh. I know what you mean, though. Watching a dabhead pull out their mini-torch and their dab rig just to heat up a gooey looking substance? Definitely looks like people are doing hard drugs rather than enjoying a little bit of weed. Here’s the thing though: Dabs are not crack. Dabs are still weed, just in a concentrated form. I used to think that dabheads were giving weed a bad name, but I realized that I shouldn’t be weed-shaming and that the people who want to use concentrates as a reason to keep weed illegal are just looking for any old excuse to maintain harmful and racist prohibition policies. Plus, dab rigs and all that stuff are just a fancier way to vaporize cannabis products. No one thinks vape bros are crackheads. Do they?