Tom

How to get legal cannabis in California

Until Jan. 1, 2018, you still need a recommendation from a doctor to legally obtain medical cannabis in California. Fortunately it is not difficult to get a recommendation. But there are a few things to keep in mind:

You need to have a reason to ask for a recommendation.

Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act of 1996, made medical cannabis legal in California, as a treatment for a variety of conditions. Among the reasons people seek recommendations are chronic pain, PTSD, insomnia, headache, epilepsy, anxiety and cancer.

You need to get a letter from a doctor.

This could be your family doctor, if you happen to have an open-minded, progressive family doctor. You'll likely have better luck asking a doctor who specializes in medical cannabis cards, and they are not difficult to find online. I got my card from HelloMD. It was a simple online process to connect with the doctor there and get my recommendation. You'll need to take a photo of your driver's license and be able to email it to them. It costs $59, and is good for one year. And your insurance will not pay for it.

Find a dispensary

Once you have your recommendation, bring it with you to a dispensary (find one nearby at WeedMaps.com). You can also find a delivery service online, and again this will involve scanning or shooting picture of your ID and recommendation later, and sending them by email.

Before you visit the dispensary, you should have some idea of what you want when you get there. Do you want:

Pre-rolled joints
Flower to roll your own joints, or put in a pipe
Oil to put in a vaporizer or cook with
Edibles
Sativa, indica or a hybrid
High THC, or high CBD

Most dispensaries have an online presence. Check it out before you, and it won't be so overwhelming when you get there.

Alternatively, if you do not have an urgent medical need, you could wait until January, when Proposition 64 takes effect, and then learn about the rules in your area, which may vary by city and county throughout California.

Surprise — our painkillers are killing us!

News item: When you consume them in high doses, commonly prescribed painkillers including ibuprofen increase your likelihood of having a heart attack within the first month of taking them.

Wow. A drug developed in the 1960s as an alternative to aspirin, available over the counter since 1983 and a medicine-cabinet staple in homes and workplaces across the country can actually make you 20 to 50% more likely to have a heart attack. And it's not the only one. Other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), including naproxen and celecoxib — among the most-commonly prescribed drugs in the U.S. — can also cause heart attacks within a week, according to Time.

This is not a good ‘wow.'

This is wow, we are all guinea pigs, and have been all our lives. Humanity itself is a test-and-learn endeavor, and always has been: The food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe all have effects, good and bad. There have always been poisonous substances in nature. Isn’t that why we banded together and created the Food and Drug Administration? To make sure the things we consume aren’t killing us?

Why more people are microdosing cannabis

Years ago, most of us might have laughed, hard, at the notion of taking the smallest possible dose of cannabis. But more and more people are finding that it makes sense.

Advocates of microdosing cannabis say it’s a way to maintain your clarity, enhance your creativity, and just mellow out. If you’re accustomed to throwing back a few cocktails to take the edge off your day, a tiny dose of cannabis can also serve as a less damaging alternative to alcohol, which, let’s face it, is not great for your liver, your skin, your sleep, or your energy level the next day.

As research proves the benefits of cannabis — as an organic medicine that can help with everything from insomnia to inflammation — some people are beginning to take a little bit of cannabis every day, as you would with a vitamin or other dietary supplement.

OK, so how does one administer a microdose? We’re talking about a versatile plant, and there are multiple ways:

One good hit on a joint, pipe or bong.
Or one or two puffs from a vaporizer or pre-filled vape pen.
By eating THC- or CBD-infused edibles (with clear dosage per serving)

Ready to give microdosing a try? Check out this story from Rolling Stone, which includes a method from Maine-based physician and Reiki healer Dustin Sulak for finding the right dose for you.

Synergy Mints: Balanced THC and CBD

The best of both compounds

We know there are health benefits to cannabidiol (CBD) and that THC can have a relaxing effect, as well as promote synergistic action between the compounds — so why not combine a small amount of each in an edible form?

That's what Dixie Elixirs has done with Synergy Mints. Each mint contains 5 milligrams of CBD and 5 milligrams of THC. The mints come in a box of 16, and are blister packaged. They are also scored across the middle, so you could cut one in half if you want to start with an even smaller dose. (Although on the first try, we found that the mint crumbled a bit when pushed out of its plastic blister bubble.)

As noted on the package, holding the mint under your tongue will lead to faster absorption.

The effect? Not a noticeable buzz at all, but a little sleepiness after about two hours. Whether you have a specific condition for which you're taking CBD, or just trying to integrate CBD into your diet for general health purposes, these are a little pricey. In California, a package of 16 mints costs $40 at the dispensary. That's $2.50 per mint — and a pretty steep cost per milligram.

According to Dixie's site: “We go far above and beyond the mandated batch testing and triple lab test every product we sell.”

Read about our review process here.

Microdosing edibles: Petra Mints from Kiva

Less is more

Sometimes you want just as little THC as you can get. Enough to take the edge off and relax you, but not get you discernibly high. In these cases, you could hit on a pipe or joint, or pull out your vape pen and hit that. Or, you could pop a Petra Mint from Kiva.

At 2.5 milligrams of THC per mint, the Kiva Mint is the under-stated cannabis edible. Take one and wait two hours, and you might not notice a thing — except that whatever anxiety you were carrying has melted away. Or take two or three, and titrate your dose to the level of high you want.

Kiva Mints are discreet, you can carry a tin around in your pocket and pop them in your mouth like Altoids. Only they're a lot more fun. They come in two flavors, Moroccan Mint, and Eucalyptus. We tested the Moroccan Mint, and found it pepperminty, with a hint of vanilla.

If you're ready to experiment with microdosing cannabis edibles, Kiva Petra Mints are a great place to start. In California, you can find them at dispensaries for about $15. They will soon be available in Illinois.

Rigorous testing

According to the Kiva Confections site, the not-for-profit company works with a third-party ISO-certified lab and follows testing protocols established by the FDA for manufacturing, packing and distribution of over the counter (OTC) drugs. Their extraction process is chemical-free.

Read about our review process here.

Why vaping might be good for you

NOTE: As of Sept. 16, 2019, given recent news reports about the dangers of vaping, we are recommending dry-herb vaporizers over pen-style vaporizer cartridges, and tank and coil vaporizers. We while we did carry some pen-style CBD vaporizer products here, we are removing those until we learn more about the relative safety or danger of vaping CBD.

Everything with a backbone has an endocannabinoid system (ECS). The endo- prefix means we produce cannabinoids — also found in the cannabis plant — in our bodies. According to a highly technical Wikipedia entry, our ECS governs appetite, pain-sensation, mood and memory.

Israeli scientist Raphael Mechoulam, who has been studying cannabis since the early 1960s, discovered the ECS (and its interplay with compounds in the cannabis plant) in 1992. He found that we have endocannabinoids and receptors for them in our brains and throughout our bodies. Many of these compounds in cannabis (cannabinoids), do all sorts of things besides get you high.

By 1993, it was so clear that cannabis held serious medical benefits, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services applied for a received Patent No. 6,630,507, covering the potential use of non-psychoactive cannabinoids — chemical compounds found within the plant species cannabis sativa — to protect the brain from damage or degeneration caused by certain diseases, such as cirrhosis.12

Treating chronic disease

Today, CBD is the most well-known of the cannabinoids, and it is being used to treat a variety of diseases, including:

Epilepsy
Cancer
PTSD
Multiple sclerosis
Chronic pain
Alzheimer’s

And many others. Research on the medical applications of cannabis is ongoing in places like Israel. Complicating this is the fact that in the U.S., cannabis is still classified as a Schedule 1 drug, along with heroin and other substances that have no medicinal value, so it’s hard for researchers to even get cannabis to study. Even scientists at the Salk Institute can’t get the cannabis they need to study the efficacy of cannabis in fighting Alzheimer’s disease.

There are many accounts of CBD stopping the near-constant seizures in young children afflicted with Dravet Syndrome. For families of these children, who have tried everything, including pharmaceuticals with toxic and sometimes deadly side effects, cannabis is a miraculous godsend. And it’s not just epilepsy. Even though clinical trials have been hard to come by, there’s evidence that CBD has efficacy in fighting tumors, PTSD, and other conditions, according to MedScape.

CBD seems to have such a wide-ranging potential as a therapeutic agent, and Harvard-trained neuroscientist Nick Jikomes explains why in a post at Leafly: “A key part of the answer lies in CBD’s promiscuous pharmacology—its ability to influence a wide range of receptor systems in the brain and body, including not only cannabinoid receptors but a host of others.” Jikomes’ post concludes:

Understanding CBD’s neurological effects is a complicated business, because of the wide variety of receptors with which it interacts. But that complexity may be the key to its promise as a therapeutic agent. Motivational disorders like addiction and anxiety are themselves highly complex; they arise from incompletely understood causes that span multiple receptor systems and neural networks in the brain. CBD’s complex, multi-target effects may therefore be crucial to its potential for aiding the treatment of such disorders. Over the coming years, researchers will continue to further understand this complexity and uncover the full scope of CBD’s therapeutic potential.

What does this have to do with vaping? If you or a family member has epilepsy, cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, PTSD, chronic pain, anxiety, addiction, diseases related to inflammation, or other conditions, CBD may be a useful medicine for you. If taking medicine orally is too slow, or otherwise cumbersome, vaping might be a practical alternative.

While we don’t know much yet about how the chemicals in vape juice might affect the body, you have to educate yourself, weigh the negatives against the benefits you might receive from CBD, and make your own determination.

The photo above, “New Kayfun Nano Kit and Copper Reservoir Mid Cap !” is copyright (c) 2014 by Curtis Keester and made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

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What a long, strange trip: The Kannaboomer Credo

So much has happened since we first smoked weed. Boomers changed the world when we were still adolescents, but some things remain the same; among them, astounding levels of ignorance and hypocrisy around cannabis.

This plant has been used by humans for 40,000 years, and massively misunderstood for the past 100 — and today's cannabis has evolved in many ways. Kannaboomers is here, in the trumpian post-truth era, as a resource to enable thoughtful people of what we'll call a ‘certain' age to make good decisions about cannabis. How do we aim to do that? By adhering to these values:

Transparency

Kannaboomers provides objective information on cannabis-related topics, untainted by any vested interest in the industry. (We may eventually have affiliate relationships, and we will disclose them if and when we do.)

Bill introduced to remove cannabis from Schedule 1

Senator Bernie Sanders did it in 2015, and now a Republican member of Congress has introduced a bill that would remove cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act and leave cannabis policy up to the states.

“I have long believed justice that isn't blind, isn't justice,” said Congressman Tom Garrett of Virginia. “Statistics indicate that minor narcotics crimes disproportionately hurt areas of lower socio-economic status and what I find most troubling is that we continue to keep laws on the books that we do not enforce. Virginia is more than capable of handling its own marijuana policy, as are states such as Colorado or California.”

It's way past time that cannabis be removed from the Schedule 1 list, which it shares with deadly drugs like heroin and meth. Cannabis is a safe plant that mitigates harm and promotes health — and its time our government recognizes this and reflects the will of the people, who have approved the use of medical marijuana in 26 states now.

Get in touch with your elected officials and tell them to support this legislation!