How to Choose and Buy the Right Type of Medical Marijuana for You

When it comes to proper dosage, medical marijuana is the hardest to use. You have several ways to administer the medicine, and even then, you need to figure out exactly how to do it. Let’s take a look at the different types that you can purchase and what can help you best.

What Types of Medical Marijuana Can I Get?

Medical marijuana comes in a wide variety of shapes, colors, and styles. If you smoke or vape, you will have a wider variety of different varieties to choose from, and you will be able to find out how each one affects you. Evaporation, at least to the best of our knowledge, poses a significantly lower risk than smoking, which I personally would not recommend. If you want to take a responsible approach to choosing the exact deformation, buy a quality vaporizer and refuse joints. If you want to avoid the potentially unknown risk of evaporation, you can purchase sprays and tinctures for just as easy dosing. Marijuana products are also available as topical waxes, food and beverage products. Let’s discuss your seriously insane number of options.

• Vaporizers : You can buy a cheap vape pen at almost any pharmacy or smoke store for about $ 15-20 and it will help. You can also buy a high quality vaporizer if you see a real cost benefit of around 10 times the cost. With a vaporizer, you insert a cartridge, press a button, suck in the marijuana vapor and blow it out. Unlike smoking, you don’t need to keep steam in your mouth. Pull in, push out, and you’re done. How do you know how much medication you received in one “blow” (mainly inhalation puff)? The cartridge you inserted will tell you how many shocks you can get from it and how much marijuana it contains (usually 150 mg, 200 mg, or 300 mg). With simple calculations, you will find that you were probably getting 1.5 to 3 mg at a time. We’ll discuss this later when we look at dosing methods, but you probably want to try no more than 4-6 mg the first time (whereas a moderately tolerant person would take 10-20 mg per dose). The advantage of vaping / vaping is its fast onset (5-30 minutes) and easy and accurate dosing.
• Tinctures and sprays : Tinctures are bottles of liquid that you suck up with a pipette and administer each dose sublingually (under the tongue). You also use the spray sublingually, however, you simply press on the cap like any nebulizer and the medicine comes out. Both effects are supposed to work very quickly (5-30 minutes) like evaporation, although in my experience it took about 45-60 minutes (half the edible time). Neither sprays nor tinctures have a particular taste, but sprays often cause a burning sensation, but tinctures do not. However, I prefer sprays because they are very portable, invisible and simple.
• Edibles : I prefer foods to any other form of medical marijuana because while they can make dosage difficult, you have many economical (and fun) options. You also don’t have to waste time figuring out a specific dose, because you can simply buy a specific dose along with your food. A company called Kiva makes my favorite option – bars of chocolate with segments containing a certain amount of medicine and, even better, a can of chocolate-covered blueberries (or espresso beans, if you like), which contain 5 mg of THC and make dosage easy and predictable. Cheeba , another company that I like, produces chewy candies with iris , which are also easy to dose. Whether you’re looking for a combination of CBD and THC, or even CBD alone, Cheeba has a very good and simple set of toffee options. However, they are not tasty. If you don’t have access to them, or if you prefer something else, don’t worry. If food exists in the world, you can probably find a marijuana-filled version of it. Despite how much I prefer edibles, they last longer than anything else. You will have to wait two hours to find out how they will affect you, and in no case should you take more until those two hours are up. Most people find edible foods to be much stronger than any other form of marijuana. In my case, the food provided more pain relief long after the high had passed. I could use them before bed, sleep well and wake up pain-free without any highs. Smaller doses also tend to be more effective, which in turn is more cost effective. Finally, edible products do not always provide consistency. Some companies like the ones I mentioned are doing their best to ensure that you get the amount of medicine indicated on the package. Many food products go wrong by offering more or less than advertised. You can usually guess from the quality of the packaging which foods you can trust, but trial and error is the only way to know for sure.
• Tablets: If you don’t feel like taking on marijuana or anything else, you can buy pills containing marijuana oil and swallow them. They often look like vitamin E supplements and are quite modest. They work in the same way as edibles, in that they take time to work. In addition, tablets are usually much more expensive than their edible counterparts. On the other hand, the amount of drug in each tablet is usually more accurate.
• Topical wax (balms): Do not confuse topical wax with wax (we will ignore it in this article because it is irrelevant). Topical wax is a balm that you rub into your skin. You can use topical wax or other marijuana balms if you have pain in a specific area. It takes about an hour to get to work, and it smells strongly of, you guessed it, marijuana. Most people will not find it advisable, but some people with skin conditions that cause pain, soreness, and migraines appreciate its somewhat localized effects. If the topical wax contains THC, it will still give you a high.

I liked edible products the best, but you may be able to use something else. The only way to know for sure is to try your options and try them a few times. Various products, vaporizer cartridges, sprays and tinctures work differently from their counterparts. In some cases, you may find that the same product works differently because a small dose was injected for one reason or another. Remember, none of these products are pharmaceutical grade and they all lack consistency, even if they are good. Just as I recommend giving a new TV show a few episodes before you fully appreciate it, you should also try any medical marijuana product. Just make sure you have nowhere to go in the next 4-16 hours. Until you know how the drug will affect you, don’t make plans that you might not be able to follow through.

How do I actually go buy medical marijuana?

If you live in a state where marijuana is legal – again, only at the state level and not at the federal level – you can just go to any pharmacy and buy some. At the time of this writing, this includes Colorado, Alaska, Oregon, and Washington. Other states have decriminalized marijuana use, meaning they won’t arrest or prosecute you on possession charges (up to a certain amount), and have legalized marijuana for medical purposes. Each state has its own rules and regulations, as well as their application. If you’re unsure how your state or region is addressing this issue, there is a great synopsis on Wikipedia to tell you .

Unless you are located in one of the four states where marijuana is more or less legal, you need to be in the state where medical marijuana is located and you will need to get a card before you can buy it. Here’s how to get it:

1. See your healthcare professional and get a prescription or diagnosis for a condition that can be treated with medical marijuana. Here is a helpful list of conditions that commonly apply. Most medical prescriptions are issued by doctors specializing in marijuana, who don’t care what you’re going to do with your prescription. However, they must follow the rules and will not diagnose any medical condition in you.
2. Write down your doctor’s contact information and the condition you were given. Then find the doctor who wrote the marijuana prescription. Leafly can help you find it .
3. Once you find a doctor who prescribes marijuana, make an appointment (or log in) and fill out a few forms. You will need to provide your diagnosing physician’s information for the prescribing physician’s marijuana appointments, and the visit itself will cost you $ 25 to $ 200 per visit.
4. Answer a few questions. The prescriber will call you, read your forms, ask you about your situation, and then give you approval.
5. Receive your card. You will return to the waiting room to get your prescription (and a marijuana card if you want to pay extra for that convenience) and they will send you on your way.

Once you get your medical marijuana card, you can go straight to the pharmacy and shop. If you’re unsure of where to go, or don’t know where the dispensary closest to you is, visit WeedMaps and find the closest one to you. Once you find it, new patients will have a few more obstacles:

1. After you have the first aid kit you are thinking, do your homework. Research specific products, choose which method (edible, vaporizer, tincture, etc.) you want to try first, and find a dispensary on Leafly or simply search the internet.
2. Visit the dispensary and tell them that you are a new patient. This will require a state ID / driver’s license, marijuana prescription, and a prescription card. A prescription card is optional, but if you want to use it to sign in with your government issued ID, you will need to give it to them for a photocopy. Regardless of the card, you still need to have a valid prescription with you every time you visit a new dispensary. They need to save a copy to a file.
3. Complete the New Patient (Long) Form. You will need to provide a lot of information (the usual things like your name and how to contact you), but you will also need to explain what talents you can bring to the “team”. This is because you cannot simply buy marijuana from the manufacturer. Instead, you enjoy the “free” work product of the team to which you (will) belong. Most dispensaries will ask you how you can help the community, so just keep literally any skill in mind. It could be web design or fertilizer research. Nobody really cares about it, but it’s always good to talk about it beforehand. Just write down anything you can really do
4. Bring cash. You can’t pay for marijuana with a credit or debit card (in most cases) for a variety of reasons, but one of them is important: you are not actually buying marijuana, but donating money to your community. Some donations require gifts. These gifts are medical marijuana. So instead of buying marijuana, you donate money and receive marijuana as a gift. It’s a semantic game, kind of like donating to a public radio — you give them money and they send you a gift, as opposed to “buying” that bag or DVD set. It makes sense?
5. Wait your turn. Most dispensaries only allow a certain number of people to enter a large marijuana room at a time. When you get there, you may have to wait a few minutes (at least) until you are called and you can enter. It helps to have some idea of ​​what you want so as not to keep others waiting for your choice. Ask any questions you have, but note that the people who help you here may or may not be qualified to answer them (but they will definitely have their own opinion). Moreover, even if you tell them that you have an intolerance, they will suggest a dose. it’s too high. Be very careful with any advice you get from dispensary staff and take the conservative side of any dosage or use suggestions they offer (more on that in a moment).
6. Let them know you’re new and enjoy some free goodies. If this is your first time visiting any dispensary or you have an anniversary (they should treat you in a year because most states require a prescription renewal), ask them what new patients get for free before donating blood. You often get a few free treats. If they give you something you don’t want (in my case, a cant), tell them you don’t want it and ask if they have anything else.
7. Find out if they have a mailing list or text messaging service to notify you of discounts. Probably so, so sign up. Every time you save at least 10%.

Congratulations, you now have medical marijuana! We’ll talk about how to use it responsibly shortly, but first one more thing: you need to learn how to store the medicine so it doesn’t go bad. Some foods require refrigeration. Some last forever and some expire. Some foods require a certain temperature (usually room temperature). Learn how to store what you bought and how long you have to keep it from wasting. The people at the dispensary really know about storage, so you can ask them about every product you buy. They won’t tell you, so be sure to ask how to store your groceries and when / if they will expire.

You can stock up on long-acting foods and get a few that are nearing expiry dates if you want to be sure you have your medicines on hand. I never liked frequent visits to the dispensary, so I always kept enough pills, candies and sprays in case I ran out of cheaper expiring options. So if you get a little lazy – which is not okay with marijuana, but a guarantee – you still have the cure until you get up and buy more.

As Green Week continues, we’ll be learning about the responsible use of marijuana for medical purposes and making our own edible products, so stay tuned!

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