DOSE:	3.6 g	oral	Cannabis	(edible / food)
		oral	Chocolate

BODY WEIGHT:

145 lb

Funky chocolate and LSD imprinting

This report has some relevance to the “is oral cannabis a psychedelic?” debate.

The background is that this summer I had my first encounters with LSD (four trips of varying doses from estimated 30 ug up to 150 ug). All were delightful experiences in outdoor natural settings with varying degrees of classical LSD visuals.

Since then I have been experimenting with edible cannabis. This weekend I had a second piece of my home-made cannabis chocolate.

The chocolate was made using what I think is Moroccan hash (dark brown and soft). I decarboxylated the hash in a double boiling kettle for two hours. By the way, if you do this, make sure all the windows are open. The hash smell is pretty strong. I then divided 1 g of the decarboxylated hash into small pieces and put it in a saucepan with plenty of butter on a low heat. After about 15 minutes the hash was fully dissolved leaving no residue. I then added dark chocolate and stirred to an even mixture. The total weight of the resulting hash chocolate was 60g (probably about half butter and half chocolate plus the 1g of hash). I froze the hash chocolate and then broke it into about twenty pieces.

I tested the batch last month with 2.7 g of the chocolate which resulted in a light but distinct high. The flavour was delicious – rich and warm with coffee and hash notes. I was quite surprised and pleased to get any effect from such a small quantity (less than a twentieth of a gram of the hash). This weekend I tried slightly more: 3.6 g of the chocolate.

This time I ate 3.6g. If I assume that the raw hash contained 20% THCA and if I also assume 100% conversion of the raw THCA to 9THC by decarboxylation, then the consumed edible dose in my 3.6g of chocolate would have been 60 mg of hash (slightly over a twentieth of a gram) containing about 12 mg of 9THC, most of which is then converted by the liver into 11 THC.

The funky chocolate experience confirmed what I had suspected from eating cannabis gummies – that 11THC is an active psychedelic with effects that seemed to almost exactly mimic a threshold dose of LSD in the 30 to 50 ug range.

I felt the effects of the chocolate within 45 minutes and by T+ one hour was experiencing visuals. They were not dynamic in the way that they are during the peak of an LSD trip (warping, breathing, rippling etc), but they were still very pronounced in terms of colour, contrast and shading. Leaves for examples seemed to blend into textures and forms that drew upon the original but were far richer and more complex with colours and shade transforming from greens into golds and silvers. Depth perception was also altered with a mixture of flattening and deepening. It remained possible to come back to normality by focusing hard, but as soon as I relaxed, the visuals would come back. The peak experience lasted for perhaps one and a half to two hours.

Hearing also became more acute and I was aware of the richness of background sounds, but I have had this before with both smoked cannabis and San Pedro.

The similarity with a light LSD trip was so pronounced that if I had not known, I would haves sworn that I had taken half a tab of LSD. I do wonder whether somehow those first LSD trips have imprinted themselves on my mind so that now when I take edible cannabis the LSD pathways are triggered. I don’t get the same effect from smoked/vaped cannabis, which produces more of a classical cannabis high without any obvious visuals.

My conclusion is that 11THC (the active metabolite in oral cannabis) certainly has a psychedelic component to it, which is triggered or enhanced by previous use of classical psychedelics.

One other observation is that the effect of this single piece of chocolate with an estimated THC content of 12 mg was similar to that produced by consuming 30 mg of THC in gummies (see my first time gummy report). Why the THC in my chocolate should be nearly three times as strong as the THC in gummies is a bit of a mystery. When I previously tried a gummy with 10mg of THC it had no effect whatsoever. I presume it may have something to do with the bioavailability of THC in butter as compared to gummies. Or perhaps slow low temperature decarboxylation retains other mildly psychoactive cannabinoids that are not present in commercial products.

Anyway, I’m glad I was cautious and tested the chocolate first with a very low dose. If I had simply assumed 1:1 THC equivalence between gummies and chocolate then I would eaten 10g of the chocolate which would have sent me sky high.

By the way, I had no after-effects or hangover whatever. What a difference from alcohol.

Exp Year: 2018	ExpID: 112353
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 50
Published: Nov 3, 2018	Views: 3,381
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