Edible cannabis products come in many forms, such as candies, desserts, snacks and beverages, but they should not be consumed like tasty treats, warn three cannabis experts.
“They're yummy, and you don't want to stop with one little morsel. You want to eat the whole thing. You don't know the effects of it and, before you know it, it's a really bad experience,” says Dr. Uma Dhanabalan, a family physician who is widely respected as an educator of cannabis and its therapeutic uses.
Her cautious approach to edibles is shared by Jacquie Cohen Roth, MS, founder and CEO of Maryland-based CannabizMD,
and Dominique Gibson, a Florida-based chef with expertise in cooking with cannabis.
All three are proponents of medical cannabis edibles as a treatment for qualified conditions but with a caveat.
They say when someone consumes edibles infused with tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), it may take a couple of hours for the effects of the psychoactive ingredient to be felt. This delayed release fools some people into eating another brownie, or gummy, or beverage before the previous edible has been fully absorbed in the body. Consuming too many edibles can trigger an increased heart rate, paranoia and nausea.
“My recommendation is always to have a CBD [cannabidiol] tincture on hand that will get into your system very quickly and help offset too much of that THC in your system,” Ms. Roth says. “The one thing about cannabis is it cannot kill you.”
In Florida, such variables with the potency of edibles are even more reason to seek the guidance of a medical marijuana qualified physician and to purchase cannabis-related products only from a dispensary, which is regulated by the state and bears a certificate of analysis (COA) that includes information on its contents and percentages of THC and CBD.
“It's going to tell you if it's been exposed to water or pesticides. It's going to give you pretty much all the information that you need to make an educated decision based on what you need as a patient,” says Chef Gibson.
Dr. Uma stresses that cannabis use should be “personalized” because the drug’s efficacy varies from one person to the next. She says, "body weight, diet, age, quality of health and cognition, and the use of alcohol or prescription drugs factor into a patient’s treatment."
