I’ve mentioned many times probably (when I’m not high I’ll look them up) that I don’t really trust the amount of THC listed on the edibles/tinctures we buy, and honestly we don’t treat this stuff as medicine. Let me prove there is an issue. These are all from one pack of 15:
These are the 100mg troches from Organic Remedies that we’ve been taking for a while. They’re great. Not very disgusting, super-potent, pretty fast-acting. They’re about as good as it gets. They’re also crazy erratic in size. These are gummy things. We call them troches in PA because that gets around some legal thing. But they’re squishy. Clearly they’re made as some kind of liquid goo that has some kind of gelling agent in there, and they’re squeezed into that shape before the goo hardens, which is to say, that stuff is pretty well-mixed. The concentration of THC is pretty nearly homogeneous across all troches. So if you have one troche that’s 4.8g and another that’s 3.5g I don’t know who’s getting 100mg of THC.
Seriously: these crazy powerful (I have a story about this) gummy things are completely variable in drug content. Let’s say the average of 3.5g and 4.8g is the mass of goo that contains exactly 100mg of THC. In that case, the 3.5g troche contained 84mg of THC, and the 4.8g troche contained 116mg of THC. A difference of 32mg of THC, which is enough that a non-user taking it could easily end up in the hospital. Any jump of 32mg is a big deal. For me, even at the pretty high end of what people take, like 50-75mg, a 32mg difference is something I’d really want to be ready for–like, it comes with a significant level of non-function the next morning, and I would only do it on a Friday or Saturday night. So even people who should be in the presence of these things can get fucked over by them. We are not treating this drug as medicine.
I don’t care for our personal case much. I weight them every time so I always know how much we’re taking. Even if they were consistent in size I’d have to get out the scale because neither of us usually wants exactly 100mg anyway. I cut them up and weigh the pieces every time.
So the story about the crazy powerful awesome Organic Remedies troches. We’ve had a lot of crap to do this year and I’ve been working pretty hard. So all the little things you have to do to keep your life running, like renewing your driver’s license on time, get less attention than maybe they need. Yes, there I was at the pharmacy trying to get some sudafed and she couldn’t sell it to me because my DL had expired at some point well before. Well, my marijuana card expires in the summer lately. The valid dates on your card can move from year to year. It’s not like your DL that expires on your birthday–it shifts. Provided you have your act together and you heed the warnings, they’ll send you the new card well before the old one expires. I had that act together. But would you expect the new one not to be valid until exactly one day after the old one expires, even if that date is weeks after you received your new card? I would not. I.e. I got my new card around July 15th, and it wasn’t valid until August 15th. You’re supposed to keep the old card for a while.
Now I admit I knew this at some point, because as soon as I tried to use the new card and the guy said this is no good until next month the whole thing came flooding back to me in a wave of irritation and defeat. I had thrown out the old card. I’m not even mad at PA, I’m not saying they didn’t warn us, but I am saying that for all the people who were too harried to remember that instruction or to read and remember the emails that contained it, if they did it the other way around, there would actually be no way to make a really bad mistake. It’s like they want us to lose our cards. The new card should be valid upon printing, and its expiration date should be exactly one year after the expiration date on the old card. You can disable the old card if you want to make sure someone doesn’t try to give it to someone else.
So my wife fortunately had already applied for her own card and it wasn’t even all that long of a wait for her card. I drove to NJ once*, then she got her card and she went to Ayr Bryn Mawr for her first weed purchase. I drove there with her. She did not want to do it. I prepped her–how you get in the door, how you greet the person at the counter, where you sit while you wait, what you do when you enter, how to make sure they pack what you ordered, what happens with the machine when you pay by debit. I could not go in with her with my not-yet-valid card.
What I did not prepare her for was a very astute guy behind the counter who must have been like shit, lady, this is your first purchase ever and you’re buying these things that are going to put you in the hospital, because he’s somewhat more sensitive than I would expect to be in the heat of the moment and what he said was actually, “can I ask, these things you’re buying, one of them would put me in the hospital. Are you sure this is the right item for you?” So basically pretty nice and an important service, you know, it’s possible that question would prevent a really unhappy situation. But she does not want to talk to a complete stranger about how much weed she consumes, and didn’t know to say something basic and non-implicating like “I’m an experienced patient,” because I hadn’t prepped her for this. She got all flustered and fortunately, at least, thought to call me in the car and I just said “yes, we’ve been doing this for many years, we had cards in New York,” which isn’t really true but I thought would explain why a complete noob was buying enough weed to put her in the hospital 15 times.
*NJ has legal recreational weed. But without a medical card, the stuff you can buy is really expensive. Probably buying bud is not more expensive. But the gummies (which are sweet, too sweet, but much less marijuana taste) you have to buy in pretty small quantities at high cost and we don’t smoke or vape.
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