There is no denying the fact that edibles are a lot safer than their traditional counterparts (i.e. smoking pot, using cocaine, etc.). The reason being is that edibles are always pure. This is the case whether you are eating a cookie, brownie, jelly bean, chocolate bar, or candy. No matter what the particular edible is made from, it will always be pure. However, there is something that can cause some people to not get high from eating edibles—the wrong dosage amount.
In the video above, you saw what happened to a friend of mine who ate an edible and ended up with a panic attack that lasted almost an hour. He had never experienced a panic attack before, and it was really scary. Many people also have a mistaken belief that Edibles only make you feel high, and that you won’t get high from Edibles if you eat too many of them. This is not true. Edibles can get your high as strong as they get your high from smoking.
People undergoing surgery or using cannabis for pain relief cannot benefit from the plant’s therapeutic value because their bodies are unable to process THC normally. I remember the first time I ate too many brownies, which brought me into a world of intense visuals, physical excitement and sugar rush like never before. Most people who use incense feel its effects, but there is a category of people who seem to be immune to incense – and scientists aren’t exactly sure why. There are theories – theories that we will discuss in this article. 
Photo: Gaiety via Unsplash However, the implications of this finding go far beyond a person’s inability to get high on 11-hydroxy-THC, and may affect things like our standardized impairment testing, cannabis drugs, and more. The remainder of this article will also elaborate on these issues.
Have you Ediblocked?
The term ediblocked comes from an article in the Boston Globe, which was the inspiration for this article. I love that term, and I can imagine it being extended to other substances. For example, I once took LSD with a group of psychonauts, and one guy said: I don’t understand, it’s just the feeling I get when I smoke weed! I stared at the man with dilated pupils, watching everything swirl around him as the walls breathed, and thought to myself: This guy’s a caveman! Of course not, and he probably experienced something like Ediblock. But the significance of this finding is that it shows that standardized impairment tests do not take into account the fact that people process drugs differently. Of course, the development of a test that can adapt to a person’s biochemical composition is still only science fiction at this point, but it also shows us that many people who have been found drunk by police may have been more sober than the officer who handcuffed them. Here is an excerpt from one of the Boston Globe articles: They couldn’t stop laughing – they were all having the time of their lives, recalls MacDonald, a 55-year-old cannabis farmer from Ontario, Canada. And I didn’t get anything from them. I sat there with my arms crossed, like, oh, man ….. Everyone’s hoverboard works but mine. It was a man named Al who discovered he was immune to the dyes when his friends ate a bunch of cookies that contained cannabis. Al says he begins to feel the effects of THC at 700 milligrams, which is a deep trip for most people. This may also explain why some people can consume incredible amounts of THC and still feel normal. For some of you, the idea of not responding to supplements may not seem like a big deal, but for those undergoing surgery or using cannabis for pain relief, they may not be able to take advantage of the plant’s therapeutic value because their bodies can’t process THC like they normally would.
How can I become edible?
Researchers cannot yet determine the cause 100%, but they speculate that it may have to do with a specific enzyme in the liver responsible for processing THC. Unlike the inhibition of THC, they claim that these people simply have more efficient processing capabilities in the liver. The Boston Globe spoke with Dr. Stacy Gruber, director of the Marijuana Research Program for Neurological Discovery at McLean Hospital: Although no studies have directly examined people with extremely high tolerance to marijuana, Gruber and other researchers have come up with a compelling hypothesis: People with an unusual variation in a key liver enzyme may overprocess incoming THC, converting it into an active metabolite that causes high arousal and then into an inactive product before the active form reaches the bloodstream or the brain. It is also possible that other people’s enzymes make this process abnormally inefficient, so that THC is not metabolized at all. It’s like they skip the intermediate step, Gruber says of people with unusual subtypes of the CPY2C9 gene, which codes for the enzyme that causes THC to undergo a three-step metabolic transformation. They destroy it so quickly that it has no time to produce a psychoactive effect. 
Photo by Tree of Life Seeds via Pexels Why this becomes a problem for individual cannabis users depends on how we control offenses in the community. Most current tests do not take into account liver enzymes and the ability to process THC better. People like Al can eat 500mg and be completely sober. But if he is stopped by a police officer and tested for THC in his saliva or blood, he is considered to be intoxicated. According to the Boston Globe: The study questions biological tests for marijuana that are widely used by researchers, doctors, law enforcement and employers. They look for the same metabolites, but do not seem to take into account the significant and elusive differences in metabolism between individuals. (In Massachusetts, most drivers suspected of drug use are screened by police using what is called a drug recognition report, which usually involves a saliva or blood test for THC.)
Question from a medical point of view
It’s not just about getting high. For people who use cannabis as medicine, this may mean that if you have a high occurrence of the CPY2C9 gene, you may need higher doses of cannabis to get the desired effect. The problem is that overuse can lead to an eight-hour drive, according to Dr. Peter Greenspoon, Harvard Medical School lecturer and cannabis expert. Or in my case, 18 hours. I think my CYPY2C9 gene likes to take its time. But hey, I ate about 20 cakes in 2 hours, so the THC content was probably more than 1 gram. 
Photo: BATCH by Wisconsin Hemp Scientific via Unsplash Greenspoon said this phenomenon illustrates how little we know about the body’s cannabinoid system, due in part to longstanding federal restrictions on marijuana research, the Boston Globe reported. It’s a problem we can understand and maybe even solve with the right research and the smart people working on it, he said. And he’s right! The federal government’s anti-freedom policies have stymied cannabinoid research for decades in the name of safety, and now science is being forced to play catch-up. This shows once again that the government’s approach to drugs is not only outdated, but also potentially dangerous for people who use cannabis for medical and recreational purposes. I wonder where we would have ended up with cannabis medicine if the government hadn’t decided to suppress research and information?
