An update on my Pot Luck hiatus and a short and sweet list of my preferred ways to get high.

Being someone who has now written a weed newsletter for almost a year, I was/am pretty confident that marijuana could/can be used to solve all of my medical issues. And for the ongoing health stuff I deal with regularly -- insomnia, stress/anxiety -- it has been great. But for sudden onset deep aching pain, it … made it worse?

A little intimate context: I've been doing some reading around the concept of "pleasure". I won't repost my diary excerpts, but the high level takeaway is that NOW IS A GREAT TIME to question how you relate to and experience your physical body, and how you allow it to maximize pleasure.

I haven't interacted with brands much through Pot Luck, because I want to keep my reviews unbiased and only pick products that I'm interested in. However, I've become a pretty un-subtle fangirl of Cosmic View so it was an unexpected delight to get to connect with the co-founder Nicole, nerd out about cannabis, and learn more about her products. I hope you enjoy the interview!!

I just still don't get why Weed Culture makes it seem like everyone who smokes weed is consuming massive quantities of it, when it's very clear that doing so is counter-productive to receiving the many benefits of it. Sure, it's clearly just another example of like, toxic masculine bro-culture, but like... don't bro's want help with their anxiety too???

The shock I see when some people "who thought they knew me" find out that I smoke weed is both continually amusing and still a bit upsetting. I still usually get the "What?! YOU smoke weed?!" (read: you're secretly a delinquent and have been hiding it this whole time?! What else don't I know?!)

Happy 4/20, Pot Luck pals! As you all know, today is the one and only day that stoners get high....jk. But, today is the day that a majority of people who want to enjoy, reform, and celebrate weed will be slightly more public about their consumption of it than on every other day of the year, which can help to further de-stigmatize it.

In our lifetime, we are going to see the rise of a new American industry. One that is full of potential, and one that has, in its illicit years prior, targeted and criminalized people of a specific race and class. It is not only our opportunity to repair the damage of this history, it is our responsibility. Think about the impact that establishing equity from the beginning could have.

In December 2020, the Pot Luck Collective assessed whether three things with the same name were in fact, the same. We sampled three strains which were sold under the name “Blue Dream”, but in a blind test, all three smelled quite different, and in a chemical comparison, all three had very different levels of THC and other cannabinoids.  

So what exactly goes into a strain name, and why is so much chemical variety allowed to fall under the same name umbrella?

Have you ever wondered what the state of being high actually is? (Ok fine, maybe this is something only a stoner would ponder, keep reading!) For the October 2020 Pot Luck class I typed this innocuous question into Google and was directed to aTEDx talk by Dr. Rachel Knox, where she explained the rarely discussed human body system that was discovered through studies with marijuana in the 1980's. It's called the Endocannabinoid System.

This is an excerpt from the October 2020 newsletter where I interviewed one of the Pot Luck participants and ask them only one question and then we just gabbed about smoking the wrong weed for your entire life and puppies for 30 minutes. Enjoy!

Terpenes are getting a lot of hype right now, and are responsible for the range, strength, and complexity of aromas across cannabis strains (yes, all weed smells different!). Our olfactory function is highly personal, and our brain encodes scents via a direct connection to our memory and emotion centers. If you had a bad first-time experience with weed, chances are your brain has linked that smell to negative emotions, and so you will perceive the smell as "bad", whereas someone who likes weed, smelling the exact same thing, would see it as a "good" or positive smell.