Hack Your High: Edibles: A Stoner Nerd's Handbook to Getting More Out of Every Batch

Two people eat identical 10mg gummies. One had them on an empty stomach. The other had them after dinner. They did not take the same dose, and neither of them has any idea. Oral bioavailability of THC has been reported as low as 4 percent fasted and above 20 percent with a high-fat meal. That is a fivefold swing on the same gummy, decided by what you had for lunch.

And that is only half of what is going wrong.

Raw cannabis will not get you high no matter how much of it you eat. What is in the plant is THCA, and heat is what turns it into THC. Smoking does that automatically in the half second between the lighter and your lungs. With an edible you are doing it yourself, in an oven, and there is a published curve for it that almost nobody making edibles at home has seen.

Research in the Journal of Cannabis Research found oven decarboxylation at 115 C retained nearly 95 percent of THC content. Uncontrolled stovetop heating lost more than 30 percent. A third of your eighth, gone before the butter was even made.

Inside:

• The Wang 2016 decarboxylation curve, and the temperature and time that actually hit it
• Why the curve is a peak and not a plateau, and what overcooking trades your THC for
• The fed-versus-fasted study, and why eating fat makes an edible stronger and much later
• 11-hydroxy-THC: why edibles are not a slow version of smoking but a different compound
• Choosing a fat, and why coconut oil beats olive oil on yield rather than on taste
• The straining step that recovers 18 percent more oil for one minute of work
• Dose math with three worked examples, including the one that produces 100mg brownies by accident
• A two-week titration protocol for finding your own number
• THE DECARB CARD and THE FAT REFERENCE, both built to tape inside a cabinet
• THE RECIPE VAULT: twenty builds off one base infusion, including what to do with already-vaped bud

The test that made the point: one eighth split three ways, same recipe, blind-rated by three people. Properly decarbed scored 6.8 out of 10. Not decarbed scored 1.2, and two of three tasters said they felt nothing at all. Overcooked scored 4.1 and all three independently used the word sleepy.

Same flower. Same recipe. The only variable was thirty-five minutes at the right temperature.

Book Four of the Hack Your High series. For adults of legal age in legal jurisdictions. Not medical advice.