As a major anxiety sufferer and California resident, I’ve had a prescription for medical marijuana since 2006. In the decade since, I have tried — and made — all sorts of crazy cannabis products, but these days every time I go to the dispensary I see some new thing that you can eat or drink or rub on your body. As a public service, I decided to test out some of the more intriguing options to see whether they live up to the hype.
I’m getting high for you, folks, and don’t you forget it.
So what happened this week, when I drank a bottle of weed kombucha for your health and mine? Did I almost immediately get too fucking stoned? Did I order a $50 box of fancy candy because of a pretty Facebook ad? Did I receive the best cunnilingus of my whole damn life? Oh baby, let’s find out.
Product: The Good Stuff Tonics Ginger Apple Kombucha
Purchased from: Greenly Delivery Service
Ingredients: Filtered water (for brewing tea), organic apple juice, organic black tea, organic green tea, organic ginger root, organic CO2 extracted cannabis oil, organic cane sugar, organic gum acacia, propylene glycol.
Suggested dosage: Each bottle contains 100mg, and the nutritional facts intimate that a serving size is 1.6 fluid ounces, or 10mg.
Actual dosage: So this is an issue that I run into fairly often: that the dosage of a product is much too high for the way it’s being served. I drank the whole 100mg bottle, obviously, because what was I gonna do, put an open bottle of kombucha back in the fridge to save for later? There is simply no need or reason for a product like this to be so strong. When I tried the weed soda in Seattle, which also came in a 16oz bottle, they had 20mg, 40mg, and 80mg varieties, and I didn’t venture higher than 40. Same thing with the cake pop, which contained over 200mg in a single bonkers dose! Anyway, since I like to try the products in the way I feel the average consumer will take them, I drank the whole thing.
The flavor: First off, the vinegary taste of fermented tea is one of those tastes you either enjoy or can’t stand. I personally love kombucha and was excited to give this a go. The sour and strong kick of the ginger root and apple juice tasted great as a kombucha, and although there was a bit of a weediness there, especially on the back end, it was mostly masked by and blended well with the other flavors. It was quite a drinkable beverage, and I enjoyed it as much as if not more than many other kombuchas I’ve tried in the past.
The experience: After downing the bottle mid-afternoon, I got into the shower. By the time I got out, I spent quite a few minutes wondering why my eyes felt so heavy before remembering what I’d imbibed half an hour earlier. Very quickly I was just ridiculously high and unable to do much of anything. My boyfriend and I had a plan to watch a bunch of Lord of the Rings DVDs so we made a journey to my apartment from his to pick them up and by the time we got back, I was exhausted and so high and also understandably horny as fuck, you know?
I ended up having one of the best orgasms of my whole damn life and then, once the world stopped spinning, we watched Fellowship and I fucked around on my phone. I was so stoned that trying to do anything beyond that wouldn’t have been feasible.
I fell asleep relatively early but slept fitfully, waking up a number of times to discover that yes, I was still high. Once I got up in the morning, almost a day after I had first consumed the tonic, I was finally sober, but it took a while to readjust to the world around me.
Conclusion: Four out of six pot leaves for the weed kombucha. Great flavor and the high itself was not a bad one, but it was simply too strong and I would have had a much better time with half the dosage. There is no need to make single-dose weed products quite that strong when a little less would serve the patient twice as well. Stop pretending that a single mouthful of liquid is actually the intended dosage, and just make a nice, delicious beverage that will make people feel great without sending them on a goddamn 18-hour rollercoaster.
