Hello friends! I hope everyone had an awesome Thanksgiving and ate some really good food! This week I wanted to talk briefly about cannabis journals and why we should be using them. As well as let y'all know that I'll be doing a bit of traveling a bit during the month of December so my blog posts will be sporadic at best. December tends to be an incredibly busy month for all, with visiting loved ones and celebrating the holidays and we should be fully present during those activities. But I am really excited to talk about cannabis journals with this post since I recently published my own cannabis journal for people to use! Taking cannabis as a medicine is truly the "practice" of medicine. The research we currently have, when it comes to cannabis, can tell us that we should start at a low dose, increase slowly, and it can point us in the right direction of which terpenes to start out with, but since we do not have standardization as of yet within the cannabis industry we can not say that what one cultivar or terpene/cannabinoid will do for one person, will do the exact same thing for another person. So I'm going to show you what my cannabis journal looks like, explain the way you might use the journal, as well as talk about what reasons you might want to be using the cannabis journal in the first place. Let's get right into it.
This picture is an example page of what the cannabis journal I created looks like. A good cannabis journal will have lots of prompts to help remind you of the different compounds that are available within the cannabis plant and highlight the compounds that are generally in high amounts in cannabis. It's really important to either gather the information you're going to be recording in the cannabis journal directly from the source you're buying from. Generally, each dispensary will give you a receipt that has what you purchased from them and perhaps the dosage of the total product, but the information we're really wanting will either come from the Certificate of Analysis (COA) that you can look at in the dispensaries or it will be on a sticker on the box or packaging. If you're able to record the information from the COA while in the dispensary, you will get a whole lot of different information than you would from the sticker on the package. The stickers will have the percentages of THC for sure, but maybe the percentages of CBD and some of the terpenes.
Whether you get the information from the COA or the sticker on the package, write down as much information as you have about the product as soon as you purchase it. We know THC (especially in higher doses) can potentially affect our thought process, so writing down the information before consuming the cannabis can help ensure that you're recording accurate information. Here's a short list of information that I would recommend you write down when purchasing cannabis products:
Cannabis type (include as much info as you get here. Do you know where it was grown? How it was grown? What dispensary has it and the cost)
Cannabis product information (is it a smokeable, topical, or ingestible product? What's the total milligrams [mg] of the product? What about mg per individual piece [for edibles]?)
Cannabis profile (this is where you write the amount [mg or %] of each individual compound like CBD, THC, myrcene, etc.)
Symptoms (what are you experiencing that cannabis will help with?)
End result (did cannabis help with the issue you were experiencing? As well as any other issues or expected results that occur.)
So, you're writing all this information down; keeping a good record of the cannabis you've consumed and whether you're getting the expected result (or unexpected result, good or bad) from the product you took, but now what are we doing with this information?? Well this information has two uses that can be incredibly valuable for a person taking cannabis as a medicine. One, it helps you, the consumer, make sure that you're only buying the cannabis that is actually helping your particular symptom. Say you're wanting to consume cannabis to help you sleep. Well you go to the dispensary and pick up a package of edibles that high in THC and the terpene limonene, which tends to have energetic effects, you take the edible and three hours later have a spotless room but aren't the least bit tired.....that doesn't quite help with getting good sleep. But because you're writing all this info down, you now know that if you're going to try another edible, the limonene levels should probably be lower for it to help you get sleep. The second use we would have for this information is to share it with your healthcare provider. There is a huge stigma, still, in healthcare against cannabis even with all the incredible research that is currently coming out. For many people who are taking cannabis as a medicine, it often due to a chronic illness that traditional medicines either don't work for or have too many side effects to make it worth taking (not to mention the price of medications these days 🤯). For those dealing with chronic conditions, you unfortunately might have to "prove" why you're consuming cannabis. Having a record of what has worked for you in the past that you can bring out for whichever provider you're seeing, can go a long way to helping to legitimize cannabis medicine in that providers mind.
Cannabis as a medicine has come a long way in the past few years and I am continuously hopeful for the future of medicinal cannabis. It's going to be awesome to see what happens next. Well, I hope you learned from this post about cannabis journals and why we should be using them. If you would like to help support my business by purchasing my journal, you can do so here. Or if you're local to me, I have copies that you can purchase and they are currently available at the Natural Remedies MMJ in Enid as well. I hope ya'll have a great weekend!
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