Hello Aydmen.
I have UC, and have started to get some info on MMJ and whether it could help with my symptomps because my goal would be to get off cortisone all together.
As I said in your thread in the UC forum, cannabis is not as potent or fast acting as steroids but it has few side effects (which some consider highly desirable) but can be just as effective long term.
I live in Italy and MMJ is not legal, but it's easy enough to get (in the form of regular pot), so I was wondering if anyone could help me with a step by step guide on how to use it?
Here's a quick step-by-step.
1. Inspect the cannabis. If it smells like mold discard it. If you have a loupe try looking at the flowers with it. You should see some white crystals or white powder on the surface. It might be hard to see to the naked eye. Here is a flower I photographed 48 hours after harvesting it. You can clearly see the trichomes on the surface.
If you have a microscope or a macro lens, you can magnify the trichomes a few times and you would see this:
These translucid gelatinous arms you see contain the cannabinoids. That's the medicine. If the pot you bought was not properly grown or harvested, you might have few of these trichomes.
Visual inspection is the only way to tell the quality of cannabis aside analysis via gas or HPLC chromatography, a tool that is only accessible to trained chemists.
So use a loupe and look at it carefully.
2. You'll want to grind the flower into a finer blend using either scissors, a coffee bean grinder, blender or a specialized grinder like the one you see here:
3. Then you can use that grinded cannabis whichever way you want. You can cook with it and eat it, smoke it by rolling it into a joint or using a bong (glass apparatus that uses water to filter the smoke before it hits your lungs), or what I find is the best option: a vaporizer.
I read that it can be vaporized, but can I use the MMJ I buy for that, or do I have to get a plant?
You can vaporize any cannabis whether it is purchased or grown by yourself.
How many times a week should I take it?
Every day. Most clinical trials had daily regimens, sometimes multiple doses throughout the day. What really matters is the actual dose of cannabinoids you ingest.
To determine this dose, you'd need to know the potency of your cannabis exactly, which can only be determined via analysis in a lab. You can take a guesstimate by looking the average potency of the strain you bought and hope whoever grew it did it correctly.
When in doubt, I'd say 0.1g every 4 hours is a good place to start.
No problem!
