I got a good chunk of "marijuana flower" on my last trip to a place where the weed is both legal and good.

The issue is I have asthma I don't like to smoke, so, what was I thinking?

Knowing weed degrades over time, and my past experience with "cannabutter" being smelly and laborious, I decided to do a "citric acid decarb and extraction". I ended up making something far too acidic to eat. When combined with baking soda to neutralize the acid to salts, I ended up making something far too salty to eat.

So, my second exploration into making edibles was a silly failure. Since then, I learned that cannabis coconut oil extracts better and is far less finnicky than butter (since there is no clarification step).

With the remaining weed I had, I followed a simple canna-coconut oil recipe. It took a few hours to grind the weed, decarb it in the oven, and then slowly process it into the oil. I ended with some frozen chunks. By my math, a 1g chunk of the oil would yield ~5mg of THC.

The 5mg of THC is a dose I was very familiar with, and that assumed a lossless extraction, so I ate the 1g chunk to gauge the effect. My tolerance was low, but it was a small dose.

I was wrong.

I got ridiculously blitzed.

I ruined my weekend.

I'd like to break down what went wrong:

• My math was simply incorrect. I did it in my head, and rounded in ways that got me almost 3x off. My extraction would have been about 15mg THC max when using the correct numbers. (Weight of flower x % THC / grams coconut oil = mg THC per chunk.)

• My chemistry was incorrect. I failed to account for THCa, which decarbs to THC. The flower was about 18% THC, but about 28% THCA. I don't actually understand what these numbers describe (they surely are not additive, or the flower would be 46% THC+THCa crystals, which seems like too much.) My understanding -- which can be very wrong, I'm not a chemist -- is that this 28% THCa is the number I should have looked at, meaning my edibles had about 50% more THC than I expected. So, that's about 22.5mg max in my edibles, which is huge for my tolerance level.

• My recipe was different than what they generally use. I used coconut oil (pure fat) and soy lecithin. No idea if this is true or just Stoner Mythology, but supposedly soy lecithin makes edibles much stronger, making onset faster and absorbed THC higher. This means the 22mg THC would be more than if I had typical edibles. Anecdotally, this checks out: I was high for ~24 hours and I started feeling high within minutes.

It's really hard to parse this information because so much of what's available are, stoner Redditors who haven't maintained lab notebooks. All I know is I have about 100 grams of coconut oil that gives me nightmares if I had too much. The smallest piece I can break off gets me quite high.

This is the first time in my life I've had access to an amount of Drugs that I could use to cope with something stressful. I don't want to, because that's a path I don't want to go down. But also because I am afraid to physically touch this nightmare oil and I can't be assed to put on gloves.

I'm just personally stupefied by how fantastically effective these edibles I just made are, given I made "weed salt water" during my last attempt.

TLDR: I don't smoke so I tried to make edibles from my weed. I made the worst edibles imaginable, "corrosively-acidic weed water". Trying to salvage it by neutralizing the acid, I made inedible "weed salt water". Third try's the charm, and so I made weed coconut oil. It was far more effective than I could have imagined.