I was a child of the Reagan administration whose immediate family—Silent Generation parents and Baby Boomer siblings—had a complex and largely negative relationship with social or recreational drugs. As such, my culture at every level inculcated a strong anti-drug stance that would make me permanently uninterested in hard drugs, and would delay my experimentation with milder substances. I didn’t try brewing coffee until I was 20, and I didn’t buy beer for the first time before I was 30. After that, I remained cautious about trying any drugs that had been illegal and culturally demonized earlier in my life.

Last year, a friend helped me try cannabis for the first time in a controlled setting. They give me half of a THC-infused gummy, and then let me hang out at their place for the next few hours, lying on their couch while they played Tears of the Kingdom on their Nintendo. The effects of this abbreviated dose were mild and pleasant, with my friend texting my partner Amy how I’d fallen fast asleep at one point.

Now that I have returned to freelancing, with more control over my daily schedule, I made up my mind to experiment with cannabis further. Last month, a few days before a flight, I marched into one of the few legal dispensaries in Manhattan and bought two tins of the same weed-gummy brand my friend had shared with me. One tin had gummies treated with THC and a mixture of other additives to resemble indica, the strain of cannabis that is generally regarded as more relaxing. The other mixed in CBD to emulate a hybrid of indica with sativa, the more energizing strain. I wasn’t following any sort of experimental schedule, here; trying two kinds seemed apt, and those looked as good as any, from a cold start.

I have sampled these gummies four times, with differing contexts and observed effects. I share a log of my experiences here in part to organize my own thoughts about it, and also as a public service for others with a similar curiosity about the effects of edibles. My experiences are my own, and represent a mere slice of the possible, but they’re what happened.

Hybrid, half dose, airport

Hours before leaving for the flight, I cut one of the hybrid gummies in half, and ate half immediately. I am a nervous flier, and the power of edibles as a relatively safe and inexpensive antidote for air-jitters was something multiple friends had described to me. I put the other half in a sandwich baggie and threw it in my backpack, figuring I might like it for the flight back home, and not daring to take more than that.

All advice I could find online said that traveling through TSA with edibles is technically not allowed. TSA operates under federal laws, and the federal government still regards cannabis as a controlled substance, even if an increasing number of states have growing tolerance for the drug. But—the advice continued—TSA agents are busy enough already that they’re unlikely to care about seeing some edibles, and the worst that can happen is that they’ll make you toss them out.

Still, the dose was enough to make me feel a ratcheted-up sense of caution verging into, yes, paranoia. Because I ate the half-dose too early, it started hitting just as we got to the airport, and I must have looked quite nervous as I watched my bag vanish into the scanner. And then, with a terrible sense of inevitability, an agent pulled me aside for a thorough pat-down—but not due to anything in my bag, which went through the scan unmolested, even if I didn’t. And then I was sent on my way, one half still in my bag and the other fizzing behind my eyes.

I don’t think the drug made this flight any easier. All around, I think I got the dosage, the timing, and the strain all wrong. In retrospect, I should have kept all of my first experiments at home, until I had a better sense of my personal reactions and tolerances.

Hybrid, half dose, hotel

Our flight home got canceled due to weather, and for convoluted reasons outside of our control Amy and I had to return home on two rescheduled flights, separated by a full day. Frustrated and not wishing to repeat the mistakes of last time, I ate the other half during my last night away, and whiled away the evening alone in the hotel.

It was all fine. With nothing stressful happening, the mild dose encouraged me to just fart around online a bit and play the new edition of Riven on my Steam Deck until it was time for bed. I considered doing some work, but felt resistance against pushing my brain towards that kind of organized thinking, much like when I’ve had a beer or two. I didn’t otherwise feel any noteworthy effects.

Hybrid, full dose, home

The following Saturday, after dinner, I announced my intent to try a full dose of the same gummy variety. Amy made a statement of benign acknowledgment and turned her attention back to her No Man’s Sky expedition, and so I proceeded. I stayed home for the whole experience and was able to observe myself in a completely comfortable environment.

I have to admit that I was surprised at how many stereotypical effects of pot visited me, this time. I learned that it takes my body around 90 minutes to digest the gummy enough to start releasing the drug into my blood, because that’s when my eyes turned red. I could feel it happening—a light prickling sensation—and went to the mirror to confirm it. A growing sense of woozy weight and lagginess of motion soon followed.

I hadn’t prepared any particular activities for myself, so I simply crossed the apartment—carefully—and lay down in bed. There, I experienced a number of interesting perceptual effects from the drug:

• I enjoyed an auditory hallucination of our neighbors’ air conditioners sounding a lot like a pounding surf outside the apartment window. I thought, “I bet I can convince myself that I’m not in Manhattan, but I’m at actually resting in a lovely beach house.” I closed my eyes, I was instantly in that beach house, even though I was also aware that I wasn’t. It was great fun.

• I kept my eyes closed and let my mind drift. I visited homes and other places from my past, and either could remember their interior layouts in stunning detail, or hallucinated that I could. Either way, I explored these spaces with a clarity of visualization that I generally can’t achieve while sober.

• Without meaning to, I fixated on details from the No Man’s Sky soundtrack I hadn’t noticed before, picking out leitmotifs in the background music as Amy explored the galaxy, and finding it quite clever and beautiful.

A little later, as I sat on the couch and watched Amy play, I continued to be struck by singular elements of the game’s sound effects. At one point, while she wandered around a space station, a certain rhythmic pumping or pulsing sound in the backdrop captured my attention completely. I tried to tell her about it but I couldn’t express it in any sensible way.

Then we watched an episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks and I enjoyed it even though I had absolutely no ability to follow the plot; the characters’ motivations from scene to scene left no trace of an impression on my short-term memory. Putting effort into remembering resulted in such a mental strain that I gave up trying in short order. Writing this, I couldn’t tell you a single thing that happened during the episode. This is not the show’s fault.

As for gustatory effects, my appetite did ratchet up and stay constant for the length of the high, just like the jokes say. It was entirely mental: my guts didn’t request more food, but it seemed like a swell idea anyway. This is how I discovered the surprising intensity that strong flavors carried. In particular, we happened to have a bag of orange jelly candies, and they absolutely overwhelmed me. Normally I find these candies mildly sweet and pleasant, but under the drug’s influence they were quite literally and simply one of the most delicious things I had ever tasted. I ate only a few, very slowly. Magnificent.

I sobered up completely by bedtime. The whole experience from consuming the gummy to coming down lasted around five hours.

Indica, full dose, home

About ten days later I found myself in an inexplicably foul mood with little to be done for it, so it seemed like an apt time to continue the experiment by trying one of the indica-only gummies. Now that I had a better sense of timing, I ate it a bit before dinner, and managed to accomplish some chores and tasks before the effects arrived.

I have fewer interesting notes here, in part because I performed less mental exploration, and also because—I suspect—of the difference in cannabis strain. Hallucination and fixation were absent this time. Instead, I felt something like a deep but soft-edged drunkenness; my bad mood melted away and I felt quite relaxed and chill, just like it said on the tin. (Literally: the two flavors I purchased were labeled “Balance” and “Chill”, respectively.) I mentioned this to Amy, while in the depths of it, and she remarked that I wasn’t acting particularly drunk from her perspective. That seemed like a positive.

After things got started I watched the film Hundreds of Beavers and had a marvelous time all by myself. Once again, I kept forgetting the main character’s motivation and history from scene to scene, but the plot of this particular film is so simple that I could grasp it again with a little conscious effort. (I enjoyed the film so much that I watched it a second time while sober two days later, and do count it among my favorite movies now.)

You know that I had some more of those orange candies. I also sampled some mint-chip ice cream, and some peanut butter. The latter is one of my favorite foods, and to my delight I found a new savory depth to its flavor, an earthy nuttiness I don’t normally taste.

The length of the high seemed a little longer than before, but not by much. Maybe six hours from gummy to landing.

Where to from here

I look forward to more experiments from home, and want to more carefully prepare some snacks and different kinds of media—music, in particular—ahead of time. I’d also like to try purposefully meditating, or just doing nothing and letting my mind wander more; the more sativa-emulating edibles might be more appropriate for that.

I don’t expect that I’ll write another public journal about it. The particulars of my cultural background made this feel like crossing a long-standing threshold, something that deserved an acknowledgment like this. With that now accomplished, I hope that a mindful and conservatively paced use of cannabis might nudge me towards a richer life, perhaps with more interesting things than the drug itself to write about.