03-06-2021: This article isn’t supposed to happen, I was finishing another article since early this morning and then I got an email that profiled some woman that should be recognized for certain achievements because they are very smart and also because it’s Woman’s History Month. The article and some of the videos of these woman touched me in a way that I wasn’t expecting and so changed the trajectory of my plans for the rest of the day. The link to the article that I received in the email will be provided near the end of this article, but first I should explain that I wrestle with some periodic symptoms of anxiety, I’m unashamed in writing about it and my struggles. If you periodically ‘check-out’ this website you never know what I’ll write about, some of the topics vary but anxiety is a reoccurring theme because it’s an obstacle to a healthy life, including some of the people that are closest to me.
I wrote the following three blog posts from a few weeks ago and they all speak to variations of symptoms and reactions that some smart people now call ‘anxiety’, in many respects the way a person understands or misunderstands something and their reaction or over-reaction to their understanding can release ugly or even unhealthy physical and behavioral issues that some modern-day smart people call anxiety, or at least the word ‘anxiety’ is about all they want you to know about it at the time, it’s all they want you to know at the time because they do not think you are capable of understanding more about your condition but they want to keep you safe until you reach that point so they call it anxiety and some Medical Doctors may decide to treat some of these symptoms with prescribed medication (man-made molecules) that will either ease the symptoms or slow down your thought-process to a reasonable level where you possibly may not over-react to foreign stimuli, sometimes i call it a blow to my ego… If you have read this much then i also hope that you can read into the following three blog posts and pick out the anxiety that I speak about… warning … I write much more crude on my blog than I do with the main articles that I write, a little less research and a ton more grammatical errors so put those criticisms aside and read a bit about anxiety from someone that struggles with it …
02-15-21: we're getting a storm in a bit, there is a possibility that we will experience an icing situation as a result, nature is nature so whatever, by i always fear loosing electricity during those storm events so im a little anxious, but probably over nothing. i notice that most of the 'anxiety/friction/conflict' in our household of 5 people are results of poor communication, people don't say what they really mean, we are too distracted or sleepy or hungry or dehydrated... to clearly articulate what we are trying to communicate, but then we assume that everyone else knows exactly what you meant ... thats part 1 ... part 2 is how everyone else reacts to what you were trying to communicate. if you were communicating something with too much of your over-emotional ego meaning you were came across as angry or upset or really sad or overwhelmed then the part 2 is how much slack, grace, understanding, compassion the people around you are willing to extend, or if there someone around you that is combatant in their response to your poor communication, they are going to 'call-out' your misunderstanding or warped ego or temporary insanity... the combative response is artistically portrayed in the following quoted term in a movie, if you don't know what i mean search a web browser for 'i'm your huckleberry' it was in a usa western styled movie, that is how i would use media to convey a combative response to your misunderstanding and laziness to research why you don't understand something before making an egotistical over-emotional manipulative response, i mean when i act angry, or depressed, or really upset, like sometimes when people are over-emotional they simply don't understand and are offended by something so i over-react to my own perception of reality, sometimes i'm 'anxious' because the world and life and truth and reality isn't how it is appearing to me at the moment and i over-react somehow, somehow and on varying levels i have an outburst whether it be an internal blood-pressure raising response, or not breathing properly for a little while, or cant sleep at night, or i just cannot articulate the way that i feel at all but im overwhelmed and upset... or if my outburst is external i come across as a real butt hole to those around me, i can be as big of a knucklehead as anyone when i don't feel well/right and don't understand something, sometimes the people that i love the most experience those moments... sometimes a simple misunderstanding and assuming, not asking relevant questions to the correct people to help solve a misunderstanding triggers all sorts of strange behaviors in people, including friction, or conflict, or division and most of the time its to the people we are closest to because we think that they should know what we meant when we don't take the time to really say what we mean, not what others are supposed to assume that we mean... Fortunately we don't have tons of friction in our house but when we do boy do we do it with drama... fortunately most of us offer understanding to those around us when we aren't feeling very well and over react to misunderstanding or if we just want to be left alone, of if we need someone to talk to, or if we are extra tired, or need to eat, or need to hydrate... you know the times when we are most susceptible to misunderstanding something and get cranky... most of the time we act as a caring loving family that respect one another and are humble enough to talk to others when we aren't feeling well. -- ct
02-15-21 later: we've had the first minor waves of the storm
begin to throw rain, freezing rain, and hints of snow already, it shouldn't be
significant but forecast of icing effects is what has me a bit nervous, we have
experienced at least two significant ice storms in the 20 years that we have
lived in this small community in n.e. usa, and by significant i mean weather
conditions left a heavy and thick coating of ice on top of everything that it
touched... to the point where our small town lost main electric service from
4-days to the worse which was 9 days, thats what makes me anxious when weather
forecast indicates a strong possibility of an icing effect, the trucks that
spread preventative mixtures to help prevent and melt ice are busy on the
streets already so we are probably going to be inconvenienced for an unknown
amount of time, like many challenges/obstacles in life we will just be
inconvenienced for an unknown period of time... i have to mention what trucks
are attempting to do, and what ice storms are and that there will be a
measurable amount of discomfort because many people in the world still do not
have electricity, so they won't know why that is an inconvenience, some people
in the world do not have a shelter that most people in modern society would
think is safe, or adequate to keep bad weather, or insects, or predators
away... not to mention luxuries of having electricity, and safe drinkable
running water, and the safety of removing human waste out and away from their
shelter... many people in the world do not have the luxury of living in a
shelter that had a place to cook food, or to place food in storage thats
adequate for food safety, or to comfortably rest at night on a surface that is
adequate for most modern societies... sometimes i experience symptoms of
'anxiety' when i realize that all people need to live is food, water, shelter,
and other people yet i am privileged to live in a small part of the world where
those things are available in abundance and to unimaginable limitations but i
feel some symptoms of anxiety when i know that some people, many people in the
world do not have access to clean safe drinking water, to nutritious safe food,
adequate safe housing... and they don't know what they don't know so they don't
know how to ask for help, and they don't know how to overcome obstacles in life
that many people in modern society never have to consider, they never have to
contemplate, they don't even think that it's a real issue to anyone anymore
because we live in a privileged society and have our own 'over-complicated'
concerns, or issues, or things that we choose to dwell on... we dwell on
selfish ego-based issues because living in a very populated area in a
privileged society where social acceptance and selfish ambition are prioritized
instead of actually helping other people that aren't doing so well... it's
thoughts like that that also make me anxious sometimes, sometimes my anxiety is
based on things that bother me and are beyond the help of my current
limitations, it's out of my control and i think its 'wrong' so i exhibit
anxious behavior or symptoms... sometimes i don't realize that i am feeling
anxious because things that i think i should be able to fix but i am unable to
fix upsets me, it upsets me when i simplify that idea into a 'the world isn't
fair' mentality and i want to fix something that is out of my control... many
times the simple way that i think i want to fix a situation would cause many
other problems because the thing that i think should fix the problem that is out
of my control in the first place is a misperception of what actual problems
are... so sometimes the world is a better place when i am feeling a bit anxious
instead of trying to fix things that bother me that are completely out of my
control... egos are a funny thing sometimes, but helping other people acquire
basic/essential human needs is not funny sometimes, its just always awesome,
its awesome because its important... one of the reasons that i write is to let
my kids know and understand what sorts of things are important in life,
hopefully i can communicate to other people that aren't my kids to
know/remember about the sorts of things that are actually important in life
too, whats important in life are simply the things that we require to live and
to share our excess/knowledge with those who have difficulty with the important
things in life. -- ct
02-20-21: im working on two short articles, or long articles based on readers perspective but one is difficult because it involves self-analysis of psychiatric/psychological manipulation and im just getting healthy enough to have straightened out some significant misunderstandings that i've have about life, and how i fit in it, and whats my role in life, and how my own compromised ego and false sense of what's important in life 'priorities', well how those things had been causing some misunderstandings in my own life and when certain misunderstandings remain misunderstandings for too long… well the result of my misunderstandings resulted in physical and emotional and straight-up ‘down to my soul' problems that remained unresolved for entirely too long... but the most fortunate thing that happened to me/my life since my last child was born had occurred at the end of the year 2020, the most fortunate thing that’s happened to my life in the past 15 years happened after 10 months of unemployment, 10 months of a highly emotional year which included constant television coverage of severely vandalized cities, leaders who refused to put a stop to the vandalism, people that were hell-bent determined to replace Donald trump with a more socialist replacement, and an infectious virus that killed over a million vulnerable people worldwide, and many americans that may not have realized that there is still unfortunate amounts of dark-skinned folks being mistreated by light-skinned folks in various ways that… many people don’t understand, some people may have noticed, and other people who still experience in painful variations almost daily … the fortunate thing that happened to me after constant watching television and more specifically news television for those painful 10 months happened when I realized that I was anxious about things that I had no control over and I had also run out of and chose not to refill two prescriptions that were to 1 help me sleep, and 2 help various other symptoms grouped under a blanket label of anxiety… people that are taking prescriptions for those types of things should never just stop taking them because that can really screw up your body and mind to the point that it becomes more problematic than the symptoms that you are taking those medicines for in the first place. But for me attempting to end the use of those two medicines seemed logical, because one of the things that got me most ‘anxious’ and I put the word anxious in quotations because in my case the symptoms of anxiety was more or less getting upset to the point where my blood-pressure would get elevated for an unpredictable period of time and the mental anguish that I felt over not being able to control my situation and understanding/anticipating many of the inconveniences that being stuck in slow-moving or no-moving large roadways near overcrowded areas, some americans simply call the problem ‘rush hour traffic’… once upon a time in American history traffic was painful but almost predictable for an hour or so depending on which ‘city’ you were trying to drive in and out of to conduct your days-worth of employment, you have too many people trying to fit into too small of an area all around the same time and you end-up with an hour-glass type of obstruction, a bottle-neck, traffic congestion… call it what you want to it sucks when its something that you force yourself to endure or happen to run into its still terrible traffic… I am noooo good when I subject myself to bad traffic and especially if its on a regular basis… so given the fact that I was unemployed and no longer wasted several hours of my life in unnecessary traffic I thought that maybe I could get away with dropping the medicine for ‘anxiety’ related day-time symptoms and see whether or not it was a mistake (so far so good), and when I realized that the second prescription, the medicine that I was taking for ‘sleep’ was effective for certain psychiatric conditions and happened to make people quite sleepy, but not an appropriate medicine for use in long-term sleeping problems in people that may not have certain psychiatric conditions… I remember that when the v.a. appointed psychiatrist that prescribed the sleep medicine to me mentioning that since most commonly used sleeping remedies didn’t help me, and since there was maternal history of certain psychiatric conditions in my family the doctors thinking was to utilize this different medicine and that it was overall an established and safe drug for long-term use so lets give it a try, and it worked well for a while but it didn’t work well to solve the actual problem of why I ‘couldn’t turn my thoughts and mind off when I should be sleeping)… but it was what I wanted though at the time, I just wanted to take a pill and get on with my busy anxious life, I did not want to get to the root causes of why I couldn’t sleep… so when I stopped taking that medicine and had realized how cloudy it had made me throughout the day it was another part of why 2020 was a great year for me… it ends up that the nice doctor that had prescribed those two medicines to me had left the va healthcare system and when I had called over a year or so later to get new prescriptions for those medicines a new nice person nicely explained to me why she didn’t want me to keep taking the sleeping medicine, and to go back and try one of the other one’s that wasn’t so effective for me in the past… so I did, and it still sucked, but… but I sleep much better lately, I haven’t had to resort to the ineffective medicine for a couple of weeks now, so again, so far so good… it wouldn’t be wise if I had mentioned that I have eliminated two prescribed medications for what are technically psychiatric reasons without mentioning another important thing… all while withdrawing from those medications I have supplemented with cannabis-sativa, as the FDA calls it… some people call it medical marijuana but the Latin name is cannabis-sativa but I just call it cannabis, if you don’t know much about that subject I can explain that there is no actual thing distributed in America from the regular places that you can purchase it from, there is no such thing because ‘medical’ cannabis is the same thing as ‘recreational’ cannabis because they both typically come from the same growers and are both tested through the same laboratories and that reason is because there is medicine in cannabis no matter what reason people think they are in ‘taking’ it for… unfortunately for people that actually benefit from the medicine that naturally occurs in those naturally growing plants many governments world-wide had adopted the same classification of ‘drug’ that’s contained in those plants (that its bad, really really bad) and had adopted laws which prohibited further medical use/research of cannabis, and that was bad, really really bad… because instead of trying to understand/researching the actual medicine that is found in those plants these bad laws forced farmers and profiteers of those plants to seek alternative means of income and so became a ‘black-market’… fortunately too many years later smarter/cooler-heads are prevailing and smart people are thoroughly researching what the actual medicine is doing to the people that could use it, they know about some diseases and other psychological conditions that it is very helpful for but they still lack funding for research mostly due to existing and preventative laws as well as the ignorant and pre-conceived opinions that most people have about the plant, the people who provide the plant, and the unknown reasons of the people who ingest the medicinal compounds found in ‘these plants’… I say ‘these plants’ because there are many naturally occurring varieties/strains of cannabis found throughout the world, and each of those strains have their own unique medicinal qualities, they have their own DNA, it might be a difficult and lengthy process to break-down the dna, compounds and molecules that make up each of those naturally occurring plants but it would probably be quite helpful for smart people to understand why the medicine in those various strains can help different people with various ailments, but some smart people will do it, they will make sure that they have a better understanding, or can ‘scientifically prove’ how those various naturally occurring chemicals help fight some diseases as well as suppress overwhelming psychological symptoms, but… but since many people world-wide still understood that there is medicine in cannabis and world-leaders that wouldn’t spend the time and money involved in further understanding the plants medicine we have a resulted ‘black-market’, and some smart people in that black-market began ‘cross-pollination’ of various strains, and then other enterprising people began cross-pollinating various strains and newly-created cross-strains or some people refer to them as ‘hybrids’, and now instead of a hundred or so naturally occurring varieties there thousands if not 10’s of thousands of manipulated strain hybrids that are sold/purchased world-wide everyday with little scientific research backing up what is good about the medicine, what is bad about the medicine, who can benefit from the medicine and who won’t benefit from it, which strains contain the compounds that will be most helpful for certain conditions and which strains certain people should avoid at all costs… at least the folks that are smart about horticulture understand how to safely grow it, how to safely dry it and how to safely preserve it for as long as safely possible, so people that benefit from cannabis’ medicine can safely purchase safe cannabis free of pesticides, herbicides, inappropriate fertilizers, free of mold and other harmful things that nature and poor farming can leave behind… in other words when people who can benefit from some of the medicinal qualities from cannabis can purchase safely grown and preserved canna they don’t have to purchase poorly grown, possibly chemical compromised products of unknown strain/origin that may not have been harvested at the appropriate time which can render many negative ‘side-effects’ of cannabis, and haven’t been inadequately dried which can leave mold/mildew and other negative natural reactions to formally beneficial compounds, and haven’t been transported in unsafe temperatures, or haven’t been transported in the sweaty underside of someone’s breasts, or down the ill-hygiened crotch of someone else… I guess im trying to say that I have a better understanding of why a particular family of strains of cannabis when properly grown and cured and consumed at the smallest beneficial quantities without pushing into euphoric state is helpful for some of the symptoms that I was taking professionally prescribed molecules/drugs for… One other unfortunate side effect of disallowing medical research for cannabis is that the people that could benefit the most from what the plant has to offer has to approach finding the best strain for their disease or other affliction is that there is a ‘try and see what’s best for you’ approach to finding the best cannabis variant for individual needs, smart people can give you an extremely vague industry-standard guess at whether an indica-based strain is more helpful for your needs or whether a sativa-based strain is typically more helpful to treat your condition or disease or which current hybridized sativa/indica strain is achieving better results for one thing or another but without scientific research and appropriately written laws I can tell you about as much as the professional that is selling me the product… that sounds a bit like a gamble, a crap-shoot of a process to see if the medicine helps your medical requirements but not so much for the parents of a child that suffers debilitating and life-threatening seizures, they are not overly concerned about what of the many strains of cannabis will be the perfect one that brings normalcy to their child after so many man-made molecules/drugs have made symptoms a little better or maybe even worse… those parents are just elated that the product that the professional has provided to them is helping their child where traditional pharmacology has failed… it’s too bad there hasn’t been enough scientific/medical research to know exactly why cannabis is a great anti-seizure medicine for some horrific medical conditions, if there where perhaps we could go a little further to figure out which strain or hybridized strains are most beneficial to someone who requires anti-seizure medicine… But similar to the use of traditional pharmaceutical practices there doesn’t seem to be medical professionals that take a blood sample that will give them the information to prescribe the perfect and available drug, instead some medical professionals will prescribe a medicine or an array of medicines that will most likely help with your condition, they start with the one that is most likely to help and after a trial and error process of they may stumble on the best one that eventually fixes you or eases your overwhelming symptoms… the first drug made me sleepy, the second one made me sleeping and sick, the next one made me … I have experienced an interesting experiment of medical professionals doing their best to help ease the worse symptoms of anxiety and occasional depression, they did their best and at times had prescribed medications that helped me significantly for unpredictable periods of time, and when side-effects of those medicines become menacing enough there is usually another medicine to try that could potentially help, but then again it might not, and just like there is no dna test to make sure that you are taking the medicine that will perfectly fix your problem there is less of a chance of a dna test that would let someone know if a certain strain is the perfect one for them… So you can understand why medicine can be unpredictable in a sense and that is a problem, and why classifying cannabis as unknown and dangerous thing is also a problem, a problem which hasn’t been resolved, in fact it’s a huge problem because the usa federal government still won’t admit that it was wrong in its false cannabis ‘classification’ as a drug which has no medicinal value and is considered too dangerous for use… fortunately there is more than one country in the world, and some of those countries are allowing research on cannabis… but the huge problem is actually a personal problem for me… I am in a very low tax-bracket and have been relying on the usa Veterans Administration Healthcare system as my medical doctors and insurance and since the federal government still refuses to admit it’s mistake and take corrective action I am legally not allowed to ingest any form of cannabis-sativa… and the other problem is that I am what many people consider a ‘patriot’, I am a person that loves our country and hates injustice enough to fight to the death to preserve the freedoms that I am allowed however I have an opinion that although I have our country’s best interest in my mind they do not have my best interest in mind because they still purposely won’t acknowledge the beneficial medicine that is found in a naturally occurring plant, and in that arrogant and ignorant decision to dismiss the value of cannabis my country’s leaders are deliberately and arrogantly and ignorantly depriving me of the most effective medicine that I have taken for symptoms related to ptsd that was ‘caused’ by trauma while working for them… here is a life-hint for you, if your physician’s opinion is that cannabis is a dangerous ‘substance’ and not worth further exploration they do not have your best interest in mind, they have a compromised ego and are unwilling to consider that they might be wrong, they are compromised because they are letting their opinion/assumptions based on very old and barely scientific research that they read about and are also influenced by very opinionated people with no true scientific data to back-up their ignorant opinions, and they let that get in the way of being able to put their patient’s best interest in mind… anyway, I don’t think I will require cannabis forever, because just as life-events/circumstances can become over-whelming enough to cause physical symptoms such as anxiety I have begun to understand the reality that I am no longer in some of those over-whelming circumstances, I have a healthier perspective about a bunch of things that used to shake me to the bone and so I probably will not require as much medication as I once did, and eventually, probably, maybe, hopefully won’t need any, unless I get one of the diseases that cannabis also helps quite a bit with… until then call me what you want, label me as you like to label people that ingest cannabis on a regular basis, and when science proves what millions of people have had an obvious yet vague understanding for thousands of years, which is that cannabis contains naturally occurring medicine, and when science eventually proves that will your negative opinion of cannabis and people who benefit from it change then… probably not but hopefully so. – ct
BACK TO 03-06-21: ... i'm updating to include additional and relevant information, i should also explain that one of the largest 'triggers' of anxious behavior for a period of 15 years in my life was terrible sleep, sleep deprivation was an enormous factor that i assumed was insignificant but was a large factor relating to my negative response to 'everyday stress'... people only need food, water, and sleep to survive, if you really screw-up one or more of those three things you literally entire into a 'tortured state', for real ... Buuuut enough about me and my problems because it’s Woman’s History Month so let me introduce four brilliant woman whom I have never met but would like to some day …
15 min video of Mara Gordon: I haven’t researched more about her, but I’ll just call her an unassuming and unexpected medical cannabis patient that understands therapeutic use for cannabis who also understands the problem with using cannabis medicinally in the USA because current federal, and many local laws prevent people from understanding how much of what type of individual strain of cannabis to use to treat the specific ailment that they need help with… but let her/her video speak for herself. https://youtu.be/jyAGlb8PMRc
46 min video of Dr Sue Sisley: If you don’t understand why many people use cannabis on a regular basis, but are concerned that some people had really bad reactions to certain strains of cannabis that may or may not have been grown in a safe environment preventing a polluted medicine, dried in such a way as to prevent growth of harmful mold, and cured in a way that ensures safe preservation… if you don’t understand why some bad things have happened to some people who have ‘experimented’ with cannabis and you do not want any effort into finding out the ‘why’ to those problems you might just as well outlaw a naturally occurring type of plant because you think that everyone who uses it is actually mis-using it… In fact don’t just outlaw it, but setup other ‘legal’ obstacles that will prevent future research by more daring people that understand there is ‘more to the story’ on cannabis use… I’ll let Sue explain the study that she wanted to conduct and how old laws put in place by lazy people have prevented her compassionate work as a health professional. https://youtu.be/e5g0tnTOCwU
5 min video of Dr Cristina Sanchez: If you live in a country that allows thorough scientific and medical research on plants that have curious effects to humans you might be lucky enough to have some smart citizens like Dr Cristina Sanchez, Spain is lucky to have her and they are smart about their laws regarding cannabis, she’s so smart that I don’t have a lot of my own unsmart words to describe so just watch her video. https://youtu.be/sYIk58mkiK0
29 min video of Dr
Dani Gordon: If you asked my opinion of people who use ‘natural medicine’ as
part of their treatment regiment, maybe even a few years ago, a few years ago
if you asked my opinion of those folks I’m sure it would have sounded
unfavorable, but maybe as much as 7 or 8 years ago I began using cannabis
medicinally but I couldn’t tell you that back then, I couldn’t tell you why I
began using cannabis on a regular basis because all that I knew was that the
crap-load of acceptable medicine that the V.A. was happily prescribing to me
for various ailments lumped under ptsd/anxiety/depression was creating too many
other problems so trying cannabis again seemed like an OK idea to me at the
time… so blah blah blah about me and my history because Dr Dani Gordon already
understands a bunch of the reasons why cannabis and other naturally occurring
things help with certain ailments, she can tell you what I didn’t understand
about therapeutic use cannabis, she knows more about the benefits of cannabis
than all of cannabis critics know combined and I wish she worked at my local VA
hospital. https://youtu.be/YMlUKJnlHjg
… Lastly, well I have nothing more to say really except ‘Thank You Ladies and keep up the good work that you are doing’… so here is the link to the article that I read this morning which influenced the article you just read... here's a link to the cool article that i read this morning “10 Women Scientists In Cannabis We Should Be Celebrating” -- christopher
09-03-21 UPDATE: On the matter of therapeutic use of cannabis sativa-indica hybrids to treat symptoms related to anxiety, lessons learned from the recent years... people consume cannabis around many parts of the world for zillions of years, for many reasons, and for some folks it's a medicine of some sorts... smart people are studying things like canna's physiological effects to the human endocannabinoid-system and then the sorts of hormonal and other ensuing physiological effects related to therapeutic benefits of what many folks simply call 'weed' but other folks call 'cannabis sativa', but that's just ignorantly defined by a USA federal agency, i learned that because they intercepted some seeds that came from a country to the north and i had specifically ordered a few seeds of a few researched strains that were a mix of an indica strain, a sativa strain and a sativa/indica strain, so upon a tiny bit more research it seems that federal drug agencies and federal agricultural agencies and other agencies don't make any such distinctions between any other variants of canna, shame on their prolonged ignorance of notable decades worth of science... anyhow, i had all sorts of nasty emotional and physical and otherwise physiological conditions when i returned from active duty in the late eighties and beginning of the nineties, i was experiencing chronic knee issues and chronic tension including chronic headaches and insomnia and the cardio-vascular spasms of panic attacks and the isolation thing too, along with absent guidance of a well-needed mentor with wisdom on many matters that i was not quite equipped to understand yet, i sought some help from the VA for all sorts of physical and otherwise emotional duress and they helped me the best that they could, but i was also weary of their help and intentions and i held back on sharing relevant information that would have been helpful for better recovery from the many ailments that i sought help for, i didn't trust them and wasn't ready to open up to them, well only to a certain degree, and they tried to help the best that they could and then i chose a 'self-medication' route mostly which was comprised of alcoholic beverages due to it's easy availability, canna helped from time to time when i was exposed to it again in a newer geography and only on a black market type of purchase due to still existing federal laws and a particular state law that had eventually been changed, the unknown strains and poorly grown and harvested and drying and sealing and transportation methods made self-medicating on a black market a very sketchy crap-shoot on whether it was helpful or not, thca and some other unknown cannabinoids were helpful in stress and depressive and other inward-focused but unguided and religion absent reality that i found myself in, i had been exposed to a denomination of christianity known as roman-catholicism, and had been reintroduced to a another 'non-denomination' or more unclassified form of christianity which may have been labeled protestant and had an evangelical and more self-spiritual rather than organized religion connection to a god that different folks from different places call different things... so back to canna as that is the subject of this writing... so when folks seem to self-medicate with canna meaning that you consume it with some sort of regularity then identifying and further understanding why it is helpful to you is fvcking important... when you understand why it is therapuetic to your individual physical/dna and spiritual and nutritional and health and hygiene and otherwise educational and other predisposed and current dispositions... when you have an understanding of exactly why you smoke or otherwise consume/ingest cannabis you can then begin to understand the safest ways to ingest the safest grown and harvested and preserved and exchanged cannabis, and you must also understand the least amount of certain cannabinoid mixtures and levels which bind to the endo-cannabinoid system to provide the most theraputic physiological effects... that is your best-case scenario, but limited laws and disseminated science in the use and around other parts of the world make that best-case scenario difficult if not impossible to many people in many parts of the world, so we do what we do and consume and medicate and in many respects ignorantly ingest a simple yet complicated herb and it's many current variants... i am getting tired as it is getting late, and so to wrap up right now i would say that understanding that smoking cannabis is the most harmful current methods of ingesting, vaporizing is much safer than smoking, understanding the difference is important... and then i would say that in particular disposition and case it seems that moving to a ratio of cannabinoids which favor a higher cbda to thca ratio is more benefifical then low to know cbd at all, cbd is more important to my theraputic requirements than thc itself, it seems that thc is still relevant but in my case it seems that a 50-50 split has been more beneficial than the higher thc producing hybridized strain consisting of an 80 percent sativa and 20 percent indica that i have been safely growing and drying and curing and preserving and ingesting for the past year or two... i like the MOAB strain from AMS for many specific reasons, mostly due to its terpene profile which gives you the smell and taste effect combined with the otherwise therapeutic effects... i know that understanding why it has been helpful was important, and in my case canna was instrumental in weening off of the man-made molecules of western-medicine, i don't take pain-killers, and equally importantly i don't take two other medicines associated with controlling anxiety and depressive symptoms... i still have physical pain that sometimes i also take another man-made anti-inflammatory molecules for, the anxiety and stress thing seem to be more related to perception of reality and an absence of god in it's purest form and decent nutrition and physical conditioning known as working and moving... those sorts of things are very important you know... it's my intention to try to go to the ten-to-one ratio of cbda-to-thca in the near future, it's not cheap to purchase responsible product, and ratios of other present cannabis is still an ignorant unknown to me, i don't know what i don't know and i dislike purchasing things that are helpful in a medicinal sense when there are unknown variables such as other helpful cannabinoids and what ratios all cannabis out to be for the most helpful ingestion, but a 10:1 cbd to thc is what some scientist medical doctor sorts of folks recommend for best therapeutic qualities, so that's what i am aiming for, right now i'm ingesting a 1:1 ratio that is more helpful then the 1:17 ratio strain that i had been growing... BTW, i grow in a very small area which can fit one plant or a few small one's, i am no farmer, just a hobbyist that was growing my own medicine, the learning and growing 'hobby' aspect was a therapeutic in itself... the next seeds that i purchase already have a better ratio built right into them, and the thc level is low enough that it is considered hemp not canna, so that's a bit of a relief from a federal and current state sort of thing... BTW, everything that i just wrote prevents me of qualifying for a federal security clearance and my health care system known as the VA doesn't appreciate it much either... the herb is under-studied and under-utilized when compared to western medicine's pharmaceutical preference to some sorts of ailments, and smart people in various levels of government ought to know better by now... and where the combination of science and god and how they fit into an overall better lifestyle is the ratio that i require the most, you probably do too. -- ct