0:00:00.4 April Pride, host: This podcast discusses cannabis and is intended for audiences 21 and over.
0:00:09.4 Kimberly Dillon, Frigg CBD: It was just so intense and I just didn’t wanna be that high, and I was like, so many people out there have this problem. They want to consume edibles, but they’ve had a bad experience or they wanna consume edibles and they have no idea how to dose themselves.
0:00:24.8 April Pride, host: Welcome to The High Guide. I’m your host April Pride, host. Most of us know either first-hand or through someone else, a bad experience with cannabis edibles. And too often it’s one of the single events that forever affects their interactions with the plant. Where responses like, “Weed really fucks me up,” or “No, thanks, I prefer to drink,” become lifetime reasonings to never get high. On this episode of The High Guide we’ll share a memorable story of an unexpected edible dose along with a few tips from our guides for how to avoid these oftentimes traumatizing incidents. We all have a story, which brings us to our glossary term of the week, distillate. While you likely associate oils and butters with cannabis edibles, distillate is yet another very common option used for infusion. In fact distillate is the most common base used in vape carts and edibles made today.
0:01:21.9 April Pride, host: It can also be dabbed and ingested orally, making it a very versatile form of cannabis. It’s highly potent and pure, so if you’re ingesting some, make sure you know just what you’re getting into. Our guides for this episode of The High Guide are Kimberly Dillon, founder of CBD Stress Less Beauty brand, Frigg, Lisa Snyder, co-founder of Tokeativity, and Devika Maskey, co-founder and CEO of TSO Sonoma, which offers cannabis culinary experiences. There’s a lot to learn here, but we’ll kick it off with a story from Kimberly.
0:01:54.1 Kimberly Dillon, Frigg CBD: So I love edibles more than any other way to consume cannabis. I will say two opposing things, one, I’m not a big drinker, but I like the idea… I love when you’re kinda dizzy and drunk, so I say that to say I’ve never had a bad edible experience, because I like the feeling of being disoriented. I don’t know if that makes sense, but…
0:02:21.0 April Pride, host: It does, I’m just trying to figure out where the fun comes in.
0:02:24.4 Kimberly Dillon, Frigg CBD: Like I just really love that I have no idea what’s going on, one of the things that I do, and this sounds horrible. So I used to be the chief marketing officer for a company called Papa & Barkley, and this was right around 2016 before the rules were in place and people were making infused everything. And they would just be in the office, and so you would just learn to know when to ask like, “Is that infused or not?” But it was the Easter or Passover or something, and there’s a hollow bread and I was just laying on the table and I was like, “Well, how would you infuse hollow bread like that wouldn’t… Whatever, I’ll take a slice.” Anyway, I’m driving down the five and when I get high, my brain just shuts off on edibles. Apparently I had stopped as if there was a stop sign, but I was on the freeway.
0:03:17.6 April Pride, host: Oh, my God. Kids, do not try this at home. And no one in the industry recommends that you eat… But you didn’t know it was infused, right? So this was not on purpose.
0:03:28.6 Kimberly Dillon, Frigg CBD: I didn’t know it was infused of course I would have expected this intense experience. I was just like, “Oh, someone should have completely labeled this.” It’s about like… I find that when people have these experiences, a lot of times they have no idea what they took, how many milligrams. There’s usually a missing piece of information and in a lot of the horror stories I’ve heard personally.
0:03:50.2 April Pride, host: Yes, definitely. Yeah, that… Okay, what happened after he stopped on the five?
0:03:57.9 Kimberly Dillon, Frigg CBD: You know, I’m just touched by God because a cop came up to me and I thought he was trying to ask me out, and he was like, “No, you are stopped in the middle of free way.”
0:04:10.5 April Pride, host: That doesn’t seem touched by God.
0:04:11.7 Kimberly Dillon, Frigg CBD: No in the sense and then that he thought the whole thing was funny.
0:04:16.9 April Pride, host: You told him… Did you tell him the truth?
0:04:19.8 Kimberly Dillon, Frigg CBD: Yeah. Swear to God.
0:04:21.3 April Pride, host: You’re like, I mean… That’s amazing. He’s like, “Ma’am, just get home safely, please.” Is that what he said to you? They always say that. “Just get home safely please.”
0:04:26.6 Kimberly Dillon, Frigg CBD: Yeah, like…
0:04:29.8 April Pride, host: Okay, well, Kimberly clearly has a wonderful attitude about her edible experience gone awry. It’s safe to say that not all of us would react with such composure or humor. But her story absolutely illuminates how a scenario can quickly shift into unexpected territories and what could have been done to prevent it in the first place. Hint… Hint, something like labeling.
0:04:51.6 Lisa Snyder, Tokeativity: I think there’s ethical edibles, when you wanna share them is so important, and I think the ethics of this are, if you make edibles, to try to communicate with clarity that it is an edible and potentially how much THC or CBD is in there and label it. Just as if you were labeling something that might have an allergen in it, I think it’s just the responsible thing to do, and when we were doing in-person events, some women wanted to come and bring edibles. And we had a very hard core rule that if that was the case that you had… It had to be less than 5 milligrams per piece or whatever it is, and it had be very clearly labeled. And it had to be away so that it’s not confusing with things that are not. Because that’s something that us as cannabis consumers we’re like, “Oh, you know haha… That was an edible, I didn’t realize that.” We can laugh it off but people can be traumatized by consuming something they didn’t realize was an edible. And I feel like the responsible thing for us as folks in the industry and also we can advocate for this is if you’re gonna bring an edible to a party, label it. [laughter]
0:06:11.0 Lisa Snyder, Tokeativity: Keep it away from the snacks that are not, and try to make it low-dose unless it’s a crazy sonar party and you’re really truly… It’s like everybody knows what’s up, that’s a whole different story. But if you have mixed company, then I think the responsible thing for folks to do is to label.
0:06:27.1 April Pride, host: Thankfully labeling items that have been infused with cannabis takes the biggest bite out of the confusion. Yes, you have consumed a weed edible, but do you know how much weed was an in it? Here we find the confusion dosing a consistent deterrent to a positive edible experience.
0:06:44.9 Lisa Snyder, Tokeativity: It’s interesting as an edibles judge for High Times, there are all these different edibles that I was trying in all kinds of different ways that they were communicating how to dose it. And even though I’m in the cannabis industry, I work everyday, all day long in this space, I was still confused by many of the packages. And how do you break apart something that isn’t already broken apart, like a chocolate bar or something? And how do you stop yourself from eating more than just five milligrams, a little tiny bite when it’s so delicious you wanna eat the whole thing? These are all really interesting questions to ponder and I do think that there needs to be a lot of work done in the edible space in regards to packaging and communicating and making it very easy. I’ve also gotten bottles of things that have droppers with no labels on the droppers, so you don’t actually know if you’re taking, again, 10 milligrams or 2 milligrams. It’s so confusing. So I think the issues just really lie in the confusion around dosing in general. And we have a long way to go for folks to really feel comfortable making those choices for themselves. And in the meantime, we need things that are already kind of cut apart, already in some kind of gummy form, very clearly labeled and consistent.
0:08:08.4 Devika Maskey, TSO Sonoma: Just making sure everyone is really clear on the dosing of everything is super important and especially if there’s a mixed crowd and we wanna create welcoming spaces and we want everyone to have fun. So we don’t want somebody who feels awkward in the corner and not wanting to talk because they over-medicated. We want everybody to be social and enjoying the experience.
0:08:33.4 April Pride, host: I was telling someone, I guess it was yesterday, that even if you have a “Bad” edibles experience, there’s always a learning. There’s always something you can look back, whether it’s like, “I can’t trust myself in that situation again.” Or “I can’t trust that friend in that situation again to look out for me, give me the right thing.” Whatever the case may be. I feel there’s always a learning with bad edible experiences.
0:09:01.5 April Pride, host: Thank you for listening to this episode of The High Guide. We hope you found it informative and entertaining, and perhaps even encouraging, should you be a person that’s been avoiding cannabis due to an unfortunate run-in with an edible. As legalization and normalization continue, there’s less and less mystery regarding just what’s in these products. And some careful attention to labeling and dosing goes a long way to keeping us comfortable. Of course, you’ll find a new episode of The High Guide every Friday. Subscribe and follow wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you’re looking to stay in closer contact, give us a follow on Instagram @thehigh.guide and subscribe to our newsletter at thehigh.guide. This is April Pride, host. Thanks for joining me on The High Guide.
