Ask a Stoner: Mixing Strains in Homemade Edibles

Dear Stoner: I’m about to make a bunch of weed butter, but was wondering if extracting from different strains and mixing them together would give me too screwy of a high.
Connie

Dear Connie: The majority of commercial edibles manufacturers don’t worry about mixing and matching, so don’t be too hard on yourself for not having the resources to make infused treats sourced from the same strains. If you’ve ever eaten an edible from a dispensary or fellow baker, it likely contained THC and terpenes from several varieties of pot. Terpenes, the compounds responsible for the smells and flavors of cannabis, are thought to be partly responsible for a strain’s individual effects – but we’ve found virtually no study addressing how ingesting terpenes alters an edible’s high, despite some users’ claims that they can differentiate among them.

I’ve made a few batches of homemade granola and peanut butter from individual strains and haven’t noticed much of a difference in highs that I couldn’t connect to outside activities or diet. An Australian study showed that smoking terpenes doesn’t affect your brain’s endocannabinoid receptors, but that same research also indicates that the terpenes could change THC’s effects through other molecular processes in our bodies. The highs could vary slightly, but at this point, a weed salad of different strains is much closer to the norm.

Send questions to marijuana@westword.com.