Eating weed raw won’t get you high, but you still might experience a few potential benefits. Here’s everything you need to know about how to eat weed the right way.

Does raw weed get you high? 

In short, no. Raw cannabis flowers are rich in THCa, which is an inactive form of THC that isn’t activated until it’s heated up. When you smoke cannabis flowers, fire transforms the inactive THCa into the active THC. However, you can activate raw weed and make it edible through the process of decarboxylation, or “decarbing”.

What does decarbing mean? 

Decarbing essentially means heating raw weed up until the inactive THCa is transformed into active THC. But to break it down even further, its important to note that THCa is thermally unstable. That just means that when you expose it to light or heat, the chemical structure changes into THC.

When THCa is activated and transforms into THC, it can be ingested and make you high. If you have a bunch of leftover flower lying around and want to make it into a batch of edibles, you’ll first need to decarboxylate (decarb) it.

decarbing weed in an oven
Decarbing weed in an oven

Decarbing weed involves heat and time, and it’s a necessary step if you want to get high from eating weed. To decarb weed, the flowers are ground up and heated on a baking sheet in a pre-heated oven set to 220ºF for 30-40 minutes. From there, they’re usually infused to a carrier oil, like cooking oil or butter, since THC needs a fat to bind to. Luckily, cooking oils and butter are easy to use in all sorts of recipes.

How to eat decarbed weed 

After decarbing your weed, you’ll need to infuse it to a carrier oil. Vitamins, nutrients, supplements, and medications are either water soluble or fat soluble. That just means that they can dissolve and become bioavailable to the body either by fat or by water. Water-soluble substances dissolve in water, but fat-soluble substances need fats to become available to the body. THC is a fat-soluble substance, so it needs to bind to a fat to make it bioavailable enough to get you high. The fattier the fat, the better.

eating weed cannabutter

With that said, the standard best practice is using butter to make cannabutter. But decarbed weed can also be infused to alcohol and cooking oils. To do that, you’ll utilize something like the Alpha 420 Edioven or the Magical Butter Machine to infuse the decarbed weed easily. You can also simmer your decarbed cannabis in a pan with your fat of choice at a very low temperature to infuse the active THC to the butter or oil on the stove.

After that, you can use your finished butter or oil in your favorite recipes. Use a dosage calculator to get a better idea of how much you should use in your recipes, or just wing it and see how it goes. Enjoy!

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