How to 'micro-dose'

Life-hacking with teeny tiny marijuana mints

Micro-dosing — taking small amounts of the main active, hallucinogenic ingredient in cannabis — is surging among U.S. consumers. The practice is driven in large part by the rush of curious but inexperienced pot users entering the marketplace. High performers — whether it’s busy child care providers or software engineers — as well as retirees and others who don’t want to smoke or smell like smoke are gravitating to the trend as part of an active lifestyle as well as for medical reasons.

Micro-dosing means taking anywhere from 1 to 5 milligrams of THC at a time, an amount that should not cause major psychological effects. You need to be a California medical marijuana patient to buy lab-tested micro-dose products like popular 2.5 mg mints ora mouth spray, or a low-THC cannabis e-cigarette, called a vape pen.

This way of using cannabis stands in contrast to traditional methods like smoking joints, hitting pipes or bongs, or taking regular edibles, which can range from 25 to 1,000 mg per serving. In Colorado, a standardized dose of THC is 10 mg, but Berkeley nurse practitioner Maria Mangini says 10 mg is much too high for a new user.

“Too much THC is where people can get into trouble,” she said. “I would say 2.5 mg of THC is probably a good amount for somebody who’s really, totally cannabis naive, maybe even less.”

People tolerate cannabis exposure differently, and they can explore that tolerance in a controlled manner through microdosing, she said.

“I really believe that the current state of cannabis medicine makes it necessary for every patient to be in an individual, controlled experiment,” Mangini said. “That kind of self-(dosing) really begins best

with a micro-dose. ”

Micro-dosing also challenges assumptions about why people use cannabis. Micro-dosing is often about leaning in to life, said Christie Strong, communications director for Kiva, a leading California edibles maker.

“We’re trying to talk about this as a productivity tool, as a sort of life-hacking tool,” she said.

Kiva has heard from Google engineers who micro-dose all day at work, as well as busy women who use a tiny amount of cannabis to manage stress while maintaining focus.

A typical way to micro-dose is to try something like a 2.5-mg Petra mint from Kiva. Or a quarter piece of a 10-mg sublingual strip from Kin Slips. The active ingredients enter the bloodstream through the mouth, causing onset of effects within 20 minutes.

As legalization progresses, microdosing might become the new norm..

“I think people are going to be using this in droves in the future — it’s going to become like vitamin C,” Strong said.