Hacker News Reader

Comment by starttoaster | Hacker News Reader

I can only speak anecdotally, but recreational cannabis product has all but cured my insomnia sleep issues. While off prescribed medication, I will stay up all night exhaustedly writing code and watching TV. While on prescribed medication, I will stay up all night exhaustedly watching TV without the bare minimum amount of focus to write code. If I take some edibles around 8PM, I'm out like a light by 11PM.

The final straw for me was being awake for 2 days straight a few years ago. I would lay down and close my eyes and just be exhausted while doing nothing.

View on HN

Weed does miracles for people truly suffering from insomnia. (At least for me)

However, there is still a risk/reward equation. If I take too much, there’s a noticeable difference in next day cognitive performance. Like anything, weed is only an effective medical tool when used in extreme moderation. The same as diphenhydramine, ambien, etc.

Agree about the moderation. The downside of the edibles is that after a month or two, I start needing more. When this happens I abstain and go back to my prescribed medicine for 2-3 weeks, and then continue back with the dosage that I allow myself. It's a bit of a cycle to watch over and maintain, but at least for me, the miracle of decent sleep far outweighs the cons.

This happens to me with my prescription meds too. Always have to go back to the doctor and get a higher dose. Then the higher dose causes side effects, it sucks.

What sort of edibles and how much does such a regimen cost? I assume it’s not covered by insurance? Is your prescribed med one of the z drugs (ambien, lunesta, sonata)?

I take an edible that advertises it came from an Indica strain, where I take it in a dose of 20mg of THC and 10mg CBN. It costs me around $150/month, which I suppose it depends if you consider that a large amount of money. It's not as cheap (from the perspective of my wallet) as my prescribed medicine, granted, but works much better. And correct, I just buy it at a local dispensary, no prescription.

My prescription drug is Trazodone, which so far has worked better than nothing. But it's a bit more involved of a process of winding down, for me. I have to make a conscious decision to stop everything I'm doing with it, and concentrate on just getting sleepy. Which is both maddening and a horrible waste of my waking time, in my opinion. And then every moment that I lay in bed, I have to make sure my mind is calm, or it's like I instinctively fight the drug and end up awake. On the edibles I just AM calm, I don't have to try to be anything.

>My prescription drug is Trazodone, which so far has worked better than nothing

Someone I know tried Trazodone but it had similar problems as well as other minor side effects. They switched to Quetiapine in extremely low dose and it worked great, however they are concerned to use it long term as it's not the main reason that drug is usually prescribed. Out of curiosity, I am wondering if you have tried that and can compare it to the current edible that is working for you?

I have not tried it, sorry. Unfortunately I only started trying to do something about my sleep issues recently, and so Trazadone was the first thing my doctor prescribed so far. Previously I just worked around them by getting night shift jobs and blaming that for my lack of sleep, heh.

Quetiapine isn’t typically on the menu for mere insomnia. At least that’s what I’ve been told when I’ve asked various doctors about it. Trazodone acts an antihistamine at lower dosages as I’ve been told. My experience is that it’s much more than that, and that modern medical science is woefully unaware of what they’re doing when prescribing such drugs.

Thank you very much for the data point. I don’t think $150 is very much given the impact of chronic insomnia. And most of that is going to back into taxes anyway, so it’s socially beneficial.

Have you worried about dependence— an issue with any sleep med? I’ve been told daily use of edibles isn’t viable without taking days off to reset tolerance. I don’t think 20mg is very much, so maybe keeping the dose moderate and sub-recreational is key.

I think this is a balanced approach --for just about any addictive drug with undesirable side effects from overconsumption.

Unfortunately, we tend to be in the extremes rather than the middle. We've either criminalized it, or have it wide open. Maybe after a decade or so of studies that are enabled by the legalization, we can get better guidance on usage and control.

THC interferes with the REM cycle. This is why when heavy smokers quit, they have crazy dreams for a few weeks. That's probably why you feel so groggy the next day when you take higher doses. You were asleep, but not getting good sleep.

Pot helps you fall asleep, but it does not help you get good quality sleep.

I'm sure to someone getting little to no sleep, not-great sleep would sound like a huge improvement.

Correct. I understand it is "less good", but as someone with Restless Leg Syndrome THC is the only "medication" I have found that stops the electric feelings in my legs almost immediately. Luckily RLS does not flare up every day any more, and my ADHD medication I take right before bed helps a ton. I recall the worst ever period I had of RLS was 36 hours of no sleep when I finally just blew a fuse over the issue.

Thanks for this, that was exactly my experience, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39786167. In the long run I think THC made my insomnia issues worse, or at least prevented me from addressing the root cause sooner.

I would bet that was strain related as mentioned in this thread, it took me going through 30 strain’s before realizing this for myself.

Before I started on MMJ I slept in 2 hour shifts, every 12 hours or so, due to neuropathic pain. Now I sleep for 8 hours - once I get to sleep. It seems that daily use does make it a bit harder to fall asleep (racing mind?) but at least I'm not just getting the bare minimum anymore.

Note that taking CBD reduces the negative effects of THC use, at the cost of less stoned. If using for medical reasons that's not a big deal. If recreational use it probably is.

I feel the cannabinoid and terpene profiles determine these REM cycle disruptions and grogginess just the same as they affect the onset of being sleepy. I sleep great on indica based land races, but terrible on most modern strains that have a higher THC percentage or hybrids of sativa strains. Hopefully in the future we can break down these differences in the profiles of each strain rather than having blanket studies and opinions that might be neglecting that these profiles can be significantly different in their effects, especially regarding sleep and medical use.

Weirdly, since I started using low doses of THC + CBD flower before bed it has increased my dreaming (or at least recall of it) substantially. For many many years now I would always wake up in the middle of the night out of breath, sweaty and sore whenever I'd have intense dreams, possibly due to trauma. Now I stay asleep through the most vivid and intense dreams, and wake up reasonably relaxed and well rested at normal times. Has been going on for several months now ever since I started using tiny amounts of cannabis intermittently again (no more than 4x per week, often less, and below 0.05g per "dose").

> Like anything, weed is only an effective medical tool when used in extreme moderation.

and I just wish it would be subject to the same per ailment clinical trials that other substances are. so that for each specific thing people claim it helps with, there are specific side effects listed and studied.

zero of these state level efforts have that and we are still stuck in the medieval age of anecdotes, its embarrassing

We are missing the science due to prohibition. This is the kind of change that is needed to foster more science.

I'm aware

The anecdotes masquerading as enlightenment are frustrating.

Do you get the impression that anyone here is masquerading anecdotes in this conversation, or are you speaking generally? Because I disclaimed my whole parent comment with, "I can only speak anecdotally..."

Its not a pejorative statement about the people here

Its a pejorative statement about how thats all we have to work with

Reading this, I’m wrestling with why I can conform to “prescribed” dosages of potentially abusable pharmaceutical like stimulants, but I find it so hard to just have a little weed I force my wife to keep hers in a safe and opt for sleeping pills for my insomnia.

Only answer I can come up with is societal norms. Taking more prescriptions than prescribed makes you an addict, smoking more weed is just normal.

Counter anecdote - THC basically ruined my sleep for a while. Granted, it was mostly my own fault, but I've just become wary because I've seen so many advertisements promoting CBD and THC as cures for basically everything that I think it's important to be wary of the risks.

In my case, I just ended up doing way too much THC in the evenings and at night so I would essentially pass out. I would sleep, but my sleep quality was really bad and I felt "groggy and foggy" the next day. When I tried to go off it, for a long time I would wake up every night around 3 AM and couldn't get back to sleep.

To be clear, I totally agree THC does have medicinal uses, but lots of medicines can cause a host of side effects and other problems (and sleep medicines in particular are a notorious bunch for dependency issues). If you go the THC route to help sleep, just be more careful than I was.

> I've just become wary because I've seen so many advertisements promoting CBD and THC as cures for basically everything that I think it's important to be wary of the risks.

I've been part of interviews of various doctors in relation to cannabis. Some are so gung-ho it comes across that you should take no other medicine other than cannabis. Others come across from the point of view as it's just one more tool in the tool chest of treatment options. So even in the medical community, there's no consensus. I'm hopeful that the rate of current research will start revealing something closer to fact, and hoping bigPharma doesn't come along and ruin it

It’s going to be such a relief when medical professionals can speak to specific “strains” (is this a problematic term here?) of people instead of trying to speak about all humans as though they all fit in one homogenous bucket.

Internally we are wildly different and surprisingly varied.

My guess would be once all of the individual molecules have been studied, they'll be able to prescribe a cocktail of cannabinoids as needed. Provided of course it is as beneficial to health treatments as hoped

dosis sola facit venenum, 'only the dose makes the poison' -Paracelsus

> all but cured

I'm confused - doesn't that mean it has done anything, but cured - so it didn't cure?

In this context it typically means it treats the symptoms almost completely. But if you stop treating it, the underlying problem is still there.

“All but X” is an idiom in (at least American) English which means essentially “99%”. So in this case it didn’t literally cure his insomnia, but is so close to having done so that it may as well have.

It just sounds somehow so wrong to me, I'm not a native speaker though.

Native speaker here, this has kept me distracted on a couple long drives.

  “X is all but Y”

  Interpretation 1: X has moved so close to Y that it may as well be Y  
  -> X loosely equals Y   
  (I think this is the colloquial understanding)

  Interpretation 2: In the set that represents X, Y has been removed  
  -> X is not Y

Excuse the poor notation, I hope this is clear! The tldr is this confuses me too sometimes

Yeaaah. But it feels like "all" could be everything that is positive OR negative, so if you have all the positive and all the negative, and you take the one positive away (or the most positive), it is slightly negative (or very negative)?

Yea! I thought along the same lines, but I wasn't sure how to write it out. If X is on a spectrum, and Y is removed, it's closer to not-Y.

Edit, eh your explanation probably explains it better anyway :)

I really appreciate your positive responses to my off-topic out-of-blue observations.

It throws me off because it sounds sarcastic depending on which parts you emphasize. "The fire department all but put out the fire".

Counter-anecdotally, doesn't work at all for insomnia, at anything short of heroic doses. (Or some there some variable I'm possibly overlooking? I got this prescribed for insomnia a couple months ago and have largely given up—it didn't seem effective).

I originally started smoking to help with my insomnia, and it was effective for quite some time. However, I also learned that I just generally enjoy being high, and am reasonably functional on it, so I started smoking for general relaxation purposes. Now that I am a frequent smoker, my tolerance has grown, so it is more of a mixed bag when it comes to putting me to sleep. Heroic doses don't help, at least when smoking (even when using high purity concentrates, etc.) (though edibles are more consistent in this regard,) even though I stick to the general "wisdom" of only using indica strains. There's mixed science on how impactful the terpene makeup is, though some are considered psychoactive or at least modulating on the uptake of cannabinoids via the entourage effect, so it's possible that terpene content could impact how useful you find it for sleeping. Or you might just respond to it more similarly to how I do now that I am a regular smoker, and not see significant impact on your ability to sleep.

I don't know what you were prescribed, but for me, smoking and vaping doesn't have the same effect. Edibles, and in particular I take ones that use Indica strains with some CBD, do the magic for me.

And it took me a bit of experimentation to figure out the correct dosage in milligrams for my body. An interesting thing about cannabis is that you don't really risk a ton from over-indulging besides maybe just having a bad time with some uncomfortable mental state (paranoia and dizziness.) I'm a fairly small person and 20mg is what does it for me. But you might try 10mg or 30mg. I know people that take 50mg, or have (perhaps irresponsibly) taken 100mg. It's mostly up to you to figure out your dosage, and in most cases I'd say listening to your doctor for dose is the right call; for this I'd say maybe take it a bit more as a suggestion than a rule, until you find a sweet spot. If you find a sweet spot. Wish you the best!

> Indica strains with some CBD

what does this mean? any cannabis plant with THC will have CBD. the amount of the minor cannabinoids differ depending on the cultivar. recreational weed has been cultivated to spike the THC so it is way out of balance to the other cannabinoids, and in my current understanding seems to drastically reduce its use for medicinal purposes. the popular phrase is "entourage effect" of all of the cannabinoids working together.

Many strains out there are below 0.05% CBD, but you can find much higher if you look for it. In my legal state every cannabis dispensary has at least one 1:1 or 2:1 CBD to THC strain, often several. It's not that hard to find.

Worst case, you can order hemp flower (very high CBD with trace amounts of THC) legally in many places and just combine that with a high THC strain at whatever ratio you desire. You can pretty easily make edibles yourself this way with an online guide, it's basically just following a recipe.

This is actually ended up working pretty well for me! The HN replies I got provoked me to go out and obtain a high-CBD hemp strain (22%), which turned out to be the key variable. I had often before tried combining THC + CBD strains, as you describe—but with more conventional, lower-strength CBD. It just turned out the "correct" CBD dosage for me a lot higher than I had explored!

Appreciate all the technical advice in this thread.

Thank you!

Not sure where you are located, but if available and you're willing to try again, look for gummies with CBN in them. There are various ratios, 2:1, 4:1, 5:1, 10:3. The 5:1 work really really well for me.

CBN or CBD? Does cannabidiene have an effect other than giving you a headache? Cannabidiol is what my medical provider provides with THC.

In the recent past few years since the stigma of the cannabis plant has calmed down, many more molecules have been identified and isolated.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/beyond-cbd-here-come-the...

https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/cannabis-marijuana-and-cann...

I maybe indulge once a year or so in a legal state, although I smoked a bit more in my teens-early 20's.

I have found that if you look for a strain that has a high concentration of THC-V, it will typically be the more fun/giggly/silly experience with a lot of highdeas and almost no munchies.

Durban Poison or Tansie are my recommendations based upon my very light experience, of course, ymmv.

To add another anecdote, I have found that these in particular https://aproperhigh.com/products/edible/plus/lychee-sleep-1-... are noticeably more effective and have less grogginess than other stuff I've tried, and they're the only thing I've found locally with CBN

CBN. Some brands I've tried in the past are Camino, Wyld, and Lights Out.

For me, a THC:CBN combo works wonders for sleep.

I have chronic insomnia and weed definitely keeps me up

That’s how I fixed my insomnia also, but this doesn’t work for every case. The cause of my insomnia was that I just couldn’t turn off my brain - I’d lay in bed and think about stuff until like 5 am. With an edible, once THC kicks in, I could turn off my thoughts at will and fall asleep nearly instantly. And the best part is, after about a month and a half of daily consumption I just quit the edibles and was able to sleep normally without any withdrawal or other side effects. I do not take THC now.

I’ve read however that for some people THC can have detrimental effect on sleep. But that wasn’t the case for me, and in any event THC is better than either the typical sleeping pills or sleeping like 4 hours per day.

Did you work out why you have the insomnia? I just got a referral to a psych that I haven't booked yet, and I believe mine is low-level anxiety based. I can be incredibly tired but my brain keeps turning around what-if scenarios in my head. Sometimes to the point my mind says screw it, I'm sleeping without you, and I start to hallucinate a little as though dreaming has started (which often wakes me up via adrenaline, phantom spiders do that).

Something like Restavit (available OTC here, doxylamine succinate) makes me feel "tired" but does not seem to help me get to sleep. It does reduce wake-ups during the night and makes me feel like a zombie until noon the next day though.

I assume it's legal where you live? Because where I live, you get dragged through the courts and get a criminal record for even small amounts. Also since it's illegal, you have to have contacts in the criminal underworld, and fund criminal enterprises. Not to mention you don't know the quality of what you're getting. It could be laced with contaminants or simply low quality crap. If it's legal where you live, relish that and see it as an enormous privilege.

It is legal where I am, and I do relish the privilege. I truly hope decision makers pay attention and make it universally legal.

Oh it is absolutely a privilege! Though it should not be, in the sense that it should be legal everywhere. Here in Oakland CA I can walk down the street and buy all the weed I want at the corner store. We have also decriminalized psilocybin mushrooms and other plant based substances including DMT. I had a very meaningful and healing experience aided by mushrooms with some close friends a few weeks ago, which involved opening up about some past shared trauma that a friend had been holding in, and led to a breakthrough in communication and togetherness.

California is looking at incremental steps towards broader legalization in therapeutic contexts, which is a step in the right direction: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-01-14/decrimin...

In the USA, marijuana is functionally legal through most of the country due to the hemp bill and the existence of things like THCA and Delta-8 THC. Because of how a product is defined as marijuana vs. hemp, products high in THCA but below the Delta-9 THC limit are considered hemp, even though when decarbed (smoked, vaporized, cooked into edibles) THCA turns into regular old THC and Delta-8 THC is functionally a less potent form of Delta-9 THC.

Some states have enacted provisions around some or all of the Delta-9 THC analogs, but most have not.

I regularly have THCA products shipped to me via USPS in a box with marijuana leaves on it in a state where Delta-9 THC is still illegal for recreational use.

The THC-A exceptions really have not been tested against state laws where weed is still illegal. I understand that THC-A weed is openly sold in a lot of illegal states and enforcement is low. But if local/county/parish officers wanted to test using GCMS instead of LCMS, it would still show that the weed had too much D9-THC.

Maybe people could get this overturned in court in some of those states, but maybe not. I understand that there's some arguments that the federal law supersedes state law due to being on a USDA farm bill or something, but I really, really don't think any of the THC-A stuff has been tested in court.

Even at a purely federal level, I don't think I can just hop on a plane with a pound of THC-A weed and tell the TSA "oh this is just hemp."

https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/...

TSA is supposed to let it through if it's below 0.3 D9-THC

GCMS will detect THCA if derivatized - https://www.cannabissciencetech.com/view/a-brief-review-of-d... - I find it hard to believe that you couldn't get a non-derivatized GCMS thrown out in court when it's known that GCMS will cause THCA to decarboxolate into THC.

I suppose I should stipulate I'm not a lawyer and there are obvious risks to possessing something that looks exactly like an illegal product.

Growing it is also fairly straightforward and most growers are hardly the criminal underground.

Benzos also work but are very dangerous if you get hooked on them

Anecdotally, it had no impact for me. I normally stay up way too late and really want to sleep earlier. While taking an edible will make me very tired, I will still fight to stay awake as long as possible. When I do finally sleep, it seems less restful.

I’ve stayed up for 2 days straight more times than I can count. I actually find that easier than making the decision to go to bed. That’s my issue, it’s not the act of sleeping, it’s the act of deciding that today is over.

Just watch your phases a bit:

"Several studies of PSG-measured sleep report increased SWS [25, 75], decreased REM sleep [74, 75, 160], and decreased REM density (e.g., number of eye movements during REM sleep) [74, 75]. However, this pattern is not always replicated [150]."[0]

(SWS =slow wave sleep)

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13722-016-0056-7

Not sure how accurate my apple watch is, but I see minimal variance in my REM sleep between nights when I smoke and when I don't.

Alcohol very much screws up with my sleep though, and my total sleep score plummets if I go to bed drunk.

> Not sure how accurate my apple watch is

From what I understand, not very

It’s wild, I’ve had the complete opposite experience. The smallest bit of weed for me is like a cup of coffee. If I have any after 6pm, my mind will race all night and I won’t sleep.

It basically destroyed long bouts of jet lag for me. I fly into LA, get some edibles and get straight off to sleep, wake up at a reasonable hour the next day no side effects.

Yeah but the next day is a slow foggy mess. If you keep doing it for a long time, you’ll eventually get “the fear”, which is mild agoraphobia and paranoia.

THC edibles or CBD ones?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com