After several months of hard work and countless efforts, your plant are today ready to be cutted. But they are not yet ready to be used. Let’s speak about how to handle your precious buds after the harvest. The best thing is to take care immediately of the leaves, and eliminate them, both the big fan leaves and the little ones all around the buds. This job can be done with scissors or with an electronic device. In this second case the job will be much faster, in the first case you will get a little ball of hashish for your instant pleasure. Hard choice uh?

Once the plant has been cleaned it’s the moment to find a dry cool place to hang them. A cantine or an equivalent place would be the ideal choice, the humidity should be around 40-50% and the temperature around 16° centigrades. In these ideal condition, the buds will be dried in 7-10 days. When the temperature is higher or the humidity lower, so we have the conditions like in an apartment, the buds can be dried in 4-5 days.

The plant is usually hanged upside down,  in this way the buds will dry closing their leaves and calixes on themselves, protecting the internal cells of resin for a longer time. We have to consider that we have to leave about 5% of water in the buds, that is the perfect proportion for conservation. The bud have to be soft and a little bit elastic and doesn’t have to break instantly. A good method to understand if the plant is ready is to break a stick close to a bud. When the plant it’s ready the stick will break instantly and completely.

Now the plant is in the condition to be burned. The resulting high is a weird one, it’s not properly high or stoned, it’s a little bit a combination of them, that lasts really short (30-45 minutes). This is because once we’ve cutted the buds from the plant, we still have something alive, and chemical transformations are still happening in the buds. The THC is the top production of the cannabinoids and it’s also one of the most complex cannabinoids at a molecular level. For this reason is necessary to let the buds sit for a few more weeks (pref. in a jar ermetically sealed) so these reactions have all the necessary time to be completed.

The bud will  be completely ready to release all its power after 20-40 days after the harvest. After that, the marijuana will loose THC constantly (5-10% less every month). The best wy to keep  it good for several  months is to use a jar. In this case can be good to open the jar(s) constantly every 2-3 weeks to change the air and to check that there is no mold in the jar itself.

And, at the end of this post, we have to answer to a question that we hear really often: “I’ve just harvested and I don’t want to wait: how can I make a joint now?”

We strongly discourage this practice and we invite do not use it but with a few buds for temporary use. You can use the normal oven or the microwave, in both cases at about 3/4 of their power. Just put the buds in for a few seconds, and take them out immediately when they start to steam. Let them sit for 10-15 minutes and enjoy. Rememebr that in this way you will loose a little bit of power and all the aroma.

Singer Amy Winehouse and her husband Blake Fielder-Civil has been arrested last friday,october 19, in Norway, for possesion of a little quantity of marijuana. The couple was arrested together with a third man. The local police was alerted by an anonimous informer. Amy and her husband have spent the night in jail, then have been released the day after after paying a fine of about 500 euro each. A fine is the normal soluction in Norway when the amount of drug is very little like in this case.

Davide Parenti (author and director) and Matteo Viviani (journalist) have been sentenced to 5 months and 10 days for violation of privacy. The 2 men, that work for the italian tv channel Italia 1, have negotiated the sentence and recognized their guilt. The fact happened one year ago, Viviani, with the excuse of making a fake interview and with the cooperation of a woman acting as make up, took a sample of sweat from 50 italian politicians (and specifically members of Italian parliament). An high percentage of them resulted positive for cannabis (12 people, almost 25%) and 4 to cocaine (almost 10%). The special was never broadcasted by Italia1, because the italian Garante della Privacy (the italian authority in matter of privacy) had blocked it immediately.

The one that just started will be a long stressing week for Justin Armijo and Robert Nuckols. They are due in court wednesday 24 to face the accuse to have served hamburgers with marijuana to a couple of police officers. The fact happened last winter, in the fast food Los Lunas Burger King. The 2 police officers are now suing Burger King.

Lebanon wasa well known hashsh producer till a few decades ago. Lebanon Red and Lebanon Gold were words associated  to something really high quality. The production reached its top, in quantity and quality, in the period 1975-1990, during the civil war. Hashish production is illegal in Lebanon, and each year since the early 1990s police backed by troops bulldoze the crops before they could be harvested. Now  things are different, and the fields occupied by marijuana plants are growing. It’s a very good bargain for the farmers, and according most of them, it’s worth the risk. The Bekaa Valley is one of the zone where the production is more concentrated. The hashish can be sold here for about 700 dollars per kilo. This is much more than what the farmers can earn with traditional products, and this explain why there are a lot people that take this risk. This news will certainly make happy a lot of cannabis lovers around the world, maybe one of these days they can taste the sweet aroma that made the lebanon hashish famous worldwide.

According the press agency France Presse, every years in the only Morocco, one billion joint are rolled and smoked “Plus d’un milliard de joints sont roulés chaque année au Maroc”.  The same article try to draw possible scenarios of legalisation of the cannabis derivatives in Morocco.

The Chai Tea, invented in India, is becming universally known for its relaxing aroma and effect. We have now tried to add some weed to get a real marijuana chai tea. You will need (for 2 persons): 2 cups of soy milk, some marijuana (even not  buds), cinnamon, some cocoa, and 2 bags of your favourite tea. Start making the milk very hot, add the marijuana and stir it gently for 5 or more minutes. Filter the leaves away. At the end add just a little bit of the cinnamon and the cocoa. Serve it and add the tea bag directly into the cup. It’s great to relax after an hard day.

During our daily surfing on internet,we have found the drugsense.org website. It’s a project that put together the MAP (Media Awareness Project) and the Drug Policy Central (DPC) offering an extensive amoount of information about the War on Drugs, its failure and the possible alternatives. “We exist to provide accurate information relevant to drug policy in order to heighten awareness of the extreme damage being caused to our nation and the world by our current flawed and failed ‘War on Drugs.’ We aim to inform the public of the existence of rational alternativesto the drug war, and to help organize citizens to bring about needed reforms […]”. To read their presentation, visit their website. By our side, we have appreciated a lot the distinction Education vs. Indoctrination: they define themselves as “pragmatists who believe “that a public well informed about the death, disease and social blight produced by current U.S.drug policy must inevitably seek to reform it”. And our opponents? Aquick look at the Dictionary.com definition for “indoctrination” pretty much says it all.”

The opinion of many scientists is, Cannabinoids and endocannabinoids are a treasure which waits to be discovered. A beautiful article on sciencedaily.com underlines the extreme importance of the cannabinoids as therapy for deseases which we don’t have a therapy right now, and yet they involve millions of people, most of them living in the richest and most advanced countries. The article analyze the researches of the last 15 years,with these conclusions:

(source: sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071014163644.htm)

The 60 years old Howard Marks, universally know as Mr. Nice, one of the biggest smuggler of marijuana in the ‘70 and ‘80, has asked, during a recent interview, to investigate better the relationship between cannabis and mental ill.

“If, as a result of smoking a lot of dope, one becomes schizophrenic, that’s reason for concern. If being slightly schizophrenic makes you want to smoke some dope to ease you through the day, I don’t think that is cause for concern. To find out which of these is true will require research.[…] One has to look into the action of cannabis (on the brain) and what happens.”