Acceptance of marijuana has grown with the President talking about it positively in his State of the Union address, Missouri doing over $1 billion in sales and 85+% of the population believing it should be legal in some form.  If you are new to cannabis or an old hat though, bongs can make for an excellent experience. Here are the best reason for a good bong.

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Some people find bongs inconvenient and apropos to a college dorm room, but bongs are effective in managing dosages and treating your lungs with a little more care than a joint thanks to the water filter.  Technology has evolved over the years, with devices now available to help keep your space clean, are more compact and, most importantly, make the most of your high priced stash.

Better grasp on your dosage

Consistent doses are difficult to achieve when smoking weed. When rolling a joint or a blunt, these can end up coming out in different sizes, containing different grams of weed. When packing a bong, there’s always the same bowl, which allows for consistency and keeping better track of how much you smoke without having to count the amount of puffs you take.

A cleaner space

The easiest way to consume is a vape or gummies, but a bong has advantages also.  Smoking requires something for ashes, a strong smell and generally a bit more mess, a bong can be both attractive in the space and be cleaner.

An easy way to clean a bong is to use rubbing alcohol and sea salt. Soak it for a while and then jostle it around. Rinse really well, let dry and put it away until next time.

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Longer lasting marijuana

Bongs are more efficient when it comes to prolonging your weed. Since you consume so much smoke per hit, they tend to get you high faster, with less puffs than if you were smoking a joint or blunt.

Smoother hits

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Water used in bongs allows the hits to be smoother and gentler on your lungs, preventing irritation and filtering out some of the ash that occurs with combustion. There’s also no need to add tobacco or paper, both compounds that damage your lungs.

So if you invest in a good bong, you can go old school and have a great journey.

Who knew the largest-growing sport belongs to golf? The contemporary and comprehensive definition of golf includes various forms of “grassless” participation where people swing clubs and hit balls at real and/or virtual targets. While golf is already a chill game, but how much more relaxed could the activity be if you smoked a little green while on the green? More and more golfers admit to partaking in a toke on the links these days. So is there a perk for marijuana and your golf game?

It’s well known that golfers love CBD products. A  survey estimated that 29% of the top 125 golfers use CBD during and after playing golf. However, CBD isn’t the only cannabinoid that golfers regularly use. More and more are consuming on the local course.

One way marijuana helps is cannabis is known to help with inflammation.  This is critical for activities with swift movement and twisting movements.

But in regards to golf scores. Golf Digest’s The Loop found the answer might surprise you.

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Golf Digest’s The Loop did a piece on 3 golfers and their’s handicaps, The Loop broke down the three men by three categories: Advanced, Amateur, and Casual. They ran the trio through three drills that every golfer has ran through at some point. Driving range, Closest to the Pin, and Putting. First the men were asked to run through the drills sober to get a base line on their various skills.

“When you smoke cannabis, you might see them start to relax, and the performance might actually get better,” Dr. Ara Suppiah, a sports medicine physician, says in the video. He later adds: “You might also see them reach a point where they don’t really care.”

The results confirm the good doctor’s hypothesis. The golfers were tested after smoking cannabis in the amounts of 6 mg, 18 mg, 34 mg, and 50 mg. Through the 6-34mg range we saw most of the golfers driving improve, as their muscles relaxed, and allowed them to focus on generating power. Putting, as one might expect, steadily declined the higher each golfer became.

Golf Digest

In layman’s terms, the results were consistent with what you might notice while playing Madden on your couch after consuming weed: Reduced inhibition and a greater willingness to go for it—see the improved distance figures—as well as a small breakdown in fine motor control—see approach and putting accuracy (also why you just lateraled it to the other team when you meant to juke).

The Loop believes the golfers found a sweet spot at 18 mg where attributes like hand-eye coordination, energy, and focus weren’t sacrificed in the name of relaxed nerves, muscles, and mood. But anymore than that, as you can see in the video, the golfers made more jokes, didn’t care if they shanked it, and started craving their next meal.

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Here’s how Jack, the group’s amateur, summed it up by day’s end: “I’m so tired. I think when you get stoned and play golf, a little bit is good. I think our results probably show you can handle that. [How stoned we are now] is excessive.”

More than two million people worldwide currently have a diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis (MS). In the U.S. alone, an estimated 1 million people live with the neurological disease. Often misunderstood, MS affects the body in myriad ways, starting with the sclerotic nerves. Many who experience the debilitating effects of MS struggle with pain, loss of motion and dramatic lifestyle changes that can affect life-long happiness. What about treating multiple sclerosis with marijuana?

The National Multiple Sclerosis Society is open to cannabis as an option.  They state although there are no cannabis-based FDA-approved medications to treat MS or its symptoms, some clinical trials have shown that non-smoked CBD/THC modestly improves reported spasticity and pain in people with MS.

Individuals with MS also experience muscle stiffness (commonly called spasticity), a condition that the Multiple Sclerosis Association of America calls quite common among those that have the disease. 

Via MSAA:

“Spasticity is a common symptom in MS. It is a tightness or stiffness of the muscles – occurring typically in the legs (calf or thigh), groin, and buttocks. Although less common, some individuals may experience spasticity in their back. These are all muscles that help people to stand and balance in an upright position.” 

While muscle stiffness affects an estimated 90% of MS patients, a study of medical marijuana has shed light on how cannabinoids in weed may alleviate spasticity. Given a single marijuana cigarette, the double-blind study found that participants with MS believed their symptoms had improved.

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In a 2000 study, researchers worked with a 30-year old man with MS to find how his tremors were affected with the use of 5 milligrams of THC. Interestingly, when doctors compared the man’s handwriting and head movement before and after taking marijuana, his lines appeared cleaner without an obvious tremor. 

While the study was decades ago, researchers have come a long way in understanding THC and CBD’s effects on other MS symptoms, such as pain and sleeplessness. In fact, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society supports more research on the potential benefits and drawbacks of using the drug to treat MS and research is finally catching up to the demand. 

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Presented in May 2019 at the American Academy of Neurology Annual Meeting, research showed that the benefits of CBD and THC with, “long-term-effectiveness” in an Italian study. Researched documented, “After one month, 1502 (81.4%) of 1845 patients achieved ≥20% improvement in numerical rating scale for spasticity and 814 (40.2%) achieved ≥30% improvement.” 

As with any substance, doctors advise speaking with your care team about adding THC or CBD to medicines already in the pill box, but there’s promising studies on the horizon and this may only be the beginning. 

The National Multiple Sclerosis Society supports the removal of barriers for long-term safety and efficacy research of medical cannabis and derived compounds for the symptoms of MS and eventual creation of evidence-based guidelines in MS care.