by Asya Mukhamedrakhimova
MKH digital plubication © 2025
by Asya Mkh
Category Life
Published December 11, 2024
‘Can You Die from a Weed Overdose?’ – The Story of ‘Highs’ and Lows

Improvisation 30 (Cannons), by Wassily Kandinsky

Usually, I write about recent experiences and events in my life. But for this one, we are going to travel back in time to the summer of 2022, when a silly and naive 23-year-old me learned one simple lesson: you don’t fuck with edibles.

The very end of summer was just around the corner. The days were still warm enough, but the night brought a cold autumn wind. The kind that makes you retreat to your warm home, with cosy, fluffy blankets patiently waiting since the first warm day of spring. One night, my friend and I decided that instead of the usual evening of watching TV and eating snacks, we would watch TV and eat a more unpredictable kind of snack—edibles.

Before I dive into my battle with edibles and my inner demons, I need to give some background to this particular strain of cookies. I was first introduced to this brand of edibles when my friend brought them to my birthday celebration a few months earlier. Some friends and I decided to try them a day or two before my birthday. After eating one whole cookie, with no prior experience with edibles, I waited for the world to fall away and objects to twirl and dance in front of me. Instead, I got a slight high, felt sleepy and ended up smoking out of sheer desperation.

My next experience with the edibles was second-hand. The same friends of mine came to visit me over the summer, bringing with them multiple packs of cookies. I should also mention that the night they came was when I finally finished my dissertation. So, naturally, I wanted to celebrate that. Instead, after eating the cookies, my friends could barely move and eventually passed out in their room. I thought to myself, “these fucking lightweights, what’s up with them”. The next day, after they described what they felt, I almost didn’t believe them. After all, I tried the edibles before, and they did not affect me at all.

So that night, fueled by the misguided confidence and cockiness of someone who had walked through fire without a single burn, I told my friend we should each have a mini cookie, wait a bit, and then have another. Which is what we did. What followed was the universe repeatedly kicking me for assuming I was immune to the power of edibles. You see, I knew the cookies were the same brand, but I forgot to check the concentration of THC on the pack. A mistake that I paid for with my life. Okay, I’m being dramatic. Not with my life, but with a full 24 hours of my life for sure.

After eating our second mini cookie, we retired to the living room and continued to watch movies. At some point, I’m pretty sure another friend of mine came to join us and then left abruptly. To be honest, though, I could not be sure. By the end of the movie, my friend had gone to sleep. Feeling a little high, I was excited to go to bed, turn on a silly sitcom, and fall asleep. Well, the edibles rumbling in my belly had other plans. Four or five minutes into watching my silly little sitcom (or four or five hours, once again, I could not tell you for sure), I realised I couldn’t feel my body. I tried to move, but no result; I tried to slowly move the tips of my toes and fingers, but still nothing. For a second there, I thought I was going to just lay in this bed until someone found my immobile body in the morning. Then, I felt movement. I was happy about it at first, but I was wrong. The worst was yet to come.

I was lying in bed, now able to move, but with my body completely numb and experiencing pinching sensations up and down my legs and hands. While my body was doing whatever it was doing, my mind was on an adventure of its own—an adventure of overanalysing every mistake I ever made in my head over and over. From a test I failed in fifth grade to every traumatic event that ever happened to me. I was trapped in a hellish loop of my own making. When it felt like hope had abandoned my still weirdly numb body, I gathered enough power to stop and make one simple move to get my phone. The second my phone was within my reach, I Googled six simple words: ‘Can you die from weed overdose?’ The answer ‘no’ calmed me down a bit. Surely, a Reddit thread and some site called ‘cannabis lovers’ will give me the most professional and reliable opinion on my current predicament.

Calmed by the fact that I’d make it to see the sunrise and with my body slightly regaining mobility, I had another question. If I make it to sunrise, how on earth will I pass this time? So for my next quest, I reluctantly google ‘how to be less high’. Most of the answers were simple: drink plenty of water and watch something to distract yourself. Some just pissed me off, like the advice ‘try to go to sleep’. I just want to point out that for anyone who ever thought to give that advice to a person at the peak of a very bad high, if I knew how to go to sleep, I would be fucking asleep. Finally, there was another piece of advice, one that I found incredibly weird but that kept appearing repeatedly: chew raw peppercorn. At first, I thought there was no way I would go downstairs to the kitchen, located directly next to my aunt’s room, who, by the way, was in the house throughout that whole experience. But then, about ten minutes later, when I realised the high had now made a home in my body, moved in its family, started redecorating the kitchen and had no plans of moving out anytime soon, I decided maybe it was peppercorn o’clock. So I got up from my bed, and, lacking the ability to put anything over my summer pyjamas, which were just a top and underwear, I headed downstairs to get some peppercorn and possibly have a very awkward interaction with my aunt. I stood in the empty, barely lit kitchen and chewed on raw pepper, chasing it with water and some rice cakes I found next to the pepper (a weird combo, but what else could I do? Both Reddit and ‘cannabis lovers’ said to eat something). As I ate the pepper, tears began falling down my eyes because, well, it’s raw fucking pepper. After a couple of minutes, I realised that this plan was unsustainable, and the possibility of my aunt waking up and finding me half naked, eating pepper, and crying was getting higher. So I took some pepper, rice cakes, and water and headed back upstairs to continue my mission in a more vertical position. I am not sure exactly when I passed out, but as I woke up the following day with bits of raw pepper still in my mouth, I felt the prospect of having a good day slipping away.

Since I woke up around noon, I went to my friend’s room, where she silently greeted me, and we headed to the kitchen. We made some pasta (great breakfast, I know) and exchanged a couple of words with my aunt, who, god bless her soul, could tell we were not in the talking mood. After finishing the pasta, we looked at each other and asked the same question: ‘Are you still high?’ The answer was an overwhelming and all-consuming yes. Thus began another journey of trying not to be high. Of course, we were not losing our metaphysical and spiritual shit as much as we were the night before. As I found out later, my friend went through a similar experience but, just like me, had no power or ability to go into my room. We still lacked clarity after trying food, taking a nap, and watching TV. Eventually, the haze of the evil edibles was gone, but not for another 12 hours.

By now, you might be wondering why I am sharing this wild story with a pretty predictable outcome. Since chances are that if you found yourself on this page, you have already dipped your toe into the pool of light recreational substances. I’m not making assumptions or anything. I’m just taking a wild guess on what my audience is. Maybe I’m telling this story to educate you on the physical and emotional consequences of edibles or to share my experience so that those who have gone through the same thing know they aren’t alone. Maybe, but not really. The real lesson here is to always look at the description and check the THC concentration before jumping in blindly. And if you’re in doubt, just smoke a J.

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