How does your environment affect your cannabis experience?

Some people have their best cannabis experiences when they eat an edible on a solo hike in the mountains. Others have their best experiences when they smoke a joint at a music festival surrounded by strangers. According to experts in cannabis wellness, there are at least 15 factors that can impact your cannabis experience. Many people feel that the setting in which they consume cannabis plays a significant role in how cannabis affects them.

What Is Your Favorite Setting to Use Cannabis?

Jointly supports 9 physical environments:

• Inside at home
• Outside at home
• Work
• School
• Restaurant, bar or club
• Concert, music venue
• Nature
• Combination of environments
• Somewhere else

Jointly is a new cannabis wellness app that lets you record how well a cannabis product helps you achieve your wellness goals. When you report your cannabis consumption on Jointly, you can record your physical environment so that you can discover how this factor affects your cannabis experience. Perhaps you will discover that your best cannabis experiences are when you are in nature. Or maybe you will find that you have the best experiences when you use cannabis at home with your partner. Jointly can help you find out. Our data indicates that Jointly works best when you report at least 10 cannabis sessions. If you only fill out a few reports and then stop, you won’t have enough data to start to see trends and improve how you consume cannabis.

Set and Setting

Early in psychedelic research, researchers observed that there were various non-pharmacological factors that shaped the effects of a drug. The same dose of a drug could produce completely different effects depending on a person’s internal and external environment. In the early 1960s, Timothy Leary popularized this idea as “set and setting.” Set is anything related to the internal state of a person such as personality, intention, preparation, and expectation about a drug experience. Setting refers to external elements such as the physical, social and cultural environment where the drug use takes place. Jointly divides setting up into the people you are with and the environment you are in so that you can analyze each factor independently.

How Does Environment Affect Your Cannabis Experience?

In the 1800s, hashish was the first psychedelic to be introduced to Western society after a gap of a thousand years. The French psychiatrist Joseph Jean Moreau brought the drug back to Paris from the Middle East. Morea supplied the Club des Hashischins with hash. The Club des Hashischins was a group of Parisian literary luminaries like Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas who wrote about their experiences with this new drug. The ideas of set and setting were quick to emerge in their writings. Moreau noted that identical doses of hash could produce completely different effects. He wrote that the utmost care must be taken when setting up an environment in which to consume hash, because the user must “ward off anything that might turn their madness into depression or might arouse anything other than tender affectionate feeling.” The French psychiatrist wrote that the effects of hash were very malleable and suggestible to external stimuli, such as “everything that strikes [the user’s] eyes and ears. A word, a gesture, a look, a sound or the slightest noise…will confer a special character on his illusions.” The poet Charles Baudelaire, who Jointly discussed in Does Cannabis Enhance Creativity and Focus, wrote directly about how physical environment affected his hash experience. Baudelaire observed that experiences with hash were likely to be positive “if you find yourself in the right environment, such as in a picturesque landscape or an apartment that has been decorated artistically…” His statement mirrored a common idea in the modern cannabis community: that cannabis is best consumed outside in nature or inside in a cozy, visually pleasing home.

How Does Physical Setting Affect Your Cannabis Experience?

There is a notable lack of scientific literature on how different physical environments affect a cannabis user’s experience. Despite a lack of research, people are increasingly recognizing that their physical environment plays a significant role in how their cannabis experience turns out. In general, people feel that cannabis makes them more sensitive to their environment. If you consume cannabis before getting on a crowded subway at rush hour, it might magnify your anxiety. But if you consume cannabis while sitting in the shade on a summer afternoon, you may feel even more relaxed and connected to your environment. The best way to find out how a physical environment affects you is to consume cannabis in different settings and record your experiences on Jointly. That said, it is best to consume cannabis in environments in which you feel safe and comfortable, especially if you are new to cannabis or are trying a new product for the first time.

Getting Answers with Jointly

Curious about tracking and optimizing how you use cannabis and CBD? Jointly is a new cannabis wellness app that allows you to track and record your cannabis and CBD consumption, including your dose, time of use, composition of the product and various other factors that can influence your experience. When you look up a cannabis product on Jointly, you can see how other Jointly users rated the product based on how well it helped them achieve their wellness goals. That's why we like to think of Jointly as a cannabis social network where we can all benefit from the wisdom of the crowd. Download the Jointly app today to join the cannabis club and get started on your cannabis wellness journey! Explore our Wellness Center to answer all of your cannabis-related questions.