The first edible I ever took was a 25-milligram gummy that Travis Wendt handed me in Missoula in August 2016. He told me to take half. I looked at it. It was the size of a nickel. I thought, I've taken hydrocodone that could drop a horse. I ate the whole thing.

Two hours later I was sitting on Travis's bathroom floor convinced that my heart was going to explode. My pulse was 130. I counted. I could hear the blood in my ears over the tinnitus, which takes effort. My hands were tingling. I was sweating through my shirt. Travis knocked on the door and I told him I was fine, which was a lie. I sat on that tile floor for forty-five minutes until my body decided I wasn't actually dying.

That was my introduction to cannabis dosing. I got it wrong.

I'm telling you this because the first thing most people do when they start using cannabis for pain is the same thing I did: assume that more is more. I'd spent seven years on VA prescriptions where the answer to “this isn't working” was always a higher dose or another pill added to the stack. When they put me on gabapentin and it didn't touch the nerve pain in my knees, they didn't lower the dose. They added cyclobenzaprine. When that didn't work for my back, they added hydrocodone. The logic was always escalation.

Cannabis doesn't work that way. I learned this the hard way, over about four months of getting it wrong.

After the bathroom floor incident, I didn't touch cannabis for three weeks. Then I went back to Missoula and Travis gave me a different gummy. Five milligrams. I took it before bed. I slept well. The pain in my knees was still there when I woke up, but it was quieter. Like someone had turned the volume down one notch.

I spent the next few months experimenting, which is a polite word for screwing up at various levels. Ten milligrams worked better for sleep. Fifteen milligrams made the pain mostly gone but gave me a fog the next morning that felt too much like the hydrocodone days. Twenty milligrams put me back on the bathroom floor. Not literally, but close enough.

Here's where I landed, and where I've stayed for almost ten years: 5 to 10 milligrams of THC in an edible for nighttime. That's it. I take it about an hour before bed. It helps me sleep and takes enough edge off the pain that I'm not waking up at 3 AM to ice my knees.

Daytime is different. I can't be foggy during the day. I've got kids. I've got guide clients in the Bighorns who are trusting me with their safety. I started using a CBD tincture in 2018 — high CBD, very low THC. A dropper under the tongue in the morning, sometimes another one at lunch if I've been on my feet all day. It doesn't eliminate the pain. Nothing eliminates the pain. Three fractured vertebrae and two blown-out knees don't heal because you found the right tincture. But it backs the pain off enough that I can work until evening without wanting to quit.

The mistakes I made taught me a few things I wish someone had told me up front.

First: start lower than you think you need. I know that sounds like something off a pamphlet. I don't care. If you've been on opioids or muscle relaxants, your instinct will be to match that level of relief. Don't. Cannabis at a high dose for pain doesn't give you more relief. It gives you anxiety and a racing heart and two hours on a bathroom floor.

Second: edibles are slow. If you take 5 milligrams and don't feel anything after forty-five minutes, do not take another 5 milligrams. Wait two hours. I made this mistake twice. The second dose hits on top of the first dose and suddenly you're at 10 milligrams when you thought you were at 5.

Third: daytime pain and nighttime pain are different problems. I needed a different approach for each one. THC at night for sleep and deep pain. CBD during the day for inflammation and mobility. Trying to use one solution for both doesn't work, at least not for me.

Fourth: write it down. I didn't want to. I'm not a journal person. But for three months I kept a note on my phone — what I took, how much, what time, how I felt the next morning. That's how I found 5 to 10 milligrams. Not because someone told me. Because I tracked my own mistakes until a pattern showed up.