Can we please, agree on one thing before we start: what THC does to our brains is entirely different from what alcohol does to them. It would be absurd to discuss ways drinking can improve your work product. While many famous drunks have produced much greatness, they all did that in spite of the alcohol that sustained them. I’ll produce my own lab data momentarily. Jazz was invented by musicians who knew that about alcohol — and yet invented one of the quintessential American idioms with more than a little THC in their blood. The THC helped where the alcohol couldn’t have — because the two chemicals work so differently inside our brains.

I have been hammered. I have been tipsy. I have been somewhere in between and sat down to write, thinking I was producing genius. I wasn’t. That happened one hundred percent of the time. By the same tokin’, I sit down to work every single day AFTER having lit up a bowl of my favorite sativa. People have paid me good money for that work — and been happy as hell with it, too. I could not have produces any of that work if I’d been drinking. Have I made my point yet?

Though I never set out to, I now use cannabis literally from the start of my day to the end of it. I have never been happier. I’ve never been more productive either.

One of the first things I learned — as my total ignorance waned — was that a thing called “sativas” exist and that they’re very different from indicas. Just as these two variations on cannabis grow a little differently (indicas tend to be stocky and bushlike while sativas tend to grow taller and get stalker, its leaves a lighter shade of green than indicas), so, too do their effects differ. Not completely, but significantly.

One of the things that separates the cannabis experience from the alcohol experience (in my personal experience) is the fact that it can be heady in the first place. Virtually all cannabis stokes my creativity. I can be well into my third bedtime indica hit (my night time regimen is three bowls to get my brain to slow the hell down) with sleep tugging at me when, suddenly, I’ll get a burst of creative energy. Words will spew onto a pad of paper (by then I’ve turned off the computer and, frankly, I like spewing in long hand). Fifteen minutes at the most and the spigot will suddenly run dry. Sleep will beckon and this time there’ll be no putting it off.

When I go back in the morning, nine times out of ten, it’s not only useable but, aside from typing it up? It’s ready to rock. That’s because cannabis doesn’t cloud the mind, it focuses it. And, it turns out, each sativa strain focuses your mind in its own particular way. The gold standard is Durban Poison, a landrace sativa from South Africa. The DP in your local dispensaries may differ in the exact amount of THC each has; that’s a product of the grower’s art. But the DP will have the same effect on your brain regardless: a distinct sense of focus. Some strains — Tangie Cookies for instance — produces a more energized focus. Thoughts don’t necessarily wait for you to “think them”. Tangie Cookie and The Fork (another racy sativa) can get you thinking a handful of thoughts all at the same time. For me? That’s the best ride in the amusement park.

While one can easily think about multiple things at the same time with a hit of Durban Poison, that would be you and not the DP driving the process — a subtle distinction to be sure but, inside one’s mind, a clear one. So, what happens if one, say, combines DP with a more vigorous sativa like The Fork? That’s when platforming happens: you get the benefit of both strains at the same time. To a large degree, growers already do this when they create new strains that combine the attributes of the parent strains. That process is painstaking and takes years. The same effect can be achieved just by opening two different strains and blending them before smoking them.

This morning, I put together an ass-kicking cannabis cocktail containing Lemon Sour Diesel, Pineapple Thai and Platinum Green Crack.. Smoked separately, the Lemon Sour Diesel would have produced a mellow focus, the Pineapple Thai a more energized high and the PGC a full-on wake-n-bake eye-opening. The resulting mix produced a sensational, productive buzz that lasted about an hour and a half. I wrote almost relentlessly and published it earlier today.

Cannabis continues to surprise me. It’s not one thing; never was. It’s a variety of things. It can make you super productive or deliver truly restful sleep (far more restful than any sleep you could get on alcohol or OTC sleep meds). It puts a remarkable amount of control into the user’s hands — and whatever piece they use to get that THC into their brains.