Cannabinoid edibles offer a long-lasting, delayed onset high compared to smoking or vaping. Effects can take 30 minutes to 2 hours to kick in and last several hours.
Main Points:
- Edibles are food items with cannabinoids, offering a delayed and long-lasting high.
- Made by extracting and infusing cannabinoids into butter or oil.
- Factors like metabolism, dosage, and food intake influence effect duration.
- Start with a small dose to avoid overconsumption and intense effects.
- Delta 8 Resellers provide high-quality, lab-tested edibles derived from hemp.
Cannabinoid edibles are known for providing a different experience than smoking or vaping. The elevated mood and other effects tend to be pretty similar. However, the length of the experience and other factors are anything but.
So, how long do edibles last? What makes them different from smoking and vaping cannabinoids?
Let’s take a closer look at basic facts about edibles. Then, we’ll focus on how long cannabinoid edibles tend to last in our systems.
Understanding Edibles: Basic Facts & Important Info
The term “edible” usually refers to a food item containing one or more cannabinoids. Cannabinoids are chemicals found in cannabis and hemp plants. These chemicals interact with the body’s natural endocannabinoid system, producing certain effects.
In nearly all cases, the cannabinoids in edibles are psychoactive. That means eating an edible causes effects like a changed sense of perception and a feeling of increased creativity.
Edibles are absorbed through the digestive system, as Eating Well explains. This is in contrast to smoking and vaping, where cannabinoids pass through the lungs and into the bloodstream.
Pre-packaged edibles are most commonly small, bite-sized, and sweet or sugary items. Gummy candies are the most popular, although chocolates, hard candies, baked goods, and many other items are available. Homemade edibles can be just about anything, from sweets to entire meals that incorporate cannabinoid butter and oil.
How are Edibles Made?
The major steps in making edibles include:
- Extracting cannabinoids from their original source. All of the edibles Delta 8 Resellers offers contain cannabinoids from hemp plants. That means they are federally legal and available in most states.
- If necessary, heating (technically, carboxylating) the cannabinoids to activate them, making them produce their desired effects.
- Combining the cannabinoids with a liquid fat, i.e. butter or cooking oil. This makes it easy to add cannabinoids to a wide range of recipes, whether at home or on the scale of commercial production.
- Measuring the concentration of cannabinoids in this mixture to ensure accurate labeling of products and produce consistent doses.
- Making the actual edible by following a recipe and cooking or baking.
- For high-quality brands, sending the finished product to an independent lab for third-party testing. The results of that testing offer users information about the quality, potency, and purity of those products.
What Makes Edibles Unique?
Compared to most other methods of consuming cannabinoids, the delayed onset and long-lasting effects of edibles stand out. So does their potency. Most other methods of consuming cannabinoids lead to fast-acting effects and a shorter overall duration.
We’ll take a closer look at how long edibles last in your system in the next section. For now, here’s a quick rundown of what happens when you eat edibles:
- Once you eat an edible, it travels through your digestive tract and begins to be metabolized by your liver.
- The effects slowly begin to kick in. Generally, it takes about 30 minutes to 2 hours to notice those effects.
- Edible highs gradually build and last for a long time. It’s normal for an edible high to last for several hours.
- The effects slowly taper off, ending many hours after the edible was consumed.
How Long Do Edibles Last After Being Eaten?
One of the major attractions of edibles is their long-lasting effects. So, exactly how long do gummy edibles last, as well as other edibles?
We noted that edibles generally take 30 minutes to 2 hours to kick in. Additionally, their effects peak after a few hours and last for several hours before gradually fading. Is it possible to be more specific about the timeline for eating edibles and feeling their effects?
The truth is that many factors can influence how long it takes for an edible to start working and how long it lasts in your body. For that reason, there is no single timeline that applies to everyone and every edible.
Factors that can influence the timeline of an experience with edibles include:
- Your natural metabolism. Metabolism can vary to a noticeable degree from person to person. That affects how long it takes to start feeling the effects of an edible, as well as the length of the total experience.
- If you’ve eaten recently. Eating an edible on a full stomach can mean a longer wait for the effects to kick in. The opposite is true when eating an edible on an empty stomach.
- The size of the dose. As Healthline explains, a higher dose or stronger concentration of cannabinoids can lead to a faster onset of edible effects.
- Healthline also notes that other individual characteristics, such as weight and sex, influence this timeline.
Don’t Overdo it With Edibles
If you’re not used to eating edibles, and especially if you haven’t read the rest of this guide, you might be tempted to eat additional doses because the effects don’t seem to be kicking in.
Remember, you normally need to wait up to 2 hours to notice the active ingredients affecting you. In some cases, you may need to wait even longer.
Additionally, the potency of those effects will gradually increase over several hours. What you start to feel is not the peak of the effects — they’ll continue to grow in potency for a few more hours. It will take even more time for the effects to completely wear off.
Our advice is to remember these important facts and resist the temptation to overdo it with edibles. It’s easy to think, “This isn’t working, I should take another dose,” and end up with an experience that’s too intense or causes unwanted side effects.
If you’re entirely new to edibles, start with somewhere between 1/2 and a full single dose. It’s very easy to adjust your dose upward, but basically impossible to reduce your dose after you’ve eaten multiple edibles. Learn more in our guide to edible dosing.
The Best Edibles from the Best Brands
Delta 8 Resellers partners with the industry’s best brands to bring you exceptional edibles. Every product we offer is derived from hemp plants, making them federally legal and legal in most states.
Whenever available, we share the results of independent third-party lab testing for our products on the individual product pages. Don’t just take our word for it — check out the quality, potency, and purity of our edibles for yourself!
