Dry Mouth – or “Cottonmouth” – is one of the few bad side-effects of smoking everyone’s favorite herb. It doesn’t happen all the time – you can enjoy dozens of smoke sessions without it striking – but when it does, it makes the inside of your mouth feel dryer than the Oklahoma Dust bowl. Swallowing becomes a challenge. Even talking can be unusually difficult. You chug water, swill it round your mouth, but all to no avail – the parched desert stays put.

Mercifully, there are solutions. But before we get on to the cures, let’s first skim over the things you absolutely shouldn’t do when you have dry mouth.

  1. Don’t drink anything too sugary. While it may make you feel better at the time, mere minutes later you’ll be back to square one, because sugar itself is dehydrating. Soda is particularly bad in this regard. Ice tea with not too much sugar, and some fruit juices, seem to be okay however.
  2. Don’t drink alcohol. Like sugar, ethanol dehydrates you further. In fact, a hangover is mostly just massive dehydration: instead of dry mouth, it’s quite literally dry brain. Yikes!
  3. Don’t drink coffee, for the same reasons as above. Not many people do when they’re high, but we thought we might as well say it anyway.
  4. Don’t eat salty things. Obviously.

So what should you consume?

  1. Water

This may seem contradictory, given that drinking water often doesn’t help at all – at the time. However, if you drink lots water throughout the day, but particularly in the couple of hours leading up to your smoking session, it can go a long way towards combating the dryness. Also, it’s a healthy habit to get into regardless, so hydrate away!

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  1. Milk

Some of our friends swear by this. It fights the dryness by coating the mouth and throat in a watery, fatty film – lubricating you, basically. Plus, it’s 87%+ water anyway, so that helps too. Knock back a glass straight after smoking for the best effects.

  1. Sugar-free gum

Get a-chewin’, and soon saliva’ll start a-flowin’. Some say hard candy is good for this too, but we’re nixing that due to its high sugar content – as much as it’ll work at the time, in the long run it might make things worse. If you’re all out of gum, try sucking on a button like they did in the film Cube (but don’t swallow it, for god’s sake).

  1. Juicy fruits

The real thing, not the candy. We’re talking oranges, nectarines, watermelons, apples, and the like. From personal experience, we can vouch that watermelons and clementines are particularly effective.

  1. Combine 3 of the best methods above into a smoothie!

During the writing of this article, we attempted to create a “magic bullet” cure for dry mouth, made from a mix of milk, ice, and juicy fruits. We made a watermelon smoothie: milk, ice, bananas and watermelon all blended up, and it seemed to help quite a lot. However, it wasn’t that much better than either milk or fruit on its own.

Instead, I present you with the definitive fool-proof way to stomp out dry mouth (patent pending):

  1. In the hours before smoking, drink loads of water.
  2. Immediately after smoking, get some milk in ya.
  3. Suck/chew on something (gum or something else, your choice) to keep the saliva flowing.
  4. Snack out on some lovely fruits (bonus: this also helps with the munchies).
  5. If you still have dry mouth after all this, consider drinking more milk. If that doesn’t work, give up and weep.
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Got your own remedy for dry mouth? Tell us below!