Not necessarily. I've heard raw weed needs to be decarboxylated but I didn't know that when I was a teenager in the 1970s. I had to eat a couple of joints quickly. Took a couple of hours but the effect was intense. Only side effect was mild stomach cramps for a few minutes (which might have been from the rolling paper). And this was the lame stuff we got in the '70s, which was mostly leaves and stems, rarely buds.

A couple of years ago friends gave me samplers to try while I was recovering from injuries (hit by a car) and surgery for thyroid cancer. Still having a lot of pain and the health care system I was with at the time wouldn't renew prescription pain meds.

My allergies and asthma are so bad I didn't want to smoke the stuff. I did try smoking a couple of times to test assertions that smoking cannabis relieves asthma, but it didn't work for me. So I read up on recipes for edibles. Most recommended decarbing first, but I tried a few without the preliminary decarb process, just baking the weed into cookies, etc. I couldn't tell any difference between the stuff made with decarbing first, and the batch just baked without decarbing. Same effect -- pretty potent, difficult to calibrate. Some days I felt almost nothing. The next day, couch lock and movies. Much harder to find a balance than with smoking.

I also tried just swallowing a raw bud. Same effect as decarbing, or baking without decarbing. Very slow onset, about two hours, then pretty potent and lingering for hours.

I also made some homebrewed tinctures, using MCT and other oils. It worked about the same as edibles, but a bit quicker when the oil is used sublingually -- same technique recommended for CBD tinctures. But still difficult to calibrate. An experienced lab could probably make better cannabis tinctures with predictable dosages.

Unfortunately I've lost my taste for the buzz I enjoyed as a teenager so I didn't get any more after finishing those samples. It just made me sleepy... which ain't bad. If I was seriously chronically ill, sure, I'd use it again. Oddly, I didn't notice any significant pain relief from full spectrum cannabis with higher THC content. If anything the familiar psychoactive effect of weed made the pain more present in my consciousness, so I ended up moping over my usual moderate chronic pain, rather than having it as my usual daily background noise. That wasn't pleasant.

For now I prefer high potency CBD for moderate chronic pain, and it also helps me sleep. But I can also work out without any distractions from psychoactive effects. I ride bikes, jog, whatever.