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Vice Blog

WEED DEALINGS - DON'T JUDGE A BUD BY ITS COVER

I go on about standards and knowing your medicine a lot. When it comes to cannabis, I believe that knowing where you stand as a consumer is essential to improving your experience and advancing the cause as a whole. Recently I was thinking about the ways we judge medicine before it’s been smoked: smell and “crystals.” Both affect the high, but neither have a direct correlation with the high's quality. That is, neither a strong smell nor a thick blanket of crystals necessarily translate into a better high or more effective medicine. A stronger smell means a higher concentration of terpenes. Terpenes are an essential part of nearly all living organisms. In the case of plants, and cannabis in particular, terpenes are the primary ingredient in resin. Cannabis resin has the highest concentration of cannabinoids, and therefore stronger smell means more resin, means more cannabinoids. And, more “crystals” (which are actually resin glands) also mean more resin. So, more crystals and more smell mean a greater abundance of the vehicle that delivers the cannabinoids themselves, but it tells you nothing of the effects that those particular cannabinoids will have.

There is certainly something to be said for the correlation between the quantity of the resin and the quality of the high, but that relationship is not direct. Personally, I’ve used medicine that looks like it fell from the pages of an Ed Rosenthal book and smelled like a terpene gangbang, but produced an entirely lackluster effect. I’ve also used medicine cultivated outdoors that doesn’t look particularly special, smells only mildly, but produced incredible effects. I bring this up because the medicine that’s being sold in most dispensaries is graded upon its smell, and its “crystals.” The stronger the smell, the more “crystally” it is, the more it costs. But if medicine is being priced based on factors that have little to do with medicinal value, then patients are being duped. At the same time it serves to drive down the price of outdoor cannabis, allowing dispensaries to purchase it for less, and squeeze the milk from both ends. Outdoor cannabis is not as fragrant, nor is it commonly covered in a thick blanket of crystals, however it produces effects that many patients find superior to medicine cultivated indoors.

At this point the only way to really know how effective/worthwhile medicine is, is to see how it makes you feel. We’re all affected differently by cannabinoids, and we’ve still got a lot to learn about this complex molecular process before we can begin to understand it. Just because something smells incredible and has tons of crystals on it doesn’t mean that the effects will be favorable. By all means pay attention to this stuff and appreciate it, but don’t use it as the primary means to measure your medicine. If you know a particular smell works for you, seek it out, but don’t let anyone tell you that medicine with more “crystals” and more smells is better medicine. There’s just much more to it than that.

ZACH G. MOLDOF