Grow Life 420

If you’re a cannabis enthusiast, you probably already know your favorite ways to consume, as well as your personal sweet spot for THC intake. But how often can you put an actual number on the milligrams of THC that get you to your happy place? And how do you guide friends or family who are new to cannabis toward finding their perfect dose?

In two online groups for cannabis writers and enthusiasts, we asked 17 women aged 21+ about their habits. Here’s what they had to say:

Ten out of the 17 people said they consume cannabis more than once a day. Four said they consume daily, one said a few times a week, and two said weekly. Smoking was the most popular form of consumption (13 people), with edibles not far behind (12), then vaping (10), followed by oils (four), topicals (four), and dabbing (just two).  

As far as dosage goes, four people said they consume fewer than five milligrams of THC each time they use consume, three said between five and nine milligrams, another three said 10 milligrams, four said 10 to 30 milligrams, and three didn't know. Nobody said they ingest more than 30 milligrams of THC at once.

One respondent observed that, because she lives in Ecuador, where the selection of high-quality flower is limited, she tends to use a bong to heighten the effect of her product. That yields an experience closer to what she would get from smoking a bowl in the U.S. Another respondent said, “I wake and bake and consume (mostly strains high in CBD and low in THC) throughout the day.” The same respondent uses higher THC strains in the evening to help her wind down before bed.

While only three of our 17 online respondents said they didn't know how much THC they're consuming (the majority are pretty in-the-know when it comes to weed), we'd bet that legions of new cannabis users wouldn’t know how to answer that question, either.

Saxon Schoch, a cannabis concierge at March and Ash dispensary in San Diego, told us that he’s seeing more and more people from all walks of life trying cannabis now that it’s legal for adult use in California. He's observed that the average dispensary customer consumes about 50 to 250 milligrams of inhaled THC a day—which is fairly consistent with our survey results, given that 10 of 17 people reported using up to 30 milligrams of cannabis more than once a day. “We’re seeing more people consume daily, as it’s legal now,” said Schoch.

Of course, the amount someone consumes hinges on the reason they're consuming. If they have medical needs, it’s likely that they’re using daily. But people who use it just to unwind after work may not be consuming cannabis as frequently.

As to what they’re consuming, Schoch said that new folks are more likely to seek out vapes over any other kind of product because of how discreet and convenient they are. “Some people are still worried about the stigma of cannabis," he said. "It’s just so much easier to use a vape and not have to think about the smell.” Pre-filled, disposable vape pens are manufactured to give the user a precise amount of THC per pull. With a Dosist product, for instance, the pen vibrates and stops dispensing the distillate after a 2.25 milligram hit of THC delivered in three seconds. So long as you keep track of your hits, it’s easy to calculate your total intake.

But Schoch has seen flower sales rising in recent months and believes that the distillate vape trend may be on the wane. Dabbing is still considered a more niche way to consume and is most popular among those with plenty of experience with cannabis.

Edibles used to be notoriously difficult to dose because most people don't have the equipment to help them measure or test dosage in their home kitchens. With everything done by hand, there's been a healthy amount of guesswork thrown into the recipe.

Now, however, we have gadgets that enable home cooks to create precisely-dosed batches of oils and butters, and dispensaries are stocked with edibles containing, by law, 10 milligrams of THC per dose. As a result, edibles have morphed over the last handful of years from the most difficult to among the easiest, cannabis products to dose. These days, tinctures also present an efficiently dosed mode of consumption because labels clearly state the THC content per milliliter, or even per drop.

But why is 10 milligrams considered a standard dose of THC in an edible, when it takes significantly more THC via smoke or vapor to experience the same high? The answer has to do with how the body processes THC from inhalation versus ingestion. Delta-9 THC is what gets you high when you smoke, dab, or vape. But edibles are metabolized by the liver into 11-hydroxy-THC, which is, depending on whom you ask, five to nine times more potent than delta-9 THC. From what Schoch sees, five milligrams of an edible become roughly equivalent to 40 to 45 milligrams of smoked or vaped THC. “It’s essentially a new drug,” he said.

That’s one reason people tend to be (or should be!) more cautious about consuming another edible than they are about taking another hit. “Even if you smoke too much, it’ll only be 30 minutes to two hours that you’re uncomfortable,” said Schoch. “But with an edible it could be eight hours later and you’re still hitting the CBD pen trying to come down.”

As to the question of how much THC we’re consuming with non-edibles, there’s a bit of guesswork involved, said Schoch. One variable is the percentage of THC content in your flower, distillate, resin, or rosin. This figure should be indicated on the label if you're buying the product at a licensed dispensary. However, flower in particular degrades in THC content over time. The longer you own it, the less potent it will be. Another variable is the fact that roughly 50 to 60 percent of the THC is lost when smoking a joint, and slightly more dissipates when using a bowl. Vaping flower wastes less (roughly only 30 percent) and dabbing wastes the least — but exact numbers here can be challenging to quantify.

With all the variables in mind, we did some of the some for you:

If you’re smoking a joint with a 20% THC strain, that’s…

200 milligrams of THC per gram of cannabis

Minus roughly 60% (120 milligrams) of THC lost due to combustion

= 80 real milligrams of THC in a smoked gram

If your joint weighs .5 grams (though larger joints are definitely a thing), that yields about 40 milligrams of THC in your joint.

How many hits does it generally take for you to finish your joint? That will give you a good sense of how much THC is in each hit.

When smoking that same strain out of a bowl, expect just a little less THC per bowl — more in the 30 milligram range if you’re smoking solo.

When vaporizing the same dry flower strain in a device such as a PAX, you’ll lose less THC than with a joint or glass, but the total number of milligrams will depend on the size of your vaporizer chamber.

If you’re vaping a distillate from a cartridge, calculating the amount of THC per pull is tricky because everyone hits it differently. “I kill a cartridge in 25 hits,” said Schoch, “but it lasts a month for others.” If you start with a new, 1,000 milligram cartridge and ensure your pulls are consistent, you could theoretically keep track of the total number of pulls you get from a single cartridge to arrive at the number of milligrams of THC per pull. Just make sure you do the math first based on the THC content of the product. For instance, if you’re using a 75% THC distillate, you’d start with 750 mg of THC in your full cartridge.

And last, if you’re dabbing a 75% THC concentrate and you take a .1 gram hit (which is tiny in actual size), that’s 100 mg x .75% potency = 75 mg in the hit. Then, accounting for the 30% loss, you’d be inhaling 52.5 milligrams of THC in a hit. Dabs range in size, so you could easily be looking at a much larger dose of THC.

Keep in mind, too, that tolerance levels vary quite a bit, as does each person’s unique endocannabinoid system and the way he or she processes cannabis. So a small dose for me could be a big dose for you, or vice versa.

Confused? Don’t be. As you've probably heard, start low and go slow — that's the surest way to gain THC literacy when it comes to comprehending the workings of your own body vis-à-vis the cannabinoid. And even if you’re experienced, hold back a bit when you try a new strain, edible, or mode of consumption. As the saying goes, you can always add more but it’s hard to take away. And if you’re guiding a newbie, halve a standard edible dose to 5 milligrams for starters, or encourage the person to stick with two to three hits off a joint.

As to the upper limits of consumption, Schoch, an experienced cannabis user with a high tolerance, told us he smokes multiple grams of live resin and live rosin a day. "So that puts me in the 1,000 to 2,000 milligrams range," he said, noting that he rarely encounters anyone who smokes 3,000 milligrams a day. And while we’re pretty sure we could find someone, somewhere out there who consumes that much, we don’t recommend it!

Image courtesy of Goldleaf 

When cannabis vapes first came onto the market now several years ago, some budtenders thought they would be just a fleeting trend. But they endured, then caught on in a big way. Today, the vape market is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the legal cannabis economy, accounting for 22 percent of all dispensary sales in California, Oregon, Colorado, and Arizona in 2018.

And why not? Hitting a vape is much easier and faster than rolling a joint or packing a bowl. Extracts work more quickly than edibles do, and the effects don’t last nearly as long. Plus, vaping is a huge advantage when you want to medicate or relax without the conspicuous weed smell. And though the science is not particularly well-developed on the safety of vaping, it hasn’t stopped millions of users from migrating over to extracts, or at least vaping on occasions that require more discretion. 

But, though vapes may feel cleaner to the user, they're not particularly sustainable. Mitchell Colbert, a cannabis researcher and activist, said that back when vapes were first introduced to the market, a budtender friend of his named them the “McDonald’s of our industry,” referring to the disposable and single-use models of consumption, as well as the products’ over-packaging. While these two problems are in no way unique to the cannabis industry (think plastic water bottles, single-use shopping bags, Keurig coffee pods, among countless other examples) they do pose big obstacles to environmentally friendliness.

Among the biggest of those obstacles is how to dispose of used vape pens. “These are small devices,” Colbert told Civilized, “but they have a disproportionate environmental impact.”

Challenges to Recycling

What’s most evident in the vape recycling space is a lack of clarity on what can be recycled, and by whom. That’s further complicated by the fact that the regulatory situation varies state by state, and regulations are changing quickly. In California, for instance, some vape recycling programs that were underway in the medical market had to be discontinued in 2018 due to the new regulations.

Dosist's all-in-one (disposable) vape pens are some of the only devices currently that can be collected in a number of California dispensaries and recycled via cannabis waste management firm Gaiaca. Consumers receive $5 off their next purchase for recycling a Dosist pen, a nice little incentive for doing the green thing. It’s a model based on the glass bottle deposit that many consumers are used to, but with higher dollar values.

But as of now, most other types of vapes are not collected for recycling in California dispensaries — in no small part because cannabis waste products (including used vape cartridges) must now be handled in very particular, legally-compliant ways. Regulators don’t want used cannabis products that may have THC remnants sitting around in dispensaries, or disposed of willy-nilly.

However, regulators in California have resisted mandating a statewide, streamlined recycling program for vapes. To justify this, they’ve cited the idea that, theoretically, consumers can recycle vapes on their own. “Unfortunately, the final state regs took a lot of wind out of our sails," Ryan Miller of OMG Farms, who lobbied hard on the issue last year, told Civilized. "In essence, they say the end user themselves can take the item to a hazardous waste disposer that both takes cannabis and will accept their device, and then pay them a premium to dispose of it.” With the task being so inconvenient and difficult, even for environmentally conscious vapers, he adds, “that’s just not going to happen.”

For the eco-friendly consumer trying to go it alone, recycling vapes is extraordinarily difficult to do. One challenge has to do with the sheer number of component parts that comprise vape devices — up to 25 or 30, in some models — many of which need to be channeled toward different recycling streams. Because of this diversity of parts (think glass, ceramic, batteries, coils, and cartridges, among others), tossing used vape pens and cartridges into the recycling bin and hoping for the best will almost certainly mean that the used vape in question ends up in a landfill.

If consumers are willing or physically able to pry apart their vape devices, they may find a few easily recyclable components like glass or aluminum (provided, of course, that those parts haven’t been “contaminated” by contact with cannabis extract like THC). Heating elements, on the other hand, may contain heavy metals such as nickel and chromium (or alloys like nichrome) that are known to contaminate soil and water if not disposed of properly, and should be taken to a hazardous materials recycling center.

Batteries should be disposed of at an e-waste or battery recycling center, however some of those centers are equipped to take only car batteries and regular household batteries — not the tiny, lithium-ion batteries found in vapes. “These devices are so new, everyone’s still figuring out how to deal with them," said Colbert.

And as for used cartridges, there doesn’t seem to be a clear place a consumer can recycle them, since they fall under the new California regulations mentioned above.

This overabundance of practical challenges inevitably will not yield many eager DIY vape recyclers.

The Ideal

Beyond offering easy vape recycling, a consumer cannabis experience that's genuinely environmentally-friendly would have a number of features.

Let’s take an imaginary stroll with Colbert and Miller through the greenest dispensary ever: In this fantasy future shop, there is far less packaging for everything from vape pens to cartridges to pre-rolls to flower. Hemp-based “plastics” (which OMG Farms is working on for their next pen design) and reusable containers make up the difference, along with biodegradable inks. Dosage and warning labeling is accomplished via inserts and peel-offs, similar to pharmaceutical medicines, negating the need for a large container for each small amount of product. A better solution is found to plastic-heavy child-resistant packaging.

This super green dispensary gives customers incentives and discounts for recycling vape products, and makes it easy to do so with a drop-off that accepts all vape materials from batteries to heating coils to used cartridges, and everything in between. “Both dispensaries and users could be incentivized to recycle in a number of ways, although many will do it for purely altruistic reasons,” Miller told Civilized.

What’s more, this green dispensary cooperates with manufacturers and other dispensaries so that consumers don’t have to return to the original store to recycle. “You bring everything back to whichever dispensary is convenient to recycle or reuse,” said Colbert. “Ideally, close the loop.”

Federal cannabis legalization (this is a fantasy after all, though possibly not too far off the future mark) would mean that cannabis waste disposal companies can scale up their operations and make the jobs of recycling the electronic parts involved in vaping much more efficient.

To make all this happen, said Colbert, the burden shouldn’t rest solely on cannabis entrepreneurs. New regulations helped create the problem of over-packaging as well as the barriers to recycling. So Colbert suggested: “It’s partially up to regulators, then, to make this easier.”