Comment by extr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by extr | Hacker News Reader

I used to smoke regular weed but in recent years have totally converted over to using vape cartridges. The benefits are too great:

- No odor.

- More consistent dosing.

- More control over the exact CBD:THC ratio.

- Lower cost per dose.

- Less paraphernalia lying around/more discreet.

In fact, it's actually significantly reduced my intake. I now take 1-2 puffs of a 10:1 CBD:THC mixture before bed some nights of the week. I get the calm without paranoia or disorientation. If I want to "feel high", I can take a few extra puffs, or try the 5:1, or even 1:1. I don't even touch the "Max THC" stuff clocking in at 80% THC by weight anymore, whereas in a past life that would have been my go-to. It really changes things when a "bowl" of "sour skunk" is no longer the minimum unit of dosage.

However, I am very thankful I now live in a legal state. When grey market cartridges first started becoming available I did a lot of research into them. Definitely there is a greater risk smoking a black or grey market THC cart than smoking black or grey market marijuana (see all the vitamin E stuff). When they first came out, I smoked them with no ill effects. But I didn't even know the risk I was taking, and today I would not touch the stuff. See r/fakecartridges, r/cleancarts, for other people who actually care about how shady some of this stuff is.

Today I only buy cartridges from reputable brands from licensed dispensaries, that have lab reports FROM THE SAME BATCH included on the packaging, that test for above and beyond what is legally required. Is this confirmed to keep me safe...no. There is always a risk with untested and understudied products like this. However it's a lot different than grey market carts or vaping nicotine, where you might take 300 puffs/day, versus 1-2. I have to imagine if there are heavy metals, the former is resulting in far more concentrated doses of it. It's a risk I'm willing to take for something I enjoy and that I feel improves my life.

I honestly hope for even stricter regulation. The price per dose is still incredibly cheap even with the taxes and overhead from compliance. I would gladly pay $100/1G for something that lasts months and has a heavily scrutinized chain of custody, that's cheaper than a single nice dinner or a weekend or two of drinks.

The major problem with cartridges is, beyond the very real risk of effectively having a pipe bomb in your hand pointed at your face, is that those in charge of formulas are assholes. They're desperately trying to duplicate the experience of smoking weed, including intentionally adding propylene glycol and other irritants for the effect of throat irritation to make you cough. They're failing and ruining the experience. This is asinine. The tastes are horrible and lean towards chemically, synthetic tastes.

The other problem is the massive, absurdly huge, selection. Choices are great, but they went absolutely nuts (and the same is true of flower selections), and I would assume it is a stoner in charge of all this crap. Bad idea.

The high from cartridges is very one dimensional, just not as potent as decent flower.

Also, you're out of your mind if you think cartridges are cheaper than flower. It isn't even close, cost is on the order of 300% more expensive for cartridges.

If all this could be fixed, if the makers would stop assuming what consumers want and just produce an honest product without the bullshit, carts might become superior.

The article specifically mentions that THC cartridges - at least the ones they reviewed - don't use propylene glycol. Your second problem is, as you say, not unique to cartridges. I kind of agree with your third point. Not sure what the solve is there. Yes they're more expensive. The only way to have the most competitive market with the best product is federal legalization.

> The other problem is the massive, absurdly huge, selection. Choices are great, but they went absolutely nuts (and the same is true of flower selections), and I would assume it is a stoner in charge of all this crap. Bad idea.

Is the craft brew industry also a mistake? For medicinal marijuana I can see users wanting a well regulated, simple commodity. For most recreational marijuana users though, they treat the smoking as an experience. The pot heads I know are always sharing new strains they found or developed and seem really excited when another pothead brings by something novel.

As someone who has tried a million varieties of both craft beer and weed, and honestly prefers the latter, there is so much more variability with beer it's not even a contest.

I used to have a joke I would make with dealers back when weed was illegal and that was the only way to buy it. I would ask what kind of weed they were selling me and they would always come up with a crazy name for it, "Mind Crusher Ultra Sour Diesel" or whatever, take your pick. I'd wait for them to finish and then ask "Will it get me high?" and they would laugh and say of course. The joke being, we all know that being high off any given strain is pretty damn similar. It's not like I was going to say "Oh, never mind" if he said the wrong name.

It's as if craft beer manufactures were advertising their beer got you a different kind of drunk. Sounds ridiculous right?

Totally agree about the nonsense marketing of effectively identical cartridges (and everything else weed related). I pretty much ignore everything said by dispensaries directly and just go with whatever manufacturer has the most transparent info about their production processes. I find there is a real lack of professionalism in the industry, I would honestly prefer to buy my shit from the dispensary equivalent of an accounting firm if I could.

I was curious about your 300% figure and checked out my local dispensary. Looking at the cheapest ounces, it's like $120. Let's say .1g is a dose for me, and so I get 280 doses from that. That's around 40c a dose. Comparing to an "expensive" cart at $70, let's make the conservative estimate I only get 100 doses from that. That's 70c a dose. That's 175% different, with the most favorable possible comparison to flower.

More realistically I would say that smoking < .2g at a time is almost impractical. That limits the amount of doses you get from flower. And realistically, I would get closer to 150 doses from a high THC 1G cart. So now carts are actually more favorable!

You can buy good 1g THC carts for $20-25 in legal states.

Oh yeah, I saw some for that price as well. I just wanted to make a maximally unfair (to carts) comparison to make a point.

There's allegedly 1g in a cart for $25-$100. There's 3.5g in an eighth for about the same price as a cart, 7g in a quarter, and 28g in an ounce. So please refigure. And not all weed is sold at dispensaries.

I don't understand your point. I'm aware of the various weights to gram conversions, that's how I went from a .1g dose to (28*10=) 280 doses for an oz. You realize that dry flower is not at all equivalent to that weight in oil right? Doing a weight to weight comparison makes no sense. Do you actually smoke weed or have experience with any of this stuff yourself?

There are some poor assumptions here. The oil they're selling you is not actually cannabis oil in the sense that the oil did not come from the cannabis. That would be nice but also insane. It is olive oil or coconut oil or some other oil, known as a "carrier oil," that was heat-soaked with weed most usually in a 1:1 ratio of cannabis to oil. So, yes, as a rule of thumb, the 1g of vape juice has the equivalent THC as the 1g of weed from which it was concocted. Also, not for nothing, dry stems and leaf don't weigh anything, only the bud has heft, and that's where most of the THC, other cannabinoids and terpenes are, so the THC ratio by weight is far higher in the bud.

Just to be clear, we are both talking about vaporizer cartridges designed to use batteries with 510 connections right? The kind you vaporize and inhale, not something designed as a food additive? They look like this [1]?

The oil you see in that THC cart is NOT a "carrier oil" and is not created using the process you describe (that's how you make DIY THC infused butter or cooking oil, for use in creating edibles). It would be INSANE to vaporize and inhale olive or coconut oil. The oil in the cartridge pictured in [1] IS literally almost pure THC. Take a look at the lab report for one of those cartridges [2]. The top compound is literally THC Delta 9 (THC "Classic"), and it represents 887 mg/g (88.7% of a 1g cart) of the compound by weight.

Oil for cartridges is literally cannabis oil and is produced using CO2, butane/hexane, ethanol, or even pressure extraction. You need the mixture to be liquid enough to be wicked onto the heating element, and I'm not sure how that is achieved today, but in the past they would use Vegetable Glycerin (VG) or Propylene Glycol (PG) to slightly liquify it (the same additives used for e-cigs). If you don't include these additives, the pure oil is a solid/buttery/sticky mess, and you get things like sauce/resin/shatter.

[1] https://bestkushstore.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/df6844f...

[2] https://rawgarden.farm/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/220000693-...

Edit: From some search I see that coconut oil is in fact still sometimes used as a thinner, so I stand corrected there. But I think the overall point stands that it is a small (< 10%) part of the mixture, and is used as a thinner, not the primary carrier. The primary oil in the cartridge is literally THC oil.

Wow. News to me. I thought handling the pure chemical would be akin to handling nicotine or safrole, not that it'd be easily lethal, but that it would not be useful in those concentrations. Also, I honestly believed that the process would turn off the typical consumers:

Dried cannabis flowers are soaked in alcohol and then shaken gently. Isopropyl strips the trichomes from the plant. The mixture is strained into a dish and then the solvent is removed using a vacuum oven that keeps temperatures under 181 degrees. When the solvent evaporates, the remaining substance is a THC rich oil.

Ah! Well then sorry to come on so strong, glad it was just a misunderstanding. Cheers!

> They're desperately trying to duplicate the experience of smoking weed, including intentionally adding propylene glycol and other irritants for the effect of throat irritation to make you cough.

Is THAT what it is? I've only taken to vapes recently and inhaling too hard has me coughing so hard I start sweating. Nothing else I've ever smoked kicked the hell out of me like that.

Investing in a quality dry herb vaporizer is even more cost effective. I don’t even smoke very often but have the coveted Volcano and it is incredible.

100% on dry herb. I'm more of a whip guy, so I have a Magic Flight Orbiter that I just use with a handheld DaVinci and it is really amazing.

Arizer for me. My first one lasted more than a decade of daily use. Got a discount on the second. It worries me that the flexible tubing might be Extremely Bad news. A shitton of leachate must come out of the heated plasticizers.

I’ve also heard the occasional bad news about the heated ceramic and wiring in the heaters. OTOH, I don’t seem to be harmed yet, and it’s not like city air isn’t filled with other toxins.

Remember when everything shut down globally, and how clear the air became? And then we went right on back to choking on our own waste.

Haha, these names! A whip guy uses a Magic Flight Orbiter with their handheld DaVinci!

(I have FlowerMate Slick)

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