And so one evening before dinner, I lined a bowl with hash and told her to enjoy. My girlfriend, however, whose job doesn't allow her to go home on lunch breaks, smokes less weed than I do. Had I not been littering bowls with the kief trapped in my grinder for the past decade, the hash may have had some effect, but it seemed I was immune to this as well. My experiment started with littering hash over bowls of 27-percent-THC sativa that I smoked through a Nirvana bong I inherited from a friend. I would test them, rate them, and, hopefully, find a combination that actually works. Still, I wasn't ready to blow the entire Stranger weed budget on dabs, so I picked up some of Potter's other favorites: Lavender Hash from Soulshine, Sensi Star Hash Oil from Orgrow, Granddaddy Purple Vape Oil from Top Shelf, and 96 percent THC Distillate, also from Top Shelf. He said that this is a legitimate concern, which is why alternating is key. Why make my tolerance problem even bigger?
I told Potter, the budtender at Ponder, that my only dabbing experience had been less than ideal and also I was afraid that if I started dabbing, I'd never be able to go back to smoking regular old flower. I would have resisted, but I couldn't move.ĭrug dealers in JNCO jeans are one thing I do not miss about the black market. Friendly took out his laptop and asked if I wanted to see pictures from his last road trip.
And as I coughed and sank back into his magenta pleather couch, Mr. The smoke that moved from the nail to my lungs tasted strongly of chemicals. After the dab rig was hot, he dropped a grain-size ball of wax on the bowl-or nail, as it's called in dabbing-and I pressed my mouth to the pipe and inhaled. This, I thought, is this closest I will ever come to doing meth. Friendly rubbed his hands together and fired up the torch. While I generally made my exit after exactly long enough not to appear impolite, I knew better than to say no to drugs. Friendly offered me a dab and said that it was the only way he smoked anymore. While he was happy to deliver, I preferred to go to him-that way I could leave.Īfter selling me a quarter ounce one day, Mr. Friendly, as he called himself, lived in a basement apartment on Capitol Hill with a pirate flag covering the bathroom doorway and black and white striped wallpaper. He wore massive wide-legged jeans that bled water four inches up his pant leg when it rained, and when he rolled up the sleeves of his hoodie, I saw arms covered in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle tattoos. At the time, about a year after recreational shops started to pop up, I bought weed from a thirtysomething dealer whose wardrobe hadn't been updated since high school. My only prior attempt at dabbing was several years ago, before the price of legal weed dropped low enough to convert me to retail. Dabs require an expensive piece of machinery called a dab rig, as well as a butane blowtorch to heat it. Flower requires merely a match and a piece of rolling paper (or, if you don't have that, a pipe, bong, plastic bottle, aluminum can, apple, carrot, or page ripped from a Bible). Potent flower may be up to 30 percent THC dabs can be up to 90 percent and sometimes more.ĭabs-along with dance parties, hangovers, and all music-make me feel hopelessly old. The resulting stuff, often called wax, shatter, or butane hash oil, looks kind of like honey gone bad, and it gets you really, really high. Dabbing, a relatively new mode of ingesting cannabis, involves super-concentrated doses that have been extracted from the plant using solvents like butane or carbon dioxide. It wasn't time to quit smoking it was time to start smoking smarter. You don't give up on something you love just like that. I should stop smoking, I thought for a second before closing Redfin and coming to my senses. I came to this conclusion recently while looking at real-estate listings and realizing that the only property I can afford is a storage unit in Bremerton. And if I stopped buying all this weed, I could probably even afford a financial adviser. My financial adviser would be appalled at the amount I spend with so little return. Even worse, these days most of that money goes up in smoke-after years of smoking weed all day, every day, I've plateaued. I could have purchased a new double-wide by now, easy. You don't have to be good at math to see that's a lot of money. My expenses have certainly gone up since then, but my weed habit has remained stubbornly the same all these years: $250 a month, every month, forever. This was years ago, when rent was still in the triple digits and instead of buying my weed from a "budtender" named Chad, I bought it from the drag queen up the street. It had the usual entries: rent ($650), utilities ($80), and weed ($250). For a brief time, I kept a spreadsheet of my monthly expenses.