On one wall of 99 High Tide Collective in Malibu, mosses and succulents are nestled in a frame of locally procured driftwood. Native American dream catchers dripping with feathers and sea shells hang from the pot dispensary’s ceilings. Vases of white lilies perfume the air. In a side room, visitors can lie on a heated crystal blanket and receive reiki, sound treatments and other ministrations.
It’s a world apart from the pot shops Green encountered years ago when she was shopping for medical marijuana with her mother, who had received a breast cancer diagnosis. At the time, dispensaries were cramped, dingy spaces, with bars over the windows. “You felt you were doing something wrong, like a criminal,” Green said. “There were no rules that said you had to do it in this hideous manner.”
Upscale dispensaries tend to aim for Apple Store minimalism rather than High Tide’s new age baroque. Either way, the idea is to nudge affluent customers, especially women, to think of weed as part of a healthy, active life, rather than an impediment to one.
For many years, cannabis users have largely had to settle for whatever they could find. The products available at High Tide show how companies operating in a legal market have taken a raw material – cannabis – and with design and marketing savvy created products targeting a far broader range of consumers than an illegal product ever could.
Inside High Tide’s showroom, a blackboard lists several dozen strains of “flower” – Sour Tangie, Pink Goddess, Lavender Silver Haze, Skywalker OG – divided into the usual three categories: indica, sativa and hybrid.
According to stoner lore, indica strains have an earthy aroma and induce a sedentary effect, while sativas smell citrusy and energize users. Hybrid strains are supposed to fall somewhere in between. Cannabis specimens do have different smells and can seem to provoke different sensations, but the sativa/indica distinction is imprecise, more like a horoscope than a medical diagnosis.
Green calls top shelf flower, which she sells for $25 a gram, her “supermodels”. These high-maintenance specimens grow indoors in rooms monitored for light, temperature, humidity and various blights which can quickly ruin a million dollars’ worth of plants.
Grown under powerful artificial light, indoor plants produce dense nuggets bursting with brown or purple hairs and trichomes, tiny translucent mushroom-shaped glands that bestow a desirable “frosted” look. Photos of choice indoor specimens, their parts larger than occur in nature, are known as “bud porn”.
Green, an actress and self-described hippie chick with long, flowing hair, calls the more affordable flower her own “hippie chicks”.
Those products, which sell for closer to $15 a gram, are outdoor plants, which tend to be less potent but have become popular with consumers who prefer “sun grown” cannabis to indoor plants blasted with high pressure sodium lights in a kind of botanical gavage. Lower-potency plants and products also support the notion that cannabis is supposed to augment other parts of life rather than leave users drooling on the couch.
As more consumers prefer the discretion and convenience of packaged products, flower has begun to look more like a niche market for connoisseurs. According to a survey by the California cannabis delivery company Eaze, in December 2017 flower and pre-rolled joints accounted for roughly half its sales, down from about 80% two years earlier. Manufactured edibles, concentrates and vapes account for the balance.
To produce cannabis products, manufacturers use solvents like carbon dioxide and alcohol to separate the plant’s foliage from its active ingredients, which collect in a golden oil. This oil can fill vaping cartridges or be infused into edibles as well as tinctures, under-the-tongue strips and non-psychoactive skin lotions.
Vape pens and edibles bring convenience and discretion to a product that traditionally is neither. These new products make it easy to indulge in movie theaters, planes, cubicles and other settings where lighting a joint is illegal.
The concern about edibles is that if someone overindulges, they have to wait out what can be an unpleasant experience. The industry still resents the New York Times writer Maureen Dowd for a 2014 column which described her day after she ate an infused chocolate bar in a Denver hotel room. “I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours.”
Today, some states where cannabis is legal require edibles to be apportioned in manageable five or 10mg doses.
The other new product category ushered in by legalization comes in the form of concentrates, perhaps best thought of as variations on hash. While Europeans roll North African-made hash with tobacco, Americans are accustomed to smoking pure flower and consider hash a rare delicacy.
But as laws have become more permissive, west coast extractors have experimented with using water, heat and various chemicals to strip away plant matter to reduce cannabis to its chemical essence. The resulting products are brown or golden, and have names like honey, crumble, wax, shatter, budder and sauce depending on their texture.
While flower typically contains between 15% and 25% THC, concentrates can contain 90% or more THC. At High Tide, concentrates sell for between $30 and $70 per gram.
The typical way to consume concentrates is through an intimidating process known as “dabbing”. It involves an apparatus called a dab rig, which resembles a bong except instead of a bowl for packing flower, there’s a metal “nail”. The dabber uses a blowtorch to heat the nail and then with a metal instrument touches a tiny morsel of concentrate to the nail. The user inhales the vapor through the rig, often coughing profusely. Concentrates are usually not discreet or convenient, but they’re the most powerful form of cannabis available.
Some users prefer concentrates extracted with butane, a colorless gas which they say better preserves the plant’s flavor profile. However, butane is heavier than air and flammable. If it’s not carefully handled, it can pool on the floor waiting for a spark. Amateur butane extractors have blown up their houses and suffered horrific disfiguring burns. A few have died. In a factory setting, however, “volatile solvent extraction” is a manageable industrial process.
Vapes, edibles and concentrates are the products changing how people consume cannabis. In a later column we’ll see them in use.
