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weed buying guide

2. Look: High-end flower, like fresh, healthy produce, provides a few visual hints to help you determine its quality. While all good cannabis should be visually appealing, a top-shelf strain can easily display a vibrant array of colors. Good-quality flowers are often a deep green with flaming orange or red hairs. They can also express colors from deep purple to bright blue.

Rae also pointed out that there is not necessarily a relationship between enjoyment and THC potency. Distinguishing between enjoyment and intoxication, Rae asserted, “You can still have a very nice experience with 5-10% THC.”

What to look for in good weed

You may think you’re getting better quality bud with a sky-high THC concentration, but Dr. Rae dispels this myth. She cited THC levels above 20% as a red flag and told Weedmaps, “Lab tests are not as accurate as they may seem, and there are financial incentives for labs to produce increasingly higher THC values. Especially with flowers labeled around 30%, be very wary of fraudulent lab results.”

Unpleasant aromas are generally a sign of mishandling, poorly cured cannabis, or advanced age. Photo by: Gina Coleman/Weedmaps

4. Flower structure: Skillfully cultivated and cured sativa-leaning flowers tend to be light and fluffy in shape and composition, while indicas tend to be tighter and denser in flower structure. Though the structure and the experience you end up having usually have little to do with each other. Rock-hard flowers are a sign that cultivators may have used plant growth regulators, which can lead to an unpleasant taste. Extremely fluffy flowers could be a signal that the plant was not grown under sufficient light intensity and was not cultivated to its potential.

So you’re going to get some weed. Hooray! But wait…how much should you get? How many joints would that be? How much will that jar or bag of buds cost? How much does the average person consume per day, anyway? All reasonable questions, which we’re here to answer.

If you’re looking to give a strain a couple of tries and get a real feel for it over several sessions, we recommend an 8 th . It’s the most common weight purchased by most cannabis consumers due to its affordability and convenience.

Gram or 8th: Buying Weed Samples

If you like having different strains on hand – like Sativa in the morning and indica in the evening and maybe even some Raw Hemp Flower or CBD Kief (for varied effects) – this quantity is perfect for keeping a good-sized stash on hand without going overboard. Minor price breaks can sometimes be seen at a quarter (depending on the specific dispensary or caregiver), but don’t expect them. Note that price breaks refer to the price per gram as opposed to the total cost.

Also known as a zip, an ounce of cannabis typically costs between $100 and $300+.

If you’re new to a strain, a gram or an eighth (3.5 grams, an 8 th of an ounce) will make a perfect test sample (Read our article on the normal weights to buy Cannabis).

Some places this figure will be more, others less. Tax figures heavily on the price of legal recreational cannabis.

Fair warning, most places prohibit owning increments of cannabis at this quantity. In fact, in some parts of the country, owning 1/4 th a pound of marijuana is still considered a serious criminal offense.

How many grams are in an eighth of an ounce?

As you can see, it’s a good way to save some money as opposed to buying by the gram. Buying three grams separately at somewhere between $15-20 will cost you a lot more than buying an eighth at a time.

A dime bag is usually the smallest increment of marijuana that you can purchase. As mentioned earlier, it’s standardized as a gram of marijuana. However, if you’ve ever found yourself buying cannabis in a not so legal setting, you probably know that people mean different things when they say dime bag.

The actual quantities may vary depending on where in the world you find yourself but that’s pretty much the standard.