Concentrates are a far more prevalent product in the current marijuana industry than they ever have been, but for new customers and tourists the idea can be a little daunting and much of the time not something that they are actually looking for. I have seen tourists drop hundreds of dollars on concentrates and the necessary apparatuses to consume them, just for a few days worth of their trip, when really they could have gotten more than enough regular marijuana to meet whatever chemical demands their body may have had.
While concentrates are understandably a more purified form of what we are all smoking anyway, they can bring with them some disconcerting effects. There is of course the stigma that if you’ve not done concentrates before, your first time dabbing can be a little ridiculous compared to smoking regular flower. The first time I dabbed was right when I first moved to Denver, and I was blisteringly high for almost three hours. But the first thing I noticed was after having dabbed, regular flower did not hit me the same way for a few days. Concentrates can wreak havoc on your tolerance, and if you get too used to doing concentrates you can find yourself not even getting anywhere smoking regular weed. This is one of the main reasons I don’t do concentrates, because I enjoy actual smoking too much to let it get ruined by that level of tolerance. Even things like disposable vape pens can do a number on your resistance to THC, though generally only the higher end pure hash cartridges, as some of the ones cut with polyethylene glycol come in only slightly above smoking normally.
But for some people, particularly those who genuinely use it for medical benefits and need an incredibly strong high as fast as they can get it, and after building up a tolerance to regular marijuana it can be the next step for people not interested in edibles or tinctures. It can be pretty depressing for medical patients to find that their tolerance has risen to the point that an intake method doesn’t work anymore, and having this next step option is a nice trade off, though it can get considerably more expensive if you do it very regularly. That being said, because of the new regulation on concentrates only allowed to be sold as attributing to 3.5 grams of your allowed buying quantity, many dispensaries are running sales on concentrates, since they used to be able to sell considerably more at a time under previous regulations.
Some new products have cropped up as well, making ultra purified concentrates that then have additional terpenes added back in for an even more enhanced effect. These are very clean compared to regular flower as with smoking weed or tobacco there is a good amount of plant matter you are dealing with in the process of trying to get your chemicals. Terpenes can sometimes get lost or lessened in the case of some concentrate production, which can take away from the complexity of the high, but these days extractors have gotten much more skilled than when this all was starting. For people with greater levels of health concerns as far as what they put into their body can find concentrates to be the thing they might be looking for, though intake methods can have a decent presence in this decision as well.
This also comes into play when selling to people in a dispensary, as sometimes the people that want concentrates are only going to be in town for a few days and aren’t going to want to spend a whole bunch on a reliable setup, making for a growth in the available vaporizer pens, varying in price and reliability from 13$ disposable pens to several hundred dollar gold plated options. I have used a few of the disposables and had a roughly $60 pen that worked fairly well, but it is definitely a learning process as far as how much each pen can functionally use and timing for good hits.
Ultimately concentrates are for those with an already established tolerance, or an option every once in a while to have slightly too good of a time. They are definitely a big choice to make if you plan on switching to them regularly, though the industry is constantly working to make them more accessible so who knows maybe that’ll be the only way we smoke in a year or two. Just be wary, they can often be more than anyone regularly needs.
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