Lately I got into the practice of smoking the devil’s lettuce, ˌmærəˈwɑːnə if you will. It is an interesting plant, mainly because it has so many varying strains, properties and potentially even medicinal use cases which you can take advantage of every day. And I do.
However, there is a big problem with smoking Weed, it is the smoking part. I think inhaling burning shit, may not be that great for me! There are many volatile compounds in the smoke itself, there is tar, which you will be inhaling and coughing out for the coming days, and rolling joints is a time consuming, annoying practice. I would rather consume weed in any other way than to burn it up and inhale it.
I also am a more financially conscious person lets say, and am interested in using a cost effective method of consumption that gets me more bang for the buck, while not being as nasty as joints. I spent 50 bucks on a BUNCH of material and would like it to last into the next year.
Turns out, vaporising herbs is a cleaner experience than burning them, and there happen to be devices out there that do not burn your material up, but rather heat it up just enough to consume them! There is a big selection out there and you can do research and ask around what friends of you prefer to use, or if they even know of specific devices that they can recommend. I ended up just going to a local headshop and asked what dry herb vapes they had in store. There were insane contraptions sold for over a grand, some heavy duty devices too, and some beginner friendly models, the one I got being an “SMONO” device, in a kind of “pen format” which funnily enough has a recorder like mouthpiece.
How you use them, is that you load up a bowl and then turn the device on. Then it warms up for a bit and you can get at it! You can also manipulate the temperature your device is supposed to climb to, from 100°C to 220°C on my end, with different temperatures bringing different experiences to the table, for instance smoking hotter results in more intense sessions, while lower temps can keep you more functional and offer a more pleasant tasting experience.
The cool thing about Vapes is that you really use a minimum amount of plant material to get a potent effect, with my vape having a rather small bowl capacity (around 0.3 grams tops but I load it with maybe 0.1 to 0.2 grams of material as I don’t tightly pack it). I don’t have a perfect way of measuring it, however the already vaped material which I have kept in a glass jar, I weighed. Weighing the material on a kitchen scale I have reached 1 gram.
I have been vaping for around 10 days now, sometimes multiple bowls a day, and only consumed maybe 1 and a little grams so far. Some material I have used in a tea, and a bowl is still in my vape, but still those are pretty good numbers.
What this means is that roughly 2,85 Euros worth of weed was consumed over a course of almost two weeks, with the spent material not being useless mind you as you, as it already is decarboxylated and can be used in baking. I will likely write about Decarboxylation in detail some time else.
If putting the material of a single bowl on a cigarette sized rolling paper, we can see how small the amount actually is, as it is nowhere near enough for a good pocket sized J. This could mean that my per bowl cost of vaping lies at around 0.29 Euros per bowl, which is a stark difference to the 0.84 Euros per cigarillo, or the price of 0.35 Euros per cigarette, which is even more insane than the cigarillo, considering that a smoker can easily annihilate 20 cigarettes in a day. This means that if you value your material, you don’t combust, as like this you get high on a surprisingly low supply.
The time I tend to vape is in the evenings, when I have to get ready for bed. I load up a bowl and have a 5 minute-ish session while continuing whatever I am doing. Eventually using the computer becomes so exhausting that it is essentially impossible to keep going, prompting me to shut off my computer and hit the hay. Maybe Insomnia should be another topic to write about soon.
But yeah, there is more stuff to explore when it comes to vaping different materials. One herb I vaporised that wasn’t weed for instance is Green Tea, which has a slightly energising effect and a more than pleasant taste, which I vape at around 185°C to 195°C. I want to also try vaping Coffee, Basil, Rosemary, Lavender, maybe even blends of herbs, and eventually maybe even weed blends that include Salvia and miniscule amounts of Datura.