Do you prefer concentrates or flower?
Do you smoke concentrates? If you do, how would you compare that to smoking flower? In my experience, even the most ardent concentrate connoisseurs still, at the end of the day, prefer smoking flower. I believe this is due to the “entourage effect,” which I believe is only achieved with full plant-based medicine. I would like to explicitly state that I would describe full plant-based medicine as smoking/vaping flower and ingesting RSO or FECO oil only. I believe all concentrates besides RSO and FECO extract some of the full plant properties, even solventless ones like rosin and even dry sift hash. The reason being, when done properly, you are really reducing the flower to the trichomes and thus extracting any plant-based material.
I have read that all the psychoactive and medicinal compounds reside within the trichomes, but no matter what I read, nothing trumps my personal experience. This is a sentiment that I echo often; that personal physiology is the most important thing when it comes to how we experience cannabis. It is my belief that every individual having a unique endocannabinoid system is responsible for each of our unique experiences with cannabis.
Some people do prefer concentrates exclusively, but like with flower, I say buyer beware. With concentrates, though, it is a whole other level.
My Personal Experiences on Concentrate Production
I have previously written a blog post on a commercial farm that I worked at in Boulder, CO, called 75 Farm. What I witnessed there was unfortunate, to say the least. I think it is worth mentioning first that I am not a scientist or doctor, nor am I able to understand the implications of what mold, pesticides, and PGRs will do to the human body. But as a novice who has some common sense, I think every person can relate to not wanting to consume an excessive amount of chemicals that are essentially toxic through what is supposed to be medicine.
So what did I see at 75 Farm as it relates to cannabis concentrate production? We were producing isolate, which is what you typically will find in disposable vape pens and disposable vape cartridges. When our flower would fail the testing of the MED (Marijuana Enforcement Division), it would get brought back to our facility, and we would process it into isolate. Our cannabis would typically fail due to mold contamination. My understanding from speaking with co-workers was that mold and other contaminants are much harder, if not impossible, to detect once the flower is converted to isolate*. Again, I am not a doctor, but do you have to be to understand that mold flying under the radar in a concentrated form is probably not something you should hardwire into your brain—which is what happens whenever you consume cannabis?
I don’t want to turn this blog post into another ECS one, so I will just say that CB1 receptors are largely concentrated in the brain, and mold and FDA- and USDA-banned pesticides (which are often neuro-toxic) should not be entering your brain.
Early Practices for Cannabis Extraction
I touched on “solventless” concentrates briefly earlier (the name says it all), but these are obviously concentrates that use no solvent or extractor to get the medicinal properties of the plant concentrated. Solventless is all the rage, I believe mainly because of people’s perceptions of it being less harmful than old-school extraction techniques like using butane to create “shatter,” if you remember that crap. BHO, or butane hash oil, became a common moniker for a family of concentrates using this process. Once again, a physician isn’t needed to tell you that you probably should not put lighter fluid into your lungs.
My Conclusion
I bring these things up to people often, but I often feel like it falls on deaf ears. As long as people think that cannabis is a vice instead of medicine (a sentiment that is hard to get across to people as long as they are slanging THC beverages at Circle K) it will be an uphill battle to convince people that largely what you get at a dispensary is just poisonous.
So… you know what I always say: grow your own, save your money, have your health, save yourself.
