If you consume cannabis, odds are that every now and then you’ve been in a pickle trying to get your hands on some gear. Generally, we recommend growing your own green, but sometimes you’re in a pinch and for some reason or another, your plants simply didn’t make it or are taking much too long. This is when you’ll need to turn to the black market to get your own weed. In this article we’ll go through various checks you can do to see if you have quality cannabis on your hands, whether it’s home-grown or bought.
Textures and Shape:
The shape is the first thing you’ll need to look at in buds – every strain has its own structure and the buds can be spongy or compact; as long as they’re nice a full you should be fine. Anything that looks different from a conventional bud in as far as shape means that it’s probably been manipulated before. This means it’s probably lost quality and resin.
Odor:
Odor is another important aspect of cannabis buds – this means that if you go to buy marijuana you’ll need to make sure that it has a decent odor; weed generally ranges between lots of different odors, although they all somehow still smell like marijuana. If your weed doesn’t smell much it means that it’s either not good quality or that it has been deteriorated. Press down on the bud slightly and see if it lets off a bit more odor. If you get a whiff of something that isn’t cannabis, get rid of it immediately, as it could have some sort of toxic substance in it.
External appearance:
Make sure that the outside of the bud looks mature enough and doesn’t look weird at all (including the color, which should never be brown or yellow). Have a close look at it to see if it has any sort of contaminating material on it such as sand or insects. If you have a microscope you can whip it out to take a look at the weed closely, analyzing even the trichomes. If the resin glands have a transparent sort of color, that means the weed wasn’t harvested at the right time, and if it’s a sort of amber color it’ll have been left for too long before harvesting. It’s always good to have a small magnifying glass or a microscope on hand for these situations.
Internal appearance:
Simply open up the buds and check if it has any sort of foreign elements such as caterpillars, fungi or dirt. Once again, for a more professional-looking plant you can also use a microscope, as it might also have microscopic pathogens on the inside. Also, make sure that there’s no empty spots in your buds, as this means it didn’t have enough carbs to fill them out and the quality will be much lesser.
Tasting:
This is the last thing you’ll need to do – give it a taste! Obviously if the weed doesn’t pass the previous tests you don’t need to do this one, and the taste-test is honestly a matter of opinion, too. Usually you can tell by the taste how strong a particular weed is – if it’s been grown properly and the roots washed out accordingly, you’ll be able to appreciate a much deeper flavor. If sparks come out when smoked or if the ash is almost black, you probably shouldn’t smoke it, as it might still have a lot of chlorophyll in it. If this is the case, the weed simply needs to be cured a bit more.
Now that you know how to tell good weed from bad weed, you should be able to rest much easier when smoking, and if you’re buying weed you can investigate it before taking it home, guaranteeing that you won’t be tricked. If you can, you’ll need to find someone you trust that grows weed to buy from. The best marihuana, however, is the one you grow yourself.
Author: Abel Alamar Brocal
Translation: Ciara Murphy