22 Jul 2017

Directional highs: the future of marijuana?

From This Way Up, 12:15 pm on 22 July 2017

The pens are aesthetically pleasing—certainly more so than a handblown glass bong resembling a dragon or those cumbersome oblongs known as box vapes. Each three-second pull you’re doled out exactly a 2.25 milligrams dose, with just under 2 milligrams of cannabinoids. The vape vibrates to let you know when you’re done. Comparatively a puff of a joint deploys around 3 milligrams of cannabinoids. Mary H. K. Choi in The Atlantic

Recreational marijuana use has been legalised in 8 US states and there's a boom in consumer pot products.  From digital vaporizers that run off an app to Eaze, a San Francisco company hailed as the UBER of weed, there's a growing range of choices for the consumer looking for a good buzz.

Now you can even choose how you want to feel.  Directed, bespoke highs allow you to select the specific effects of what you're inhaling.  Sold under names like Sleep, Bliss, Relief and Passion, producers are selling precisely measured dosages in carefully calibrated formulas inhaled through a vape pen, giving you control over how alert, active, and sociable you want to be.

Mary H. K. Choi has been sampling the products of one producer in this high end, bespoke end of the marijuana market.

"If you want to talk about lifestyle and the various verbs you want to undertake they also have formulas called Passion and Arouse for sex basically. One is to lower the barriers for initiating sex. They even effect the frontal cortex where normally you would be thinking about a laundry list of to-dos or being distracted by the events of the day: these pens shut that off and so you can be fully immersed in the person, and verb, at hand." Mary H. K. Choi