Just to catch you up on something that’s been bouncing around the stoner community for a bit, “dabbing weed” has nothing to do with the recently popular dance meme of the same name. That kind of dabbing is near dead thanks to Paul Ryan and these children, so there will be fewer and fewer opportunities to confuse the two going forward.
Since its introduction, “Dabbing weed” has gotten more and more popular as the tools and knowhow required required became increasingly available, and tales of its ability to fuck you up continued to spread.
For the uninitiated, dabbing weed is slang for using a “nail” and a “dab ring” to smoke specific kinds of potent pot extracts derived from the hair-like “crystals” on marijuana. Weed concentrates dabbed include rosin as well as wax, shatter, butane hash oil, budder and crumble.
Given that creating even a small bit of any extract requires large amount of dried weed, the prices for them can be quite steep compared to those for normal bud. For instance, a gram of rosin currently averages about $53 a gram nationwide, almost five times the going national average for the same amount of conventional pot. Interestingly, it does not take high-quality weed to make such products, a fact that endears it to producers. Also, some extracts can be made at home, as the rosin tutorial below demonstrates.
Despite the effort and cost involved in obtaining them, extracts have become the first choice of many millennial and Gen-Z stoners as they offer many times many times more THC than conventional pot in the same amount of smoke. While a single bong rip of most weed might get you buzzed, most “dab rips” will leave you blazed almost instantly. As we wrote in an earlier piece, “dabbing is like taking a shot of premium vodka. Smoking a joint is like nursing a glass of house red.” While some medical extracts are engineered not to get you high, the majority will crush you in an eye blink.
For that subset of stoners for whom more and faster is always better, the attraction is obvious. There’s even a genre of YouTube videos dedicated to capturing people taking down massive dab rips, which adds to the product’s cachet. Enjoy the sampling below.
As you might have noticed, these dabbers are using specified hardware, the previously mentioned “nail” and a “dab ring.” The first is essentially a metal wand heated to a specific temperature onto which one puts a small amount of concentrate. The other is a bong specifically engineered to pull the smoke that comes off that heated wand. Quality examples of “dab rings” tend to be more expensive than above-standard bongs and nails (self-heating or otherwise) and butane lighters represent an entirely new cost for stoners.
There are possible dangers associated with dabbing. Producers separate wax, shatter and other concentrates from weed using various chemical solvents including butane, CO2, propane and ethanol. The long-term effects of inhaling the extracts created in this process aren’t known, but all the solvents above are confirmed toxic inhalants. Experts suggest users stick to chemical-free concentrates such as rosin. There have also been suggestions that dabs are far more addictive than normal pot, but the there evidence is purely anecdotal.
In contrast, a nice side benefit of dabbing a safe extract is that regular practitioners not only inhale far less tar and burned particulate matter than traditional smokers per rip, but smoke less overall. Over time, this makes it a safer option than puffing on joints or toking from bongs, methods responsible for the few health risks associated with pot use.