Dear Stoner: How Can I Make a Bowl More Potent?

Dear Stoner is a new weekly column in which our marijuana expert answers your burning questions about weed. 

Dear Stoner: I have a metal pipe that I can unscrew and clean, and the other day I had a great idea: What if I put a nug in there to get nice and sticky after smoking a few bowls? Will it be more potent?
JustBlaze

Dear Blaze: Now I know why natives get so annoyed with transplants, because no one who grew up here would ever think of doing such a stupid thing. No offense. Yes, sticking a nug in a pipe while you smoke can be a jailhouse way of coaxing it to get you a little higher, but it comes at the cost of your taste buds, lungs, and brain cells. That black stuff that covers the inside of your pipe is basically tar with some THC in it. Smoking it gets you high, but it’s not worth the damage it does to your lungs or brain cells while you’re coughing for five minutes — and it tastes like Bigfoot’s dick.

A small drop of hash oil over a bowl will get you higher than a tar-coated nug ever could. A small pinch of kief will also do the trick, and you can collect that yourself if you buy a grinder with a screen in it. Whatever you do, stay away from the metal hardware.

Dear Stoner: I got my hands on a half-ounce of herb and wanted to make edibles, but I’m afraid they’ll get me too high. Is there any way I can figure out how potent they’ll be?
Chef P

Dear Chef: THC content in edibles is measured in milligrams, which is a measure of weight. So if you have a half-ounce of marijuana flower, all you need to do is find the THC percentage and convert accordingly. Remember, homegrown stuff is a little harder to estimate, and although dispensaries put flower THC percentages on packaging, they’re not always as high as advertised. Assuming you have a decent estimate of your THC percentage, though, it’ll just take some basic math.

To make this easy, let’s say your half-ounce of flower tested at 20 percent THC. An ounce equals 28,349.5 milligrams, so a half-ounce would be 14,174.75 milligrams — and the THC would account for 20 percent of that. If you extract all of the THC from the flower while making some pot butter, you should get about 2,835 milligrams of THC. How much butter you want to cook with in order to spread out all that THC is up to you. As far as personal use goes, consider that in Colorado — where recreational marijuana is legal — the law limits recreational edibles packaging to doses of 10 milligrams or less.