What to Do With Disappointing Weed

So your last cannabis purchase didn’t live up to expectations? It happens. But with the right approach, even the most middling cannabis can make a comeback.

A word of caution: if you suspect that mould or mildew are the cause of your distaste, toss the batch entirely—it’s not worth the health risks. But for cannabis that’s simply dry, stale, or less fun than you’d hoped, read on.

Mix It Up

Apologies if you’re getting tired of the CBD-can-do-everything mentality taking over health headlines lately, but seriously: it’s kind of amazing. In addition to its abundant medical potential, CBD can also mitigate the paranoia and anxiety of a bad cannabis experience.

So if you’ve found flower that looks great and tastes great, but makes you want to curl into a ball and mentally rehearse your end-of-days survival plans whenever you hit it, try blending it with some CBD-dominant flower next time.

It’s not just cannabinoid content that impacts your cannabis experience—terpenes play a role, too. So if you’re not loving the experience of a particular bud, give it a good whiff and consider mixing it with something that smells completely different. If you’re lucky, you’ll create an entourage effect you enjoy. If not, keep reading.

Just Eat It

Licensed producers aren’t wasting their most beautiful buds on secondary products like oils and extracts, so why should you?

For better or worse, the infusion process will alter your flower’s original terpene and cannabinoid concentrations, changing it in ways near impossible for the home cook to measure. Even if your homemade oil possessed exactly the same qualities as the flower that made it (it won’t, but let’s just say), it will still feel different, because ingesting cannabis is a completely different physiological process than inhaling it.

It’s hard to predict how it will feel until you try it, so start low and go slow until you get a handle on your infusion’s effects. And another thing: don’t get too caught up in the whole cannabutter thing. It has a nice ring to it, but as you’ll see below, infused coconut or olive oil is much more versatile.

Soak It In

So you turned your disappointing bud into magical oil and you still don’t like it? Try again, but this time instead of eating the oil, apply it topically. This method is unlikely to get you high, but it may offer localized relief from pain and inflammation.

Slather infused coconut or olive oil directly on your skin, add it to bathwater with your favourite essential oils, or use it as the base for a range of do-it-yourself lotions and potions including lube.

And if none of these options do it for you, take that infused coconut oil, funnel or syringe it into some empty straws, stick them in the freezer, and read on.

Stick It Where the Sun Don’t Shine

It’s not nice discovering you’ve wasted your money on subpar weed, but before you return to your budtender and tell them to stick it where the sun don’t shine, please—save this stellar idea for yourself.

To date, little research has been published around the intoxicating potential of cannabis suppositories, so your safest bet is to accept that this method might get you high, although most fans report lower body pain relief and more of a body buzz than a cerebral sensation. Because of the anus’s thin mucosa, rectal suppositories are likely to work faster and have more intoxicating potential than vaginal ones.

But perhaps the silliest advantage to this method is its revenge factor. So what if your weed let you down? You’re going to stick it up your butt and have a good time.

Take that, schwag!