Some of us reply with the latest studies showing smoked marijuana may well be good for your lungs.
Or maybe we whip out a vaporizer and say, “Look, it’s vapor, not smoke, so STFU.”
But did you know that vaporizing marijuana has to be done just right, or you’re actually wasting your bud and spending lots of extra money?
First, the basics…marijuana smoke gets you high when you apply heat to THC, other cannabinoids and other compounds in marijuana and deliver these heated compounds to your blood via your lungs.
If you stick your nose close to a bud and inhale deeply, you’re getting some molecules of unheated marijuana compounds into your respiratory tract, but those molecules haven’t been heated and won’t get you high.
The science behind this is that raw, unheated bud contains Δ9 Tetrahydrocannabinolic acid. In its acid form, it won’t get you high.
When you apply heat, you decarboxylate the acid compound to get delta-9 THC that does get you high.
But what kind of heat is best?
To Vape or Flame…That is the Burning Marijuana Question
(ohhh, some will hate this video!!! LOL)
Heat comes in different intensities. You may heat marijuana with direct contact to a flame, so it lights the marijuana on fire, producing many of the same lung-harming sooty byproducts as you’d get from lighting tobacco or wood on fire.
In that overheated combustion process, you’re certainly activating THC and other cannabinoids so they get you high.
You’re also sending heat, particulates, tars, toxins, and other crap into your lungs.
When people first thought about vaporizers, they were hoping to heat marijuana just enough to activate THC and other cannabinoids, without burning marijuana so you’re inhaling a gray cloud of particulates.
They were also hoping to limit the characteristic smell of burned marijuana to deter snoopy sniffers who nark you if they smell your burning medicine.
Nowadays there are fancy vaporizers with digital temperature controls, inhaler bags, and flashing lights that look like UFOs.
There are itty bitty “vaporizers” that are nothing more than a glass tube. And everything in between.
Many years before I saw a commercially-produced vaporizer, I smoked out of a primitive homemade vaporizer that was just a two-inch in diameter soldering iron-type platform with a fishbowl that fit on top and a gasket that allowed a hookah tube and mouthpiece to cover the opening.
The college dude who showed it to me had made it himself. He put some reefer on the little hotplate, put the globe back on, plugged the device in.
In a few minutes the globe filled with vapor, and we took hits off the hookah. It didn’t taste or smell like marijuana smoke.
It did make me cough, and it made me high, but the high was not the same as it was when I smoked the same weed in a joint or bong.
I didn’t think his contraption was anything more than an entertaining party trick, and I continued to prefer joints, pipes and bongs.
But hey, take a look at this Paris Hilton massive vaporizer Jack Herer marijuana video filmed at the Sensi Hashish Museum in Amsterdam. Now this really is impressive…
Marijuana Vaporizer Potency: It’s All About Temperatures
Fast forward to 2012 and we’ve got so many styles and brands of vaporizers that you’d think nobody buys rolling papers or bongs anymore.
You can categorize vaporizers into two main types. It’s the whips versus the bags. You know…the vaporizers that have tubes coming out of them (whips), or the ones that fill up a bag with vapor and you inhale from the bag.
Yes of course there are vaporizer sub-categories. Little units that even use a flame. Others that gather the vapor into glass, and deliver it through a whip or bag. But the main selling point of all of them is that they’re not combusting the plant material. They’re only heating it.
The heat turns the volatile marijuana resins into activated vapor, so you get the vapor without the tars and other crap.
But the big problem with vaporizers has to do with temperature and temperature control.
If you underheat marijuana, you don’t get full decarboxylation or vaporization of all cannabinoids.
You see a brown or black mass of dried bud left behind, and it’s not sticky anymore, but some of the cannabinoids have been left behind because the temperature was not high enough.
Or the cannabinoids were not fully converted from acid to active, so you get a weird high, if you get high at all.
And it’s not just cannabinoids that are left behind. Terpenoids and other compounds that affect your high--some of which are unique to marijuana—are also left behind.
If those aren’t transferred properly to your lungs, you could also lose medicinal benefits.
On the other hand, if the vaporization unit temperature is too high, you get combustion or near-combustion. This may well give you a full vape of cannabinoids and other high-producing compounds, but it also results in creation of combustion byproducts that don’t get you high and are bad for your lungs.
Marijuana Vaporizer Science Stumbles Along
Do you believe science has figured out the absolutely perfect temperatures to heat cannabis so you get all the high you want with no combustion byproducts? Or that the perfect vaporizer exists so you get all the fun and none of the lung trouble when you use marijuana?
Unfortunately, cannabinoid vaporization science is still in the argumentative phase. Some researchers claim the ideal temperature is in a range of 250-450 degree Fahrenheit. Others say it’s a much narrower range: 350-400 degrees Fahrenheit.
Why can’t people make up their minds about what’s the real deal with marijuana vaporizer temperature? Because marijuana contains between 50-70 compounds that could be part of the marijuana high and/or marijuana’s medical effects, and each of those compounds has its own volatility and vaporization characteristics.
Some terpenoids vaporize at 259°F, but our most favorite cannabinoids such as cannabidiol (CBD), cannabinol (CBN), and delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) do not vaporize until they hit 403°F, 415°F, and 301°F, respectively.
You see the obvious problem: different marijuana compounds vaporize at different temperatures.
But let’s say you have a very popular and easy to use bag-type vaporizer. In some cases, what happens is your device first heats up the terpenoids and those go into your bag. If you take a hit, you get mostly aromatics, and not as much cannabinoids.
Later on, as the vaporizer heats up to the temperatures needed to vaporize CBD, CBN, and
THC, your next hits might be loaded with more of
those Big Three Cannabinoids.
You might say, so what? Eventually I will inhale all the active ingredients as vapor, so who cares what order they’re vaporized in?
Well, you can taste the difference in vapo hits, and you can feel it in the high.
The first hit may not taste like smoked marijuana at all, and does not get me high. The second and following hits are almost all THC and other cannabinoids, but minus the terpenoids, so the high is different.
When I smoke a joint or flame-lit bowl, I get all the cannabinoids and terpenoids at once, and yeah I get tar, toxins and particulates too.
I am willing to take that smoky risk, because I like that high, and I do things to cleanse my lungs so it’s no big deal to me.
Also because I smoke bubblehash or budder most of the time.
My assertion that some vapes don’t always deliver a full spectrum of marijuana’s helpful compounds is backed up by research.
For example, researchers used a gas chromatography mass spectrometer (GCMS) to examine marijuana vapors produced from the famous Volcano vaporizer.
The Volcano’s vapor was 95% THC with traces of cannabinol (CBN). The remaining 5% consisted of small amounts of three other components: a minor cannabinoid, a suspected polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAHs), and an unspecified aromatic.
PAHs are classified as pollutants.
Testing of smoke from a marijuana joint found dozens more compounds, and at least a half dozen PAHs. Only 12% of the smoked sample contained cannabinoids!
Smoke it or Vape It: It’s All About What Marijuana Gives You Now
One of my scientist friends said some of what I believe is a marijuana “high” is actually my body reacting to toxic, burnt plant material. He might be right. There are many bad things for you to inhale when you inhale smoke.
And he agreed that vaporizers produce a way different marijuana component profile compared to combusted marijuana, with vaporizers, joints and bongs often providing uneven and inconsistent delivery of all the psychoactive and medical compounds present in the raw bud.
He further suggested that bubblehash, consisting mainly of washed resin glands, lacked some of the cannabinoid, terpenoid and non-cannabinoid medical components of whole smoked marijuana.
To make a long story short, we see that generically believing vaporizers are cleaner and better than flame-combusted marijuana is too simple a story.
My advice is to do some testing with your favorite marijuana strains, using them in vaporizers and in joints or bowls, comparing how your lung and throat feels, how much marijuana you have to use to get the high you want, and the type of high you get.
As we discussed in the marijuana inhalation article, marijuana smoke is not all that bad for your lungs, unless you’re smoking ten or more grams per day.
The marijuana strains I grow produce the highest THC and resin gland percentages, because I often make bubblehash out of it.
There are very little if any toxins generated when you light and inhale bubblehash.
I don’t need or like vaporizers, but if you’re a vaporizer fan, that’s cool. It’s not for me to argue that vaporizer vapor is better or worse for you than combusted marijuana smoke…
The thing that really counts is that you grow premium marijuana and safely get it into your body so you feel its kind effects.
http://bigbudsmag.com/grow/article/marijuana-vaporizers-bong-smoke-lungs-thc-bubblehash
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