Through the looking glass…

You may have noticed that many cultivators are beginning to package their flower a bit differently these days. They seem to be exchanging their rigid, structured, and sometimes overly ornate glass and plastic packaging for ziplock bags when possible. This move toward the bag is most surely a response to rising costs across the board.
In a cannabis market flush with product, will this translate into lower prices for patients or will it only serve to reduce overhead for the cultivators? 

One would think less money spent on unnecessary fluff like glass jars wrapped in hemp would allow cultivators to lower their prices to a more competitive bracket. 

Pomp and Circumstance

It is rather disheartening at worst and silly at best when you open a box to get to a plastic dram that is only one-third filled. You may wonder what you’re paying for; you may even needing to justify bringing this dram into your home by coming up with all the ways you can repurpose the tin or jar. Surely that’s worth the extra money you spent on this flower ….right?

Some of the best flower I’ve had in Maryland cost less than $50 and, many times, has come in a ziplock bag, not a glass jar.

I will include Roll One’s Critical Sensei Star and District Cannabis’ Cherry Chem are two good examples
So you can get an idea of who’s packaging their flower in what, I’ve put together a list of sorts with all the different cultivators operating in Maryland and their respective packaging. YOU CAN SKIP TO THE LIST HERE.

To be fair there is a lot to be said for glass; it does make buds look important and it can keep your flower quite fresh. I recall many times pulling buds from jars during prohibition.  In fact there was even a particular type of weed that would make its way to the Blue Ridge Mountains from the deep swampy south, a Kush I presume, and smelling of oranges called Florida Jar Weed. Still to this day growers pick glass mason jars over many other mediums in order to cure their cannabis yields to perfection.

But, at the end of the eighth what do you do with the jar? Sure, you can put your other flower in it; or even other items like change or guitar picks. But is their really a necessity for this type of vessel with a product sold in such a small incremental weights as a gram and an eighth of an ounce?

And why all the glass anyway? Back in the day, the only reason we wanted to put our herb in glass jars, was to be able to look at it. It certainly wasn’t to protect it from light; mostly since it wasn’t (and still isn’t) necessarily the kind of thing you leave just sitting around.

Also, as mentioned in the list of packaging; glass and plastic jars and drams may present an extra layer of difficulty for those suffering from, say, arthritis, carpel tunnel, or tendonitis; making it all the more difficult to access the flower. 

Lick-Locked…

I remember a time not so long ago when the ziplock was a breakthrough after years of distributing and receiving cannabis in simple cellophane baggies with no locking mechanism and offering absolutely zero barrier for odor.
When you would purchase weed it was usually in a baggie, a sandwich baggie to be specific. In order to use one for this purpose you had to first turn it inside out to get rid of all the static electricity so that the shake wouldn’t stick to the sides.

Then once you had the flower nicely snug at the bottom evened out as best as you could from corner to corner, you rolled, and rolled and rolled until only the flap was left (sandwich baggies have an extended flap). Then you or someone you either knew well, or not at all, would stick out there tongue (moist or worse wet with saliva) and the licking of the bag from left to right wold begin. Then after sufficiently wet with spit, the flap was tamped down and you were good to go. gross.
I would come to call this “lick-locked”. 

Lately many Cultivators such as Kind Tree are employing ziplock bags. Since taking over the HMS line, Kind Tree has been distributing some of the HMS legacy strains like Strawberry OG and newer ones like Grapefruit Kush in their purple Kind Tree ziplock.  Harvest and now its brands Roll One and Modern Flower are also in ziplock. 1937 is one of the newer cultivators to go the route of the ziplock as well. However, both Kind Tree and 1937 still offer both Glass and Plastic screw top drams for their flower as well.

Big box, tiny gift

Prices are increased in just about every sector of the economy. Paying $65 for an eighth of flower in an ornate jar shrouded in a box does seem a bit obnoxiously extravagant from a consumer’s standpoint.
And let’s face it there are huge disparities between product to packaging ratios in a lot of instances. Remember the HMS 1/4 oz tubes that were only every 1/3 filled?
This just seems to reek of unnecessary cost where the coverage outweighs the event.

The Invisible Ink effect…

Not to mention the other issues that arise. A few very popular multi-state operators refuse to acknowledge that their terpene and potency lab test labels rub off completely at the slightest touch.

This is unacceptable from a consumer standpoint yes; But especially in a medically legal state where regulation from seed to sale can mean a mountain of red tape-compliance; well it simply flies in the face of logic and pretty much laughs in the serious brow of overbearing compliance standards.

And really, isn’t it just a bit concerning that you could be ingesting a strain to get some sleep that may have loads of pinene in it but you can’t check because well…it’s vanished? To me the use of these jars seems unneeded and for the most part screams of the notion of the coverage outweighing the event so to speak; so much so that the coverage even falters. What’s next? Lids that fall off?

Shattered, Shattered…My-Doobie

Of course glass drams are nice and they do help retain the freshness but they can also shatter on impact rendering your flower pretty much unusable; I’ve tried but there’s just no safe way to extricate the minuscule, almost imperceptible, shards of glass from the herb without running the risk of inhaling said glass shards.
This has happened to me one time and it was indeed, an unfortunate mishap; one that prevented me from being able to sample and review 1937’s Gorilla Girl on a balmy July 4th day. (Inset photo one minute after I lost the Gorilla Girl. Sad.

Ziplocks also have issues…

Even in the land of ziplocks, not all are created equal. You may have noticed that the foil interior of 1937’s ziplocks can wrinkle making it more likely to lose precious trichomes that get stuck to the surface. As seen in the photo below Strane’s new “Stash” ziplock has a much more slick surface free of wrinkles and easier to scrape remnants from.
Strane’s new ziplocks seem to exceed the others in durability in my opinion. And after a week and a half of holding roughly 10 -14 grams of GDP it remained fresh and fragrant..Not only that I reclaimed all the shake.

Every cannabis container has its issues…

So every format has its ups and downs. I like glass but I don’t really like the opaque glass that is said to be “protecting” my flower from harmful UV rays. Really? Is there anyone reading here or otherwise that stores their drams of flower on a rooftop or sitting on a solar panel? My guess would be that the black glass is less refined recycled glass and cheaper to use. So, yeah…
Plus, it’s bad enough we can’t purchase deli style anymore; now we can’t even see it from the bottom of the jar after purchase.
All in all it’s hard to argue against the ziplock. It is an easy format to store and transport. The more heavy duty examples like Strane and Kind Tree will indeed preserve aroma and freshness.
The downside is that because the ziplock lacks a hard shell, the bud material can be easily crushed causing precious trichomes to be stuck on the bag itself and rendered unusable. Often, more of this material is lost than if the flower were just kept in a hardshell dram. And, much like the other types, ziplocks can present a challenge when attempting to retrieve the last remnants of your stash.  But using the ziplock they way it is intended will surely elongate the freshness of your flower just as much if not more than a glass or plastic hardshell dram.

In Conclusion…

So, we probably haven’t seen the end of glass drams…maybe plastic, but not glass… Especially if the market is every tiered between medical and recreational… or even if it goes complete recreational or stays medical. And this is because cultivators will always need ways to differentiate their product and establish its quality. Glass does say high end and that’s probably not gonna change. Maybe a buy back program with coupon incentives for returning glass and plastic drams to be recycled and re-used as cannabis drams again? There are such programs such as the High 5 Initiative. In fact Oceanside Dispensary and Ethos are two dispensaries in Maryland where you can participate (no point systems or sales incentives are attached to this program but you’ll unload the mountain of drams you may have hiding in your home. Here is the program as it is advertised at Oceanside in Pasadena.

I hope that we can see the majority of the flower, especially the preroll and the eighth be sold in ziplocks. And hopefully this help keep costs down and translate into lower prices; all while still securing freshness.