A conversation about vaping is important for many reasons. It’s also fairly new on the scene, so there is little research out there, but we had better start talking now while we’re waiting for the research findings. If we’re not careful, I think some of the most devastating effects of marijuana use might come from people vaping. There are so many things about vaporizing THC that freak me out that it’s kind of hard to know where to start.
Let’s begin with the basics because I suppose there are those of you reading who don’t know what handheld vaporizers are. These are little tools originally made to let people ingest nicotine without the tobacco or smoke. They use water vapor to create a steam that looks, and feels, like smoke while delivering the nicotine. It’s just another delivery method to get some drug into the body. When vaporizers hit the market a few years ago they got traction pretty quickly. For one thing, they were advertised as cleaner than cigarettes—though they contain 4,000 chemicals mixed into the nicotine—and they didn’t smell. You could even get them in different flavors. There are some major issues with them as a nicotine delivery system, but since this isn’t a book about nicotine or cigarette companies we’ll move onto the subject at hand: weed!
It was only a matter of time until the technology allowing nicotine to be delivered without a smell would be utilized for weed/THC. Not only did it happen quickly, but it’s evolving much faster than the nicotine vapes did.
The THC vape pen manufacturing game is getting crowded now. Snoop Dog has his own line, so does 2 Chainz and a bunch of other people, but the innovation leaders still seem to be O.penVAPE. It’s a cute play on words encouraging open consumption, right? You should see some of the campaigns they run, one that really stands out was the $10,000 giveaway where they encouraged customers to post pictures of themselves with their O.penVAPE pen. Not many of the shots were taken in private places.
O.penVAPE makes many different kinds of vaporizers for THC consumption but it all started with a little version that combusted and delivered THC in oil form. The oil came in little plastic packets, and some manufacturers made the pens to combust the plastic along with the oil, nasty! Pretty quickly, somebody—I think it was the “pro” designers Pinnacle—realized that with a few adjustments to temperature, a vape pen could also consume organic matter (weed) and concentrates.
All that was required was to bring the temperature down a bit for the flowers and get it up to above 700 degrees for the concentrates. The necessary improvements happened pretty quickly. Vape pens today can combust THC or weed in just about any form and do it without leaving a smell. That’s super good if you live in Colorado like me. In a way, I hope more people start using them so I have to smell less weed being burned every time I go downtown. But the innovation is bad news if you’re a school resource officer, teacher, or other educator. If it’s not bad enough that a student could be eating, chewing, sucking on or drinking THC right in front of you, now they can actually smoke (vape) it in class, if they’re sneaky and slick enough, and get away with it.
I thought I was slick back in school, before things went way south for me. I went to a big high school, lots and lots of kids, and very crowded halls. They used to give us seven minutes between classes. That was a bad idea. It might not sound like a lot of time, but you can get in a lot of trouble in that amount of time. While it was easily enough time to sneak a cigarette in the bathroom, you couldn’t make it outside to get high so I had another technique that worked well. I held whatever it was I was smoking in my thumb and index finger with the burning end pointed up into the palm of my hand. Since I always had a jacket on, I was able to bring my sleeve up to my mouth, take a drag, and then exhale the smoke back up my sleeve. Yes, I smelled pretty damn bad and got some odd looks, but I never once got caught.
I undoubtedly wasn’t the only one who got high in school. Knowing what I now know, I can say that it likely didn’t help my academic career much. We had a big security team at the high school I started at in Northern Virginia. When they were paying attention to someone, that person didn’t get high as much because nobody wants to get caught with drugs in school. But vaporizers that combust THC with no odor change the entire equation. Now that kids can get away with it, I can guarantee that they are getting away with it.
We have been seeing a very disturbing trend recently. I should have seen this one coming but, honestly, it blindsided me.
Question: If a vaporizer can combust concentrates at 700-plus degrees what else can it combust?
A) Crack
B) Heroin
C) Meth
D) All of the above
Like any good multiple choice test-taker, you likely chose D. When you see it, “All of the above” is pretty much always a safe bet. Good job, D it is! This isn’t necessarily the weed industry’s fault, but without their influence there wouldn’t be products this, um, tricky. I don’t think they were trying to create a tool to smoke meth with no smell, but they did create or enhance a tool that works for all these substances. People can now combust what the world accepts as “hard drugs” in vape pens. I propose we change the way we look at hard drugs and say that if it needs to be “hot-knifed” or heated to over 700 degrees in order to be taken into somebody’s body, it’s a “hard drug.” Seems like a solid working definition to me, I’m going with it.
A pretty smart guy once wrote, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Correct me on this one if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure this is new territory. Making drugs easier for people to use and for kids to get away with using them is not a good idea. I’m also not sure that holding a stick up to my face that heats up to 700 degrees is a good idea, so I recommend we stay away from that scene.
THC-specific vapes are often hiding in plain sight. If you see kids with these things, call them out. If you see anyone with the “new and improved,” 700-degree version, give them hell because that one is messed up.
