CANNABIS CODE
THE STATE OF COLORADO limits the amount of marijuana a person can purchase at one time to an ounce for in-state residents and a quarter-ounce for out-of-state visitors. But when faced with options ranging from straight buds to hash to edibles, trying to figure out what that means can be trickier than you think. Each marijuana strain and even individual plants contain varying amounts of active THC, which is typically measured in milligrams. “What we look at as your average bud out there, the average flower, is around 16 (percent) to 17 percent THC in the bud,” said Nick Brown, of High Country Healing in Silverthorne. “If you take one gram of bud, 17 percent of that gram is THC, which is 170 milligrams.” This measurement is used as a baseline of comparison for other products, such as edibles and concentrates. If you do the math, a quarter-ounce of marijuana buds, also called flowers, is roughly equivalent to 1,050 to 1,400 milligrams of active THC. An edible made from THC oil or butter can contain as much as 100 milligrams of active THC, according to state retail marijuana laws, which means you could potentially buy 10 to 14 cookies, brownies, juice boxes, etc., as an equivalent to that quarter-ounce. But here’s where the math gets tricky. The Colorado Marijuana Enforcement Division hasn’t yet set standards on testing and labeling most cannabis products, so it’s hard to know how much active THC you are getting when you start combining buds, edibles and hash. Brown said it’s up to each individual retail store to make sure they are doing things legally and limiting customers to the correct amount of products for each purchase. “What the Marijuana Enforcement Division had us do is break it down ourselves and say that 1 gram of pot is equal to two edibles,” Brown said. Brown said High Country Healing stays on the conservative side to ensure compliance with the law, but other stores may approach sales of concentrates and edibles in different ways. Because there is no set standard for testing and labeling each product, it can appear as if one store is hooking you up and another is ripping you off.
10 Rocky Mountain Marijuana
MARIJUANA MATHEMATICS by KRISTA DRISCOLL “The customer might think that each shop might be doing things in a shady way,” Brown said. “I only allow you to buy 200 milligrams of edibles for 1 gram of bud, where say in Denver you could buy 500 milligrams for every 1 gram of bud. None of us are uniform because the Marijuana Enforcement Division hasn’t come up with what that rule is.” Concentrates, commonly called hash, are also tricky to measure. Brown said he errs on the conservative side for those products, as well. “With concentrates, you look at earwax — it’s a form of hash — 1 gram of earwax could be 60 percent, 70 percent, 80 percent, 90 percent, so we’re looking at 1 gram of earwax and saying it’s on the high end, 80 percent THC,” Brown said. Labeling packages with exact milligram amounts of active THC could prove to be difficult because each gram of hash or batch of oil would have to be tested. Despite the hurdles, Brown said he would love for there to be a standard across the industry. “These companies aren’t required to test, it’s not required on the label which percentage THC the concentrates are,” Brown said. “We get a gram of wax from a company, we buy it from them, the labeling doesn’t have to be on that. It doesn’t list on the label what percentage concentration it is. It’ll be in a range of 60 (percent) to 90 percent — we go conservative and take the higher numbers on that. We’re trying to create the standard that the Marijuana Enforcement Division was not able to create themselves.”