Reggie Weed: What It Is & Why You Should Avoid It
Reggie weed, shorthand for regular weed, sounds perfectly normal. It’s almost weird to say that regular weed is something you should avoid. The landscape surrounding cannabis has substantially changed over the past decade.
The medical cannabis industry is growing, and the recreational cannabis market is expanding across the country. This has established a nearly official standard for cannabis quality, and seasoned users have a set of expectations.
Reggie weed is the weed that doesn’t meet those expectations. It’s not that Reggie weed is unsafe, it’s that Reggie weed is generally bad. Here’s what makes Reggie weed different from higher-quality cannabis and why the difference isn’t worth saving a few bucks.
How To Spot Reggie Weed
Reggie weed has very little in common with cannabis you’d purchase from a recreational or medical dispensary. It looks different, smells different, tastes different, and produces lackluster effects.
What Does Reggie Weed Look Like?
Reggie weed is usually dark olive green, sometimes with tan, brown, and black spots or streaks running throughout the flower. It usually appears parched and feathery, kind of like a tumbleweed. It will be very clear at first glance that Reggie weed is a flower that died a long time ago.
Reggie weed often has very pronounced stems, and many seeds may be visible from the exterior of the flower.
How Reggie Weed Smells
Reggie weed may not have a strong aroma. Usually, when someone opens up a jar of cannabis, the odor begins to waft through the room. Reggie weed may have a vague cannabis smell, or it may smell like a pile of raked leaves from the lawn or the pellets you feed a rat, rabbit, or guinea pig.
How Reggie Weed Tastes
Reggie weed often tastes like burnt campfire kindling. It doesn’t have a distinctive cannabis flavor or any strong notes you may associate with your favorite strains.
There is nothing specific in the flavor and no identifying characteristics that would indicate that Reggie weed is even weed. Quite frankly, most Reggie weed could be dead lawn clippings, for all most people would know.
What Are the Effects of Reggie Weed?
A highly experienced cannabis user would likely say that Reggie weed does not produce any effects. Reggie weed was never properly handled.
Most of the terpenes and cannabinoids responsible for producing the high or general experience you have with cannabis have evaporated from the flower before you get it.
Beginners may experience some mild effects as a result of the small amounts of THC Reggie weed still contains. The experience would best be described as a brief and fleeting high.
You may feel inclined to go back for more after about 30 minutes when the effects fade faster than expected, which would double or triple your cannabis use compared to properly grown and stored cannabis.
How Is Reggie Weed Different From Other Weed?
Reggie weed is extraordinarily different from properly grown cannabis, to the point where it would be reasonable to consider smoking Reggie weed and smoking top-shelf cannabis to be wildly different experiences.
Growing Conditions
Reggie weed is often grown outdoors with minimal supplies. There’s nothing inherently wrong with sun-grown cannabis. Plenty of well-respected cannabis brands offer traditionally grown strains that are of impeccable quality. The difference between Reggie weed and these strains is the amount of care that goes into growing them.
Reggie weed is usually grown with dirt in a large pot, the same way you might grow a fern plant. This weed seldom receives the proper nutrients it needs and isn’t monitored closely for adequate soil pH, the presence of illness or mold, or the damaging effects of excessive heat or sunlight.
The end result is a barely healthy cannabis plant that’s been undernourished and scorched. Reggie weed often contains an abnormally large amount of seeds because the plant isn’t properly nourished during the stage of growth where flowers are supposed to form.
Beautiful Buds
Perfectly dried and cured cannabis will be bright green in color. If the weed has purple or orange hairs, it’ll remain vibrant. The buds should be dense and sticky, and they should be slightly soft to the touch.
Correctly preserved cannabis retains just enough moisture to prevent the flower from drying out. The flower should be frosted with tiny white trichome crystals that indicate its potency: the more trichomes, the more potent the weed.
The Preservation of Terpenes
Terpenes are the aromatic compounds in cannabis that give each strain a unique flavor and aroma. Terpenes may also contribute to the effects profiles of different strains, encouraging you to feel energized, calm, focused, or sleepy depending on the unique terpene and cannabinoid balance.
Cannabis plants use terpenes to communicate with nature. The aroma of terpenes tells bad organisms, like pests and animals that eat the plant, to stay away. Pollinators find terpenes enticing and are more likely to visit the plant. Terpenes are designed to constantly evaporate.
Professional growers take extra steps to preserve the natural terpenes of the plant, assuring that a substantial amount of flavorful compounds are left behind for you to enjoy. This is one of the hallmarks that separate a great smoking experience from a subpar smoking experience.
The terpenes of Reggie weed are long gone before it ever reaches you. You’re missing a substantial part of what makes cannabis enjoyable.
Proper Storage
Cannabinoids are very sensitive to light and heat. Professional growers use controlled drying and curing processes to preserve the terpenes in weed. They thoughtfully package cannabis before sending it off to the dispensary, often including humidity packs to keep the moisture levels ideal within the container.
Storage is one of the most important things in the world to cannabis. The most perfectly grown and expertly preserved strain in the world will rapidly deteriorate if stored improperly.
There are no storage standards for Reggie weed. You don’t know how much light and heat it's been exposed to. You don’t know how long it's been sitting around. The cannabinoid content could be significantly diminished by the time it reaches you.
Should You Smoke Reggie Weed?
Odds are slim to none that your local legal dispensary sells anything that would be considered Reggie weed. If you’re contemplating buying and smoking Reggie weed, chances are better than not that we wouldn’t approve of the method by which you obtained it.
Buying cannabis outside of a dispensary is a lot like buying sushi out of the trunk of a stranger’s car. Sure, it’s cheaper. It may not kill you. But do you really want to take that risk?
Support your local cannabis industry by shopping at trusted dispensaries. Dispensaries are the only place to buy high-quality cannabis of discernible origin. You’ll always know you’re getting what you think you’re getting, and many cannabis companies lab test their products for safety and purity.
Since Reggie weed doesn’t contain most things that make cannabis delicious, beneficial, or potent, smoking it is unlikely to be a worthwhile experience. If you’re going to smoke cannabis, you should choose cannabis that’s meant to be enjoyed.
Prevent Your Great Weed From Becoming Reggie Weed
The cannabis you get from the dispensary is absolutely perfect. If you don’t take good care of it, it will inevitably become Reggie weed. Fine cannabis can be a splurge, just like fine wine. You’re not going to pour your fine wine into a bag, tuck it into a shoebox with your wine glasses, and stuff it under your bed. Why would you do that with your weed?
All you have to do with cannabis is keep it the way you found it. This doesn’t require a lot of maintenance, and it isn’t tricky to figure out if you have an easy-to-use storage solution. That’s why we made the Stori case.
The Stori case is a multifunctional cannabis storage solution. You buy it once and use it forever. The sides of the case and the lids of the pods and tubes are child-resistant, keeping your cannabis from getting into the hands of your children or the mouth of your pets. The top of the case serves as a rolling tray, and there’s storage space inside for your lighter and rolling papers.
The light-proof, airtight Stori pods come with color-coded lids that have a special space to stick a Boveda humidity pack, effortlessly maintaining the freshness of your cannabis. You’ll always know which strain is in which pod or tube.
You can even label the top with a dry erase marker. Better still, you can integrate your Stori case with the Stori app to keep track of your cannabis purchases and make a note of your favorite strains. Never settle for Reggie weed ever again.
Sources:
How Evaporation of Terpenes in Cannabis Can Cost You | Boveda
Analysis and review of trichomes in plants | BMC Plant Biology | Full Text