Before Oregon legalized cannabis, and even before the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program was in place, I was an avid consumer of cannabis.
A steady supply of high-quality craft cannabis was not always available to me, though, so I was at times reduced to partaking of whatever was available. That meant smoking some pretty harsh, seedy, dried-out “flower” some of the time.
I’m certainly not talking about any of the flower that Oregon consumers can now find at dispensaries for as low as $40 per ounce—part of the state’s overproduction that has left some growers stuck with harvests from this spring, or even fall of 2017. There was a time that I would have paid three times that amount for even the low-end stuff.
So the next time you bitch about what you deem subpar flower, just know there are people who would cherish what you dismiss. And some of those people can be found in Oklahoma, where our fellow Americans are buying and smoking flower—from hemp plants.
In Oklahoma City, a CBD products store canned Herban Mother is selling small jars of hemp flower for $35 each. Judging from photos, each jar looks to hold about an eighth of flower.
That’s $280 an ounce for hemp flowers with less than 0.3 percent THC. Any more THC, and it’s no longer legal to sell outside of a regulated dispensary.
Hector Najar II of Herban Mother told KOCO TV earlier this year, “I don’t necessarily recommend [smoking it] for pain management. However it would be a great application for stress and anxiety. But who am I to say, the response for everyone is different…. [But] if you’re subject to urine analysis, this is not the product for you.”He added a contender for Understatement of 2018, concluding that for those who do smoke the hemp (Originally published December flowers, “If they’re looking for medical marijuana, this is not gonna give them the same result that they’re looking for.”
I’ve smoked industrial hemp flower before. It was bad. I didn’t get high. It didn’t do much for pain, at least not for my throbbing lungs, which hacked up their linings as I tried to choke down rope smoke.
I can’t imagine this is the ideal delivery system for CBD, or even one that should be encouraged at all. But if it’s helping people with stress and anxiety, it’s still a better alternative to many pharmaceuticals which are commonly prescribed for those conditions.
West Coast, we forget how good we have it here sometimes.