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Let’s get your imagination running hot with a little “what if” scenario to start today’s blog. What if all cannabis strains were priced equally… what would YOU choose as your highest rated, best buds? Just like the thousands upon thousands of strains of weed out there today, many people’s opinions would be just as diverse.
Cannabis is such a customizable experience, even if we’re all smoking the same flowers – how you’ll feel, what you’ll experience and the kinds of benefits you can derive from one strain might be completely different from my high. As many of us know, even our own experiences can vary greatly from one doob to another, even if they’re rolled from the same batch. Cannabis just hits differently for different people, making predicting tolerance an almost mystical undertaking.
A lot of stoners in a cannabis-friendly country like Canada are used to just “smoking what we got” and making the most out of their experiences. Contrarily, a lot of other markets like the U.S. are demanding more concrete, mappable effects so that health practitioners can make prescriptions, suggest treatments and have more medical confidence in this new, but old “green medicine”.
Whether you fall into the category of “Gotta know the exact details”, or you’re more of a “Let’s see where this goes” stoner, the need for more transparency in how cannabis affects our physiologies is rising to a fever-pitch. There is more research ongoing than ever before, just in time to match step with the surge of inexperienced cannabis greenhorns flooding all the emergent cannabis markets around the globe. Today is a good day for cannabis growth, both in the growroom and in society at-large.
With all of these questions cropping up about cannabis profiling and predicting effects, we’ve decided to throw our Haute hat into the ring and tackle the smoke haze surrounding cheap vs expensive weed. What are the differences between cheap and expensive weed? How do prices reflect premium vs cheap weed today? What is the history of cheap vs expensive weed in our neck of the woods? All of these questions and more will be discussed in this article. Are there differences between cheap and expensive weed? Let’s find out.
Stoner’s Lore: Cheap Vs Expensive Weed
Before we breakdown the analytics of what separates premium vs cheap weed, it’s good business to take a look back into the history of cheap vs expensive weed in Canada. For starters, let’s dive into what constitutes “premium weed” vs “cheap weed” back in the early days of ‘reefer madness’, and where the divide exists between cheap vs expensive weed today.
Cheap Weed Of Yesterday
Let’s go back, way back, to the days of suburbia when milk was delivered by a milkman in glass jars, cigarettes were thought of as a “refreshing break”, and everybody did the ‘Twist’ at the local shindig every Saturday night. You could say these were much simpler times, but for cannabis users these were not better times at all. This is the infamous age of “Reefer Madness”, where cannabis discrimination reached its fever-pitch.
The maniacal ‘War On Drugs’ was just getting its feet dirty in much of the Southern hemisphere, and while narcos played their intricate games of “cat-and-mouse” with drug traffickers, cannabis was unfortunately front-and-center in many of these altercations. Even though hemp and cannabis were traditional medicines for many peoples throughout North and South Americas, governments of the Western world made the ill-fated decisions to mimic the United States, and outright ban the use of this wonderful plant, in all its varieties.
This forced many small time farmers of hemp to lose their hearty crops, while Indigenous peoples befell even more unwarranted scrutiny for their “archaic medical practices”. Caught between the suppliers and the teachers of cannabis & hemp practices were the unsuspecting “potheads”. The prices for cannabis shot up ten- to one hundred-fold in the span of a few months. Cannabis growers and providers became “dealers”, peddling “the devil’s lettuce” that rotted people’s brains. In short, these were the dark ages for stoners, everywhere.
Why are we diving so heavily into the history lesson for this first part? Because to understand cannabis prices, you need to know that it is as unique a commodity/medicine as it gets. Cannabis has been both illegal and legal in many countries for many decades. This strange duality of legality makes it very difficult – nigh impossible – for costs to be manageable, and prices to balance over short- and long-periods of time.
Simply put, by demonizing weed and all those who partook of it, governments made the messy bed we find ourselves in today by yanking off all of the covers back in the 1940’s and 50’s.
Cheap Weed Today
Even though the cheap vs expensive weed landscape has transformed since these dark epochs in the history of herb, the effects of government regulation on cannabis values continues to cause havoc today. There are literally tons of cheap weed sold online in Canada – Haute Health being one of the leading providers for high-quality, low-priced cannabis, thank you very much. With economic conditions looking like they’re taking another nosedive in yet ANOTHER recession, the price-factor is only becoming more important to your average stoner.
Cheap weed is not the bargain bin buds it used to be when dispensaries first opened up decades ago. There are differences between cheap and expensive weed, and they have more to do with strain popularity than scarcity or cost issues. For the most part, strains of premium weed vs cheap weed are priced based on their popularity – the Comatose OG’s of yester-years are now priced to sell, whereas that fancy new Oreoz strain will require some of your top-dollars. Neither of these strains exemplify skunk weed, shake, filler or low potency dro. Cheap and expensive weed both can be potent, flavorful, have tantalizing effects and cost less than a 6-inch sub at Subway.
Don’t fall prey to the antiquated notion that you get what you pay for – do a bit of research on the latest & greatest strains of weed, ask the stoner community for insight, and shop around before you submit your credit card info on the first flashy strain that your mouse comes across. Today’s savvy cannabis shoppers can have their Wedding Cake (https://hautehealth.club/shop/cannabis-flowers/wedding-cake-flower-indica-dominant-hybrid/) AND eat some edibles too, because the age of cheap, affordable weed is here to stay as long as Haute Health has something to say about it.
Expensive Cannabis Now & Then
This section will be super simple. All weed was overpriced back then. Enough said…
In all seriousness, cannabis didn’t cost nearly as much as it does today BECAUSE of government regulation – i.e. cannabis legalization and the subsequent taxation of weed, from seed to harvest, to sale.
Despite the fact that nothing seems to get cheaper these days, cannabis is actually getting more potent, more efficiently made, produced in greater varieties and with more convenience. In light of these developments, cannabis could be considered to be more fairly priced today because it is more efficiently cultivated, harvested, extracted, packaged and sold. The fact that there are so many varieties of strains, product types and potency levels means that your money can be spent exactly to the dollar-per-mg of THC, CBD, or terpenes you’re after.
Differences Between Premium Vs Cheap Weed
It’s a debate that burns more hotly than the embers of a big phat blunt on a Friday night: is there a difference between cheap and expensive weed? On the face of it all, there are some obvious distinctions between premium vs cheap weed – price, aesthetics, potency, popularity and more. Much like the buds themselves, we often don’t really have enough appreciation of their value(s) until they’ve been ground up, rolled into a joint, lit up and pulled into our airways.
Most cannabis strains are priced on what we’ll call “experiential factors”. These kinds of factors can range from sensory experiences such as flavors or aromas, to neurological effects like deep, REM dream cycles. Cannabis is such a wildcard when it comes to this wide range of experiences, especially when you take into consideration how every strain is a hybrid of something else.
To keep it simple, and to attempt to organize the impossible to categorize, we’ll break down some of the most notable cheap vs expensive weed strains on the market today. Our dope here in Canada is a lot easier to arrange because we are the first country to Federally legalize both medical and recreational cannabis. We’ll start with this level of distinction, then move onto the other big differences between premium and cheap weed.
Medical vs Recreational
The first major discrepancies between price and potency differentiation is government caused – depending on who you ask, just about everything bad is government caused! To put it bluntly, medical cannabis in this country is suffering from a severe lack of financial support – near to zero in most provinces & territories. High-potency, high-quality cannabis products that some Canadians rely on for serious medical conditions are almost completely out of their own pockets.
Factor into the equation rising costs in cannabis production, and suddenly the medicine people need for their quality of life is suffering from oversight in epic proportions. It will be years before the insurance and medical community catches up to the general populace’s need for weed, so don’t expect costs to go down for high-grade medical cannabis anytime soon.
Recreational users on the other hand… they’re loving life right now. You could argue that most recreational weed can be used for medical remedies, and you’d be right. However, we believe that the fundamental issue has to do with “access to life-changing cannabis”, which for some people is out of financial reach because of the incredibly high doses they’re consuming on a frequent basis. Things need to change yesterday, because when it comes to health & wellbeing there’s no excuses.
A vs AAAA+
Thankfully, we already wrote a comprehensive blog on this very subject, so we’ll just link to our guide to weed grades, from A to AAAA+ for your further reading pleasure.
Aesthetics vs Gimmicks
This is where some feelings might get hurt – sorry to any growers, smokers, stoners, dabbers, activists or hippies that will disagree with some of the opinions in this section. Aesthetically speaking, many cannabis buds are very much alike – coated in trichomes, multi-colored, dense and aromatic. For many newfound potheads today, it’s all about the price per gram because they just can’t tell much of a difference between the funny strain names.
Cannabis is almost too nuanced for the average Canadian stoner (this is a great problem to have, some might say). With so much variety in how cannabis products look, the decision to buy one over the other is often just a matter of price. For more seasoned cannaseurs, the terpenes tell the story that matters; for others, it’s a matter of exclusivity or perceived status-and-value. All of these characteristics for cannabis make it a complicated commodity to shop for. This is made all the worse by some online dispensaries marking strains up based on their own opinions on a strain’s value.
Sometimes a celebrity will rave about one particular kind of pot and cause a buyer’s frenzy. In other cases, a strain’s popularity can be quashed if the hype doesn’t live up to the endorsement. Either way, it’s complicated – to say the least – how cannabis is priced today, tomorrow or how much it was yesterday. Always do some homework, and always stick to your ganja-guns – if you know how a strain affects you, then go with what’s consistent.
Supply vs Demand
Again, we’ve written extensively on this exact subject already, so we’d recommend checking out some of our past articles on the most popular strains, what affects supply vs demand, and what differences between cheap and expensive weed are results of market fluctuations in the cannabis industry.
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10 Reasons Cannabis Dispensaries Are Better Than Dealers
We hope this guide to cheap vs expensive weed will come in handy next time you’ve got an online cart-full of buds and can’t decide which ones to bring home. For all the latest on cannabis in Canada, you know to keep it locked on HH. For anything we might be missing, don’t hesitate to reach out to our amazing customer service team through chat or email. Haute Health wants – nay, NEEDS – to provide you with the absolute best that the world of weed has to offer. If it’s important to you – the loyal cannabis community – then we want to know about it.
Happy shopping, even happier highs, and keep smoking that dro, bro!
