Consider the pot cookie—the commercial, prepackaged variety brought to us by legal weed and suddenly imperiled by racist geriatrics in that other Washington.
My first hit of pot, administered by the man who literally wrote the book*, changed my life for the better. But I never got used to smoking pot—the stench, the ashes, the asthma attacks. I preferred edibles. And back in the day—way, way back before July 8, 2014 (when the first legal recreational pot stores opened in Seattle)—if you wanted edibles, you had to make them yourself. (Or know precisely which vendor at a certain weekly flea market to ask for edibles, and precisely how to ask them.)
You were never able to predict just how high a pot cookie or brownie might get you. The unpredictability of homemade pot edibles from batch to batch didn't bother me—I liked having to let go and let pot—but complaints were common.
Well, not anymore. The pot cookies we eat now—the ones we buy in stores—have precise and predictable amounts of THC.
How do they do it?
"We extract the THC from the cannabis plant and then take the oil to a lab for testing," said Jody Hall, founder of pot edibles baking company the Goodship. "They evaluate it and tell us just how much THC is in it. Then we do math!"
Once Hall knows how much THC is in a batch of pot oil, Goodship bakers can determine—using that math stuff—just how much oil to add to a batch.
"If we're making a batch of 1,000 cookies that are supposed to have 10 milligrams of THC in them, we'll need to put in 10,000 milligrams of THC total," said Hall. "That's why we have to know the exact amount of THC in the oil."
And after those 1,000 cookies come out of the oven, a sample from the batch is sent back to the lab.
"If something is labeled as having 10 milligrams of THC, the FDA would say you can be plus or minus 20 percent, because baking is not an exact science," said Hall. "Legally, there's some allowable variation. But if the batch isn't right on target, we trash it. We want you to have the same experience each time you use our product. We're here to get rid of 'edible roulette.'"
Does Hall ever miss the unpredictable pot edibles of old?
"There was a romance to it," said Hall. "We've all had that experience where you have a tiny bite and you're like: 'Holy crap! I'm glad I didn't eat the whole cookie!'"
The Goodship just won the Dope Cup for best edibles in Washington State. Check 'em out at thegoodship.com.
* Weed: The User's Guide by David Schmader.