RSO 'Rick Simpson Oil' - an affordable, versatile cannabis preparation for vaping, smoking or eating

Hi-Guys RSO - 1g tubes $15-$18, at Seattle Tonics

Extracts of cannabis in their many guises have proliferated since the legalization of recreational marijuana in Washington State. Edible cannabis preparations are widely available, albeit relatively expensive compared to other formats of cannabis like good-ole smoking grade flower. Marijuana extracts have proliferated and increased in potency and consistency across the board - like the 1g cartridges of super-pure distillate claiming potency north of 97% (not RSO).

RSO is a preparation popularized by the medical marijuana community, but is also enduringly popular with ganja farmers and other bulk users as a way to to utilize cannabis scraps and leftovers. RSO is a versatile cannabis format, more suitable for medical use than formats limited to consumption via smoking. RSO can be put into capsules, used as an edible, smoked, vaporized or mixed with emollients and made into a topical formulation for use on skin.

To make RSO, cannabis is pulverized and extracted into a solvent - isopropyl alcohol, hexane or others. Ethanol - even in its purest drinking form as Everclear, is 95% alcohol - contains 5% water requiring subsequent removal.The principle of GIGO, garbage-in-garbage-out, applies to RSO extractions - starting with inferior material won't yield a superior finished product.

Several processes can be found online, including the original from Rick's website. Different techniques vary in equipment, solvent and time/ temperature paradigms. The liquid is strained out of the spent material, and gently evaporated to leave the concentrated marijuana extract - Rick Simpson Oil. RSO is a thick, tarry, blackish goo mostly because it still contains chlorophyll, which is also alcohol soluble. Chlorophyll gives plants their green color, it adds (generally undesirable) aroma and flavor compounds and does not increase potency in terms of cannabinoid content.

Not to be eating this!

There are medical marijuana preparations made via 'whole plant' extractions, including leaves, stems and plant components not generally included in extracts. Some medical proponents believe complex and possibly unelucidated compounds contribute to the effect of RSO. But the 'Wellness' industry is brimming with products that over-promise and under-deliver and some of the claims made about medical marijuana are simply too fantastic to be true. As a patient with a chronic, autoimmune condition I am privy to novel forms of quackery hitting the street. Often these products are sold by multi-level marketers who operate with a pseudo-religious zeal.

The blackish-hue of RSO and its thick, unwieldy nature (just TRY to get it off your bathroom vanity) diminish the potential reach of this marijuana extract. However, Stoners are over-indexed in the waste-not-want-not school of thought, so a scrap using paradigm has appeal. Smokers may enjoy adding RSO to extract laden joints and other specialty products. RSO is widely available at attractive price-points in some markets and almost unheard of in others. Go figure.

RSO is an extract which can be used in a variety of ways - smoking, vaping or as an edible. However, most states have enacted strict laws restricting product and package size for medibles. In WA, the serving size of a marijuana edible is 10mg of active ingredient, with no total container having more than 100mg active ingredient per package.

The High Guys RSO pictured above comes packaged as 1g (1000mg) in a needleless syringe sealed in a plastic/mylar bag. This is an excellent, affordable RSO option produced by the fine people at Cowlitz County Cannabis, under their Hi Guys brand, focused on providing great value products for the working man. Their 1g containers of RSO are available at a marvelous price point $15-$18/g and are currently available at Seattle Tonics and other Washington retailers.

10mg/candy or 100mg per bag

With the Hi-Guys RSO label showing total cannabinoids at 72%, we know the container contains 720mg Cannabinoids or seventy two servings of edible cannabis (at 10mg/serving). So don't eat it! This product is not labeled nor intended for edible use. Most boxes of medibles run $15-$30 for a box of 10 candies, a total of 100mg in the box. One tube of this is the equivalent of seven boxes of 10mg candies in their usual packaging configuration, or seven bottles of the very strongest beverages available (no container with more than 100mg).

When it comes to dosing with marijuana edibles, it is a delicate art with several moving parts. The same dose on different days will impact an in individual in varied ways. With smoked cannabis, the 'high' hits a plateau beyond which the stoner will not climb. With eaten cannabis, a protracted lag-time often leads to errant re-dosing and subsequent over-dosing. The subjective experience of overdoing cannabis edibles/beverages differs from the experience of smoking too much; the edible experience can bend toward the psychedelic, akin to eating psilocybin mushrooms or the substituted phenethylamines like 2-CB.

Seven bags of these equals one RSO tube

Fortunately, cannabis is non-toxic and has an extremely wide therapeutic index. In practical terms, that means the amount people use to get high is very different from the dose required to kill them. Some drugs, notably the opiates, have narrow therapeutic index, causing unfortunate consumers to accidentally kill themselves. That isn't going to happen to a stoner who eats what the Liquor Control Board considers to be 72 servings of marijuana all at once. But they better buckle up, because it is going to be an extended, weird-ass ride.

A budget oriented consumer desperate for cheaper cannabis edibles could split a RSO tube into ten servings, each with about 70mg cannabinoids. This would provide about 7x bang-for-the buck in terms of price per mg (for $15 you could make about seventy RSO servings, each with ~10 mg cannabinoids). Or you can spend $15 and get 10 servings of a legit product which is exactly what you should do! RSO packaged in this format is not intended for use as an edible and Stoner Living is not encouraging product misuse.

'Dosage makes the poison' goes the old adage, and though you probably won't kill yourself, why risk making a single day suck?

So, put that in your pipe and smoke it.

(C) 2019 Stoner Living Blog

Hashish for the New Generation: Dabs, Hash Oil and Vaping

Hash oil (also called honey oil, BHO and dabs) has exploded on the North American scene. The past few years have seen a proliferation of marijuana products going far beyond traditional hashish. Long before kids were blowing up suburban garages with compressed butane and before ingesting cannabis had anything to do with a blow torch, excellent quality hash existed in a handful of special places. Let's explore some of this heritage and consider what it means for marijuana connoisseurs in 2014.

High quality American Kief

First of all - what is hash anyway, and what about hash oil?

Background
As a more compressed/concentrated form of marijuana, hash (hashish) became popular during global prohibition of cannabis because of its relative ease of transport. This is similar to the gain in popularity of distilled spirits over wine and beer during American alcohol prohibition.  In the USA, hash shows up sporadically and becomes the stuff of urban legend.

But hash has never been popular or widely available in the United States. Why has the European tradition of hash smoking failed to catch on in the US? Locals in Amsterdam smoke hash rolled with tobacco.

Maybe smoking 'bud' is an American thing. Perhaps it traces back to the influx of cheap Mexican weed in the 70s, followed by the flood of BC Bud, outdoor weed from the emerald triangle in California and finally recreational legalization in Colorado and Washington State. Maybe it had to do with the proximity to Jamacia and hypnotic Rastafarian grooves.  Or maybe it is because Americans can drive a car load of stinky marijuana from California to NY without interaction if they obey traffic laws, while drivers in Europe had lots of borders to cross.

Hash
Hash is purified marijuana, produced by isolating the psychoactive active-ingredient-rich trichomes (resin glands) from the plant material. Examining a marijuana flower closely will show small, glassy, clear to amber colored trichomes that look like little pins, with heads on stalks. These trichomes can be removed mechanically (as with charas or ice hash) or by using solvents like butane or CO2. The resulting isolated trichomes are pressed together to make hash.

Hand rubbed charas are a well known classic form of hash from Nepal and India, made from the resin collected from hands during the hand-processing of marijuana. Gardaa is an excent hashish produced in the northern parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Its format varies slightly by region, with some formats being powdery and others being a dark, pliable solid.

Hash Production
Domestically, screens in various formats can be used to separate the trichomes from plant material well enough to produce very pure hash. Fine powder (kief) is created by screening the cannabis over screens that are 127 - 135 lines/inch. The resin glands that fall off of marijuana flowers can be obtained at home from stash-boxes with screened bottoms. Quality product is made slowly with light pressure, taking care not to screen undesirable plant material into the kief. Instructions for preparing hash are available online.

'Ice hash' uses the same principle, with bags made out of silk-screen material, ice and water. Cold water extraction makes the trichomes fragile and more likely to fall off the plant material, filter through the various layers of silk screen bag until they are isolated and collected. One benefit of this method is that no harmful solvents are used. Supplies can be obtained for under $200 USD from Fresh Headies in BC.

Commercial tumblers using screens in drum formats are ideal for larger operations, with excellent examples of both tumblers and ice systems. Screens can be purchased at printing stores for under thirty dollars. The resulting powder can be further pressed into solid shapes using heat and pressure.

The resulting powdery screened product will vary in quality vastly, depending on raw material quality and processing factors like time and pressure. It is variously called pollen (polm), kief (kif),  skuff, scuff, (scuff is technically the material used to make the hash and the verb of obtaining it), The resulting product is available as-is at dispensaries and hash markets where marijuana is legal.

Cinex BHO (Butane Hash Oil)

Hash Oil
The concept behind hash oil is to separate the desired psychoactive compounds (ideally along with aroma and flavor compounds) while leaving the other material behind. The process is creating a marijuana 'essential oil' (not to be confused with the hemp oil which is extracted from seeds). The main psychoactive compounds in marijuana are not water soluble - but they are soluble in fats, alcohols and other solvents like butane and CO2 .   

'Dabs' refers to concentrate products (hash or honey oil) and the process of smoking such products in specialized vaporizers. Think of dabs as the next generation of hashish, a cannabis extract popular for centuries. This hash oil is a waxy version of hash made by refining a marijuana extract so only crystallized resins (and no structural plant materials) are left behind. Hash oil can be made from a wide range of solvents. High quality hash oil is sometimes called honey oil. Other textures of hash oil are know as shatter, wax, ear wax and diffent local terms.

Probably the most popular hash oil available today is BHO - Butane Hash Oil - made using solvents of varying purity (usually sold as lighter fluid, widely available at gas stations, etc). Some claim up to 1% of the butane used can remain in the hash oil (this seems unlikely to the author). This residual butane has health risks of its own.

Despite efforts to 'purge' the hash oil, the product may remain contaminated by non-volatile contaminants other than butane. Brands like Ronson state on their MSDS sheets that they contain 99% butane.  This means they contain 1% something else, which may be a simple mix of hydrocarbons that will blow off, or it could be something else that will remain and contaminate the hash oil. (Have you ever had a 'plasticy' taste?). Smoking systems that involve heating a metal or ceramic nail introduce the very real possibility of introducing metal toxins. Blow torches are inherently dangerous when used by the intoxicated.

One undesirable consequence of over-processing marijuana is the potential to strip out desirable aroma & flavor compounds. After all, a 100% THC extract wouldn't have the fruity and complex aromatic bouquet of a well cured cannabis flower.

O Pen Vape- An E-Cigarette for Weed!

Often, hash oil extracts are smoked in elaborate devices, some requiring the use of a blowtorch and a 'nail'.  The blowtorch isused to super-heat the metal or ceramic element on the 'nail', and then the hash oil extract is smeared on the heated 'nail' and the resulting vapor is inhaled through a mouth piece. Water cooling/filtration may or may not be involved.

CO2 extraction has great promise. This technique uses sophisticated extractors (not yet available for practical home usage) which use pressurized CO2 to extract the essential oil from the cannabis flowers. Work with processing regimens will continue to improve the product.

Highly pure honey oil has very little odor and can easily be enjoyed in devices that look like e-cigarettes and spare the lungs the harsh hit of burning smoke.  The O-Pen Vape unit looks like a conventional e-cigarette, and costs less that $40 including the charger. Refill cartridges are available for $30. Similar discreet and effective systems are likely to become a commercial format of choice, due to the relative ease of calibrating dosage and standardizing potency of the product.

Quality Tips for Savvy Smokers
If a smoker is going to be using the product as a 'topper' for marijuana smoked in a pipe or bong, ground hash or kief is recommended. Loose kief or pollen is best enjoyed mixed with another smoking base - ground cannabis flower or tobacco works well. This can be smoked through a pipe, water pipe or can be rolled in paper. Lighter gold/beige colors indicate higher quality than greenish powder (green indicates it has been screened long enough to include undesirable leaf material in addition to trichomes). Consumers looking for a natural product should consider domestic kief or hash made by cold water extraction if looking for an ideal cannabis topper.

Hash oil in one of its many guises is ideal for those who vaporize their cannabis. Its suitability for use in e-cigarette type devices has great commercial potential. Home vaporizing systems will be discussed in a later article. Hash oil varies in quality and potency, and few offer the results of analytical testing due to the expense of testing. Remember, blow torches are inherently dangerous when operated by the intoxicated.

Concerns about purity and lingering solvents make CO2 extracted products preferred over Butane extracted products (BHO), until purity can be guaranteed otherwise. 

Reported by H. Hjorth for Stoner Living

-------- (c) 2013 Stoner Living