Despite knowing full well that I cannot handle weed anymore, every 10 months or so I will mosey on into a dispensary and buy a nice little joint for myself. Then, I’ll proceed to take exactly one puff and immediately question why I thought it was going to be fun or good. I know, though, that I’ll make the same assumption in another nine months. And when I do, it’d be nice to save some money and use the same weed I didn’t smoke. But given that having un-smoked weed lying around was never a problem in my youth, I have no fucking clue what to do with old weed.
Thankfully, according to Jake Browne, co-founder of a cannabis cultivation competition called The Grow-Off, it’s actually “very easy to restore the life of a dried bud.” If, say, you frantically stuff a lightly-smoked joint into your sock drawer and then forget about it for over a year, Browne says all the dried-up, dusty weed needs is a bit of humidity. “I recommend dropping a Boveda humidity pack in a sealed jar, and it’ll be brand new by the next day,” he says. And if you don’t have a fancy humidifier on hand, some stoner engineers say a simple orange peel in the jar will work in a pinch.
This is particularly good news for people like me with low tolerances, since research suggests that the amount of THC in weed decreases with age. “The nice thing about old weed is that the THC oxidizes and becomes CBN, a cannabinoid that has strong sedative qualities,” Browne explains, adding that he has “a harvest from four years ago that I can always pack in a sleepy-time bowl.”
To that point, so long as it’s free of mold and wasn’t pulled from a 2,500-year-old tomb in Siberia, old weed is typically safe to smoke — re-hydrated or not. Or at least so says the sage weed-smoking communities on Reddit whenever people post asking what to do with old weed. “Friend of mine once found a baggie of early 90s weed in her childhood home. It was almost all dust, but we took what remained of the buds and smoked it,” responded one redditor to a question regarding three- to four-year-old weed stored in a sealed bag. “It was actually pretty nice lol.”
Old weed is also perfect for making homemade weed gummies or whipping up some weed butter. But if worse comes to worse, you can be like the redditor who purportedly “just found a bunch of 15-year-old weed” and gritted through it. “I tried smoking it, and it works,” he reported back to his fellow stoners on Reddit. “Just tastes terrible.”
Quinn Myers
Quinn Myers is a staff writer at MEL. He reports on internet culture, technology, health, masculinity and the communities that flourish within.
