The Fake Era: Sprayed Terps

The First Spray

I was in New York last year walking around the Lower East Side with a few friends. One of them had a 3.5 from a brand whose bags and stickers I had been seeing around the neighborhood a whole lot, so when a friend rolled a blunt of this new mystery weed I was curious to see what it smoked like. On the first inhale it wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t really good either. It went around a couple times and I’m thinking to myself something feels and tastes kinda off about this. It burned really hot and seemed to have a little sizzle when I held it up to my ear (I did so because it absolutely scorched my throat). The ash was salt and pepper at best, but definitely more pepper than salt. Maybe it was a flavored backwood, which I never smoke. Flavored wraps in general. I couldn’t call it because I didn’t roll it, and wasn’t really paying attention. So I asked to see the bag. I opened it, saw a couple nugs left in the stickered mylar and took a deep inhale of the nose. It immediately hit me. I HAD JUST SMOKED THE SPRAY PACK. I was left hoping this wouldn’t get me sick like the vape gate era of fake cartridges, as the same fake terps used in that trash was infused into this flower. 

FML

“Fuck my life,” I thought. What is with the blatantly fake cotton candy bubblegum nose on this stuff? Why was this flower infused with artificial terps? The weed looked nice, why would someone ruin it? 

Then it dawned on me. Nobody even cares. 

These were probably (definitely) budget backdoor indoor chad packs that looked the part but had a very weak nose due to the giant commercial batch size, the choice of whatever fully synthetic salt line of nutrients used to grow it, combined with the “were late on the power bill and need to pay our trimmers” signature flash dry / trim process that most of the industry now runs on. A lot of these cultivators care zero for the end user’s experience and only want to maximize yield for profit. Yet they wonder why they get lowballed on packs when they literally smell like wet grass and turn brown after 30 days due to being pumped 15 times daily with salts at 3-5 ec during the plant’s entire life cycle. 

It actually makes perfect sense why someone would come along and figure out how to infuse these thousand dollar boof packs with some sort of smell, because that is what it needs to move it. 

It’s actually quite a disgusting business model and very surprising to me that the average consumer would buy and smoke this trash, as it hits them at the same price as real weed does at a retail level, and these cultivation facilities are down so bad they would rather grow babbage and sell it for cheap out of the back rather than use more quality inputs to achieve more quality outputs. They can’t let the packs speak for themselves right now. It’s way easier to offload a bunch of cheap packs that look the part than it is to create higher quality stuff that the cultivation would have to sacrifice weight to achieve, and sell it a bit higher to make the same margin. These guys only care about the money and most of them got in the game in 2018 when they were allowed to by California law. They are not built like the legacy pioneers who built this industry, those who care about people and what they are ingesting. They thought this was a modern day gold rush when they got in, and now that the margins are slim we are seeing facilities, distros and retail locations pop up for sale all over California. For pennies on the dollar of what they cost to build.

Quality Over Quantity

In the beginning, growing and selling weed was extremely dangerous. It still is, just way, way less now than then. As a culture we cared most about quality. Mid grade weed would still move at exuberant prices compared to nowadays, but nowadays if it’s not it, it just sits. As a grower you did not want to be known as the mids guy. All of that is out the window now, it’s all about the money. It’s all about finesse and getting over on the next person rather than building solid business relationships. It’s “me me me” and “take take take.” Even some of these so-called legacy members of the community have the audacity to pull Chad-style business moves on other legacy players – more on this topic later. It has created the perfect climate for the fakeness to prevail and run rampant. It has created the perfect platform for Mr. Spray Pack Boi to push fake weed as if the fake funny shaped bags weren’t enough. The fake strain names, fake online marketing campaigns, fake Instagram reels of the lame events edited to appear like they were popping and you missed out by not going… the fake smiles from fake friends who hate you behind your back but never to your face. The fake made up brand histories, fake bought (not earned) whatever-the-fuck cup wins. The fake bio on the fake Instagram page that’s selling fake weed off a fake telegram page.

Enough of this fake shit y’all some straight weirdos!

Quality will always reign supreme and being unique and original will always stand out. That should be embraced rather than pushed aside for this fake nonsense. Having a truly loud batch that burns immaculate will be remembered, realizing you just got got buying fake weed will only breed contempt. Life is just too short to smoke sprayed boof pack!