The media won’t shut up about e-cigarettes. Tobacco companies have giddily returned to the ways of the Mad Men era. Usage is up among teens, and the health effects, especially in the long term, are unknown. We’re approaching a cataclysm of some sort. Whenever popularity meets mass hysteria, the regulatory hand of our government closes into a tight fist and smashes the life out of the party. But Puritan do-gooders, are you aware that nicotine isn’t even the whole e-cigs story?
The other day I called Mr. Brightside, who had figured out a way to pack hash oil, with a concentrate he says approaches 100 percent THC, into these portable, legal, name-brand machines—quite a feat, and a major advancement in man’s ongoing efforts to deceive authorities. Of course, innovation has always been associated with the entrepreneurial underworld: Give a pothead a newfangled object, and he’ll surely find a way to smoke drugs out of it.
Mr. Brightside (not his real name) is a drug dealer in New York City. The handle is more than a pseudonym—it’s a hazy state of an altered mind. When Mr. Brightside inhales the vapors of one of his hash-tinged electro cigarettes, the world turns “brighter,” “lucid”—blood rushes to his eyes.
The idea came to him almost three years ago, when he first discovered butane-extracted hash oil (BHO). The high, he says, was far more intense than that of garden-variety marijuana. He was both relaxed and wired, the synapses in his brain firing at speedier intervals, though he felt no sense of anxiety or urgency. No problems on that front. The issue was the process of getting there. That was problematic.
Mr. Brightside wasn’t making his own oil, which he’d purchased off another dealer. He didn’t need the headache, didn’t have time to distill and manufacture the product: a sort of amber wax crammed with mind-blowing, psychoactive chemicals. No, his issue was consumption. To consume the oil, Mr. Brightside was forced to dust off an old bong, replace the bowl with a titanium nail, then heat the fucker up with a blowtorch—a blowtorch!—until the head was branding-iron hot, add a dash of holy “budder,” and suck the attending vapors toward the back of his skull.
That’s a preposterous amount of effort for a stoner.
“It is very dangerous,” Mr. Brightside says. “And very unpleasant. You cough incessantly. You feel like your lungs are sticking together.”
Mr. Brightside would have to find a better way.
So he set about contriving a new method, recalling that e-cigarettes were a growing presence on the American market. Imagine if they could vaporize hash oil. Jesus Christ! What if they could vaporize hash oil? Mr. Brightside supposed it was probable, and began to experiment with different brands, swapping out cartridges containing the native solution, and swapping in ones with budder. There were cheap ones made of plastic, like blu eCigs, and expensive ones made of metal, like V4Ls. He discovered that plastics could support oil, but only after it was cut with propylene glycol (PPG), a component of the native solution that, when combined with oil to improve viscosity, reduced the THC content to something like 5 percent, less than conventional marijuana. Pure oil would only vaporize at high temperatures, and the plastic melted when it got too hot.
But the metals were a different story. They could tolerate serious heat.
My God, he thought. This was revolutionary! E-cigarettes could be smoked in bars and restaurants, even at the office! They could hold a gram of unadulterated oil. Just one puff would send you to the moon! One puff! How efficient. Even if there was a vague fragrance of weed in the air, it wouldn’t matter—the smell would dissipate in seconds, before anyone noticed a thing. And even if they did notice, so what? There’s nothing suspicious about a dude smoking an e-cigarette, except for the fact that maybe he’s kind of a jackass.
This shit was going to sell. This was going to be huge. This was going to change the “oil game.”
And man, it was so smooth when it hit your throat.
Mr. Brightside did some research. He learned that other, more weed-friendly states, like Colorado and California, had conceived of similar apparatuses on their own. But in New York City, where the mayor was a bit of a tight-ass, the market was wide open. He could sell the things for $90 a pop. One would last a month, unless you were a real freak. Either way, that was a heady deal. And best of all, Mr. Brightside would deliver.
“Working professionals love my brand,” he says. “Wall Street loves it. They buy in bulk.”
And what about the competition?
“Around here, everyone else’s cigs are crap,” he says. “They’re just jumping on the bandwagon, amateurs, trying to make money as quickly as possible. But the product is weak. They cut their oil.”
But how does he keep his oil pure?
“I can’t tell you everything,” Mr. Brightside says. “There are trade secrets.”
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