Having this platform to share canna-centric news, viewpoints, and historical insight is a great privilege. It also means that I’m sometimes besieged with new products for review, and while that’s usually fantastic, it can sometimes… not be.
The thing that seemed so awesome to a team that’s developed a fancy new product can get lost on the way to market—but pointing this out can sometimes feels like punching down, especially in an industry with so many young, struggling businesses. So unless it’s prohibitionist claptrap or a total rip-off, I have a policy to generally not run negative reviews, especially since they sometimes start a feedback loop of angry comments.
But I care about you, so this week I’m going to throw hands and violate my policy of “don’t start none, won’t be none.” All of these products are 100 percent real and definitely not made up, for realsies, pinky swear, stick a needle in your mother’s back, etc. Just don’t look for them on shelves. They’re, um, all sold out.
Super Mega Monster Vape 500 XXXL Pro Edition
The variety of vaporizer options may seem limitless, but the makers of the SMMV500 promise that once you’ve tried it, “Anything else is like vaping rotting seal meat through a straw made of burning sewage sludge.”
The unit is hefty at nearly four feet high and 18 inches across, weighing in at an unwieldy 114 pounds, necessitating two-handed use at all times. A standard mouthpiece has been replaced with a neon green, pot leaf-adorned CPAP mask that makes the user sound like Bane.
Heat settings can be laboriously and slowly programmed to individual temperatures in .00001-degree increments, ranging from 120 to 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit, for hits that the press release claims “offer mad terps, and burst blood vessels in your eyeballs from the blackout-inducing hacking fits.” Each hit is accompanied by a five-second blast of airhorn.
It’s powered by dual car batteries, and affixed with eight wheels of questionable quality—three of mine broke off during testing, leaving me to drag the SMMV500 down the sidewalk, resulting in a shower of sparks that injured numerous passersby. The tank has a capacity of 13 gallons, which seems excessive, but hey, you never know.
SUPER Cheap Dabs
A year ago, you could pay $60 or more for a gram of top-shelf extracts. Oregon’s current cannabis oversupply has resulted in free-falling prices. But the makers of Overly Leveraged Industries have lowered the bar to subterranean, with one-gram butane hash oil (BHO) dabs that are readily available at a frankly baffling five cents each, or 25 for a dollar.
I asked OLI owner Lee Banfield how he was able to offer what is certainly the most inexpensive dab anywhere on the planet. “We just do, okay? Maybe don’t worry about it,” he responded. He mumbled something about “um, vintage trim,” which was later found to be questionable material from a medical grow in 2006. “Weed is weed, brah,” Banfield explained.
The dabs are Vantablack in color, and seem to throw off disturbing sizzling noises before they’ve even been lit. When the dab is burned, it emits a high-pitched screeching, which several users describe in online reviews as “oh god, these tortured souls want to drag me with them to the underworld.” Lab test results were printed in Cyrillic; when translated, they appeared to be a recipe for pickled herring pie. When asked, Banfield replied, “You really seem really hung up on this whole ‘test’ thing—I wonder what that’s about,” and insisted his products contain “all the best cannibal droids in the world, for sure, I bet, probably. Now leave.”
Celebrity Weed
Bandwagon Gardens, a division of Starfucker Farms, admit they may not have made the best choices with their line of celebrity branded pre-rolls.
“Releasing individual lines for all 28 contestants from season three of The Bachelor may have been a misstep,” a spokesperson sighed.
“Was our follow-up strain of ‘Quackers Kush,’ endorsed by Jeanne Bice from QVC’s Quacker Factory, a better choice? Certainly not,” the spokesperson continued, lighting a cigarette. “And people haven’t really seemed to connect with our line of Diff’rent Strokes products—our marketing research team discovered that the average consumer finds them ‘depressing’ and ‘inappropriate’ and ‘Jesus, what were you people thinking?’ But the biggest mistake was the timing of our signing Roseanne Barr and Papa John, for sure.”
When asked about the company’s overall strategy, the spokesperson took a hopelessly deep pull of whiskey and said, “Look, the weed is attached, I guess, to someone you’ve seen on, like, TV, or something. That’s a thing, right? People want stuff that famous people put their name on. I mean, just look at the White House—isn’t that how we got into this whole mess?”
