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Vaping Flowers Vs. Dabs which is healthier for you?

HippieHitman

HotBoxin' My Wheelchair
Havent seen a post on here about this, so I wanted to start a thread and just hear from the community?

long term which is healthier vaping herbs or Dabbing?(for this discussionn consuming concentrates via nail or pen)

Points to start off the discussion:
Dry hits your thoughts?
Using water filtration which is easier on our system?
 

hd_rider

Well-Known Member
I prefer the taste of flower.

I have a Dr. Dabber pen and use it occasionally with some wax. I've found that after two or maybe three draws on the pen, the concentrate is pretty much gone and I get this "yucky" (technical term), metallic taste.

To me, the pen is good if all you want to do is get baked. I also like the discreteness of the pen as I like to take it with me on walks.

But when I'm at home, I'm a "sipper" of flower all the way (though I will sometimes drop a little chuck of wax in my flower bowl).

As far as which is healthier for you, I suppose that would depend on how each "product" is manufactured. How was the concentrate made? were all solvents adequately purged? With flower, you want to know how it was grown. Was it grown organically? Were artificial fertilizers or pesticides used? Etc.
 

herbivore21

Well-Known Member
A well made concentrate will not create thermal-oxidative decomposition byproducts from inactive plant material when vaporized whereas flowers will, so there's that. When all that you have is an essential oil fraction (maybe some membranes and secretory cells/trichome stalks), you just don't have close to the same amount of shit that can be easily overheated at the temps being used on anything electronic (I do not recommend pens at all btw. So far IMO nothing portable for concentrates is ideal, the later hits taste like garbage in coil based and coil-less pens - the FF2 looks like what would give the most consistent hits but the battery capacity is low and the external chargers to overcome this issue are not widely available yet).

Some will tell you they find flowers tastier than concentrates. These are IME people who do not generally dab high enough quality concentrates to realize that concentrates are better tasting still, with more of the same deliciousness! Plenty of Cali people have never tried full melt for example! It really depends on your budget, your ability to make concentrates or the concentrates retailed in your locale as to whether there is a realistic opportunity for everyone to try the better concentrates out there.

IME being able to dab the best quality flower rosin and full melt bubble/dry sift etc on the regular, I get much less debilitation and mental fogginess from concentrates. Flowers are not conducive to my career in these ways. Also, flowers take too long to consume comparatively - I spend so much less of my life consuming my meds with concentrates. If I need to medicate quickly in the night for insomnia, only concentrates will help me get straight back to sleep with a big rip in seconds. Flowers don't work to keep me asleep.

Flowers tend to give me much more congestion than concentrates. I am a light-moderate dabber, I do not dab more than .3g on a high usage day. I am coughing and have a scratchy throat the day after a big flower session, not so with high end concentrates (YMMV, especially if you're dabbing butane soup lol).

Too many people IME snub their noses at concentrates before they've even see the better examples of what is out there!
 

MinnBobber

Well-Known Member
Too many people IME snub their noses at concentrates before they've even see the better examples of what is out there!
.........................................................................................
I look forward to the day when I can try a high quality conc.
For now, just have to live in the dream conc world of the Liger thread and Terpy Tues etc :)

I find it hard to imagine, for example, a better taste than a high quality flower thru mu miniVAP but hey,
it would awesome if there is ;)

I do snub my nose at the thought of improperly made conc where there might still be chemicals or concentrated pesticides etc----but for quality conc, love to experience it and will sometime
 

herbivore21

Well-Known Member
.........................................................................................
I look forward to the day when I can try a high quality conc.
For now, just have to live in the dream conc world of the Liger thread and Terpy Tues etc :)

I find it hard to imagine, for example, a better taste than a high quality flower thru mu miniVAP but hey,
it would awesome if there is ;)

I do snub my nose at the thought of improperly made conc where there might still be chemicals or concentrated pesticides etc----but for quality conc, love to experience it and will sometime
Bro, I snub my nose at top quality flower in my evo for dabs of full melt and flower rosin day-in, day-out! That should give you an indication of how much tastier good concentrates are ;)

I encourage you all to pass on the poor quality concentrates of course. Not to mention poor quality flowers (pesticides etc are still a problem with flowers regularly). Play it safe people!
 

phattpiggie

Well-Known Member
Accessory Maker
a better taste than a high quality flower

I don't have access to concentrates, I could make them but I don't.

I have made BHO, 2 decades ago when I toked. High grade greenery and good quality BHO.

Nothing like the examples here at FC, @herbivore21 and @ccchase420 the pair of you make my mouth water, it's watering now thinking about it.
Amazing seeing how it's changed, I can imagine the flavors.

Taste and smell out of this world, a frankincense like thick aroma with proper mind altering effects.
I had no idea about micro dosing smearing big thick lines in a skin full of green.

Great stuff for me then, but not now.

Healthier for the lungs, debatable I suppose. Is any vapor healthy especially when it's thick.

Healthier for the mind, not for me. I'm at a place in my life where a dab, or 2, would be too much.
My head would be full on million mile an hour, not pleasant.

I say a dab or 2, once you've had that full rich flavor it's hard to not want it again, very more'ish.

The day will come where I try some, something citrus flavor.
 

herbivore21

Well-Known Member
I don't have access to concentrates, I could make them but I don't.

I have made BHO, 2 decades ago when I toked. High grade greenery and good quality BHO.

Nothing like the examples here at FC, @herbivore21 and @ccchase420 the pair of you make my mouth water, it's watering now thinking about it.
Amazing seeing how it's changed, I can imagine the flavors.

Taste and smell out of this world, a frankincense like thick aroma with proper mind altering effects.
I had no idea about micro dosing smearing big thick lines in a skin full of green.

Great stuff for me then, but not now.

Healthier for the lungs, debatable I suppose. Is any vapor healthy especially when it's thick.

Healthier for the mind, not for me. I'm at a place in my life where a dab, or 2, would be too much.
My head would be full on million mile an hour, not pleasant.

I say a dab or 2, once you've had that full rich flavor it's hard to not want it again, very more'ish.

The day will come where I try some, something citrus flavor.
Oh man I have some full melt right now that has a beautiful citrus and creamy aroma with those super strong almost perfume-like smells. I suspect this is just like what you are talking about!

Also I find that flowers are actually worse for me in terms of functionality than dabs. Another problem with most people's view of concentrates is they dab too much. Concentrates are just that, yes, but you can always dose smaller and dose amounts that are similar to squishing the nug that you vaped (I admit, I have a much more readily available mental picture of what this might look like than most). I found that vaping flowers, a typical .15-.3 bowl that most flower vapes would use can easily be replaced with a .025-.05g dab of rosin during the day. I reliably get more debilitation from the flower vaping in this scenario than from the resin extracted from the same amount of flower.

Different kinds of extracts will vary this relationship somewhat of course ;)
 

HippieHitman

HotBoxin' My Wheelchair
A well made concentrate will not create thermal-oxidative decomposition byproducts from inactive plant material when vaporized whereas flowers will, so there's that. When all that you have is an essential oil fraction (maybe some membranes and secretory cells/trichome stalks), you just don't have close to the same amount of shit that can be easily overheated at the temps being used on anything electronic (I do not recommend pens at all btw. So far IMO nothing portable for concentrates is ideal, the later hits taste like garbage in coil based and coil-less pens - the FF2 looks like what would give the most consistent hits but the battery capacity is low and the external chargers to overcome this issue are not widely available yet).

Some will tell you they find flowers tastier than concentrates. These are IME people who do not generally dab high enough quality concentrates to realize that concentrates are better tasting still, with more of the same deliciousness! Plenty of Cali people have never tried full melt for example! It really depends on your budget, your ability to make concentrates or the concentrates retailed in your locale as to whether there is a realistic opportunity for everyone to try the better concentrates out there.

IME being able to dab the best quality flower rosin and full melt bubble/dry sift etc on the regular, I get much less debilitation and mental fogginess from concentrates. Flowers are not conducive to my career in these ways. Also, flowers take too long to consume comparatively - I spend so much less of my life consuming my meds with concentrates. If I need to medicate quickly in the night for insomnia, only concentrates will help me get straight back to sleep with a big rip in seconds. Flowers don't work to keep me asleep.

Flowers tend to give me much more congestion than concentrates. I am a light-moderate dabber, I do not dab more than .3g on a high usage day. I am coughing and have a scratchy throat the day after a big flower session, not so with high end concentrates (YMMV, especially if you're dabbing butane soup lol).

Too many people IME snub their noses at concentrates before they've even see the better examples of what is out there!

Thank you Bro always dropping knowledge
 

Enchantre

Oil Painter
I'd be way more concerned about the hardware, and also the backstory on the cannabis.

Flower or concentrate is sheer preference. Best bet is organic, hand-trimmed, cured correctly.

I like my dabs. I use a torch and quartz. I also grow my own flowers. They are nearly as good as dabs.
Nearly.
 

herbivore21

Well-Known Member
I'd be way more concerned about the hardware, and also the backstory on the cannabis.

Flower or concentrate is sheer preference. Best bet is organic, hand-trimmed, cured correctly.

I like my dabs. I use a torch and quartz. I also grow my own flowers. They are nearly as good as dabs.
Nearly.
The end of that sounds lovely! I envy your being able to grow! Do you extract from your flowers at all?

This is it in a nutshell really, you can have risks with flower or concentrates. Knowing how to identify good material, whichever way you go is vital. Also good vaporizers (including enails etc) ;)
 

hinglemccringleberry

Well-Known Member
I know there are concentrates that are better than flower but theyre not readily available in my neck of the woods but blue label top shelf flower is. so flower it is until I can do some traveling. plus i love botanicals out of personal preference, you know, its love not logic.
 

TeeJay1952

Well-Known Member
Same boat as @Enchantre. However I am Lay to the Z. I HOPE and pray that there is a measurable increase for you concentrate folks. I want all the effort of building a frankenstein monster (press) or play with a sticky goo wad and hot nails is worth it for you. IMHO the ease of grab, heat and puff outweighs whatever increase you receive. YMMV and I really do wish you well. I am retired and somewhat of a recluse, don't drive so I have all day and night if need be to get where I want. Reading FC is sort of what I do.
 

Enchantre

Oil Painter
I do not yet produce my own concentrates, but that is coming. :D

I've had much better lung functionality after a day of dabs, vs a day of vaping flowers. A dab is a moment, which often can trigger a cough reflex. I mostly lack one. Lots of meds, all in one go, less taxing on my lungs, and if I get a cough, it is strengthening.
 

hinglemccringleberry

Well-Known Member
The thing that concentrate fanboys forget is the tolerance and dependency issue. Every single dabber I know doesn't use herbs at all because it doesn't get them high anymore. Then when they have to quit or go on a t-break the withdrawal symptoms are so through the roof it's comparable to quitting harder drugs. It's easier said than done to microdose concentrates, it's a no-brainer to microdose flower. I don't care if well made full melt tastes better, it's not my game; besides, around here it's such a lottery obtaining properly made concentrates vs sketchy junk. I've never dabbed without having an irritated throat and bronchial tubes (scary when you feel the pain in your bronchial tubes). Vaping flower never irritates my respiratory system no matter how big the dose and a night's sleep eliminates the effects which is not guaranteed w/ dabbing, so I guess I'm just an imbecile rookie to the dab community which I'm fine with. And then they like to talk as if growing flower is the only thing that comes with risks that affect the safety of the end product, and somehow making concentrates never comes with any risks, lolz.
Keep in mind this is not a matter of “better” or “worse” – it's about what suits the individual's preferences and my dabbing friends can do whatever they want. But this is my preference and I don't need no BHO fanboys telling me my preference is inferior or less educated.
 
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psychonaut

Company Rep
Company Rep
@mccringleberry I subscribe to the live and let live philosophy, so if that works for you then there's not much more to be said. I think some dabbers honestly are less educated, mostly the ones using torches with no real temp control other than a guess. When I took my first dab I am sure the nail was 900+ degrees. Not good! The chest tightens up, heavy feeling. I use an enail now, and TBH, I can dial the temps down low enough to where I'm basically having a dry herb effect as far as number of hits go. The lower the temps the easier the vapor to inhale. There is a difference in effect and a lot less waste/taste going higher temps, but you hit a point where like I said, you have problems.

I vape a 0.3gr bowl in my Crafty and get just as medicated as I do off a solid dab. There are pigs out there who take massive dabs at such high temps they are destroying the concentrate and possibly harming their lungs. Those are the folks who need a whole blunt to themselfs to get medicated. I dont consider them the harbingers of wisdom, they just seem like wasteful consumers. I always get a chuckle when I hear how an ounce of flower only lasted them a weekend. Yes, these people do exist.
 

herbivore21

Well-Known Member
The thing that concentrate fanboys forget is the tolerance and dependency issue. Every single dabber I know doesn't use herbs at all because it doesn't get them high anymore.
Man this is a false equivocation between concentrates and tolerance/dependency (cannabis dependency is not something that even addiction experts all agree is a real thing!).

Sure, dabbing can be more efficient in getting cannabis actives into you than flowers will ever be, but the person consuming the concentrate decides how much oil they put on the dabber and how often they repeat the exercise. I do not have a tolerance and dependency issue.

I use concentrates because they are much more medically effective for my needs, much less debilitating on my throat and lungs and much better tasting. I am telling you, as someone who has as much access as necessary to all kinds of concentrates and the flower they were made from, that concentrates are unequivocally smoother on the throat and lungs than concentrates that have been properly made. Flowers hurt my throat with continued use or higher temps. Dabs only hurt my throat if I use temps that are far too high. As you say, you can't necessarily find well made concentrates easily and this may explain your experiences.

Add to that the cleanliness of a sapphire/borosilicate/titanium vapor path with no other materials in the mix and this is one of the safest possible ways to consume meds. I tend to dab .25g or so a day. Flowers do get me high still. As Psychonaut says above, I find that roughly .25-.3g of flower gets me as high as a dab extracted from the same flower. If you were to rosin a flower that size, you'd expect to get one dab out of it. The relationship is by no means a mystery!

Can you not understand that when done properly, a concentrate is simply the part of the flower that boils, rather than burning and that by removing the parts that burn and degrade into unwanted byproducts, concentrate vapor should actually be cleaner and only contain the actives that we desire?

Then when they have to quit or go on a t-break the withdrawal symptoms are so through the roof it's comparable to quitting harder drugs.
I can't understand this comparison.

Concentrates are not comparable to harder drugs in any way in negative or positive effects IME. I have had times where my tolerance was higher at .5g-.75g per day of dabs and even then, when I had to fly long distance for work and had no access to any cannabis of any kind for a week, did not feel anything aside from noticing my dreams again and difficulty sleeping (this is not a withdrawal symptom - I medicate MONSTROUS insomnia which is caused by a condition I was born with, cannabis concentrates are the safest of the effective insomnia medications that I have ever used BTW).

I also had more issues with other medical symptoms of chronic conditions that I medicate being more prominent again which is to be expected - stop using the medicine that treats the symptoms, start getting the symptoms again. If you stop using a harder drug, you get REAL withdrawals. Withdrawals that can lead to death or hospitalization (alcohol withdrawals, opiate withdrawals etc).

I have addressed the profoundly misunderstood topic of withdrawals as they apply to cannabis here before. The DSM V is very clear that it is not a withdrawal if it is a pre-existing symptom. There are many other such exclusionary criteria. My insomnia after cessation of use is an example of this kind of failure to satisfy the criteria to be called a withdrawal. Most of the reported 'withdrawals' I have ever known from cannabis users could easily be explained as symptoms that they were treating/masking with their cannabis use, which became noticeable when they stopped. Please understand that I am speaking from professional expertise here.

If you wanna use flowers and don't care to learn about or use concentrates because what is available locally is questionable, that's fine man. But don't go and spread this kind of slander against all concentrates when what you have said simply doesn't describe what most of us high quality concentrate users experience. I use the term slander to describe the way you spoke because if there is one thing that will make the most effective cannabis medicines for many of us (concentrates, that is, not flower!) harder to access for patients, it is comparing cannabis extracts to hard drugs. Please, consider the comparison you have made. Heroin, Meth, Cocaine, alcohol etc kill people all the time. Properly made cannabis extracts do not, and even the badly made ones have not been attributed to any deaths as of yet in the literature to my knowledge.

I would never say your choice to use flowers is inferior. There is nothing wrong with people using flowers if it agrees with them. If you're only using for recreational, then what does it matter if concentrates tend to be more medically useful?

I will say however that from the sound of it, you only have access to inferior concentrates though. Anything that hurts your airways like that from the first dab is NOT a good concentrate (or was dabbed way too hot)!
 

Deleted Member 1643

Well-Known Member
Can't resist chiming in. Preference is clearly dabbing concentrate, some thoughts about health.

As far as which is healthier for you, I suppose that would depend on how each "product" is manufactured. How was the concentrate made? were all solvents adequately purged? With flower, you want to know how it was grown. Was it grown organically? Were artificial fertilizers or pesticides used? Etc.

Grow flowers and make concentrate from them, so have a pretty good basis for comparison. Vaping flowers, if you take one low-temp hit and immediately call it AVB, could be comparable to a low-temp dab. Minimize cooking all of that extra plant material. Also maximizes flavor.

The thing that concentrate fanboys forget is the tolerance and dependency issue. Every single dabber I know doesn't use herbs at all because it doesn't get them high anymore. Then when they have to quit or go on a t-break the withdrawal symptoms are so through the roof it's comparable to quitting harder drugs. It's easier said than done to microdose concentrates, it's a no-brainer to microdose flower.

Guilty, but beginning to wonder if tolerance is a good thing, medicinally, as opposed to getting high. That is, do medicinal effects occur at higher doses?

For example, take the pharmaceutical doxepin. Used for depression, the effective dose is >200 mg/day. Used for insomnia, the effective dose is only ~20 mg/day. So, if you want to take it for depression, you must develop a tolerance for its sleepiness effect in order to get to your therapeutic dose. (Otherwise, you might not be depressed, but only because you're unconscious.:zzz:)

Might cannabis be similar? That is, do you need to develop a tolerance to its low-dose euphoria effect (getting high) in order to get to much higher, therapeutic doses? Don't know the answer - would appreciate any good dose-response studies.

Never experienced any withdrawal. With solid concentrate, find it difficult to micro-dose dabs. If it's liquid enough to get into a syringe, can be much more consistent.
 

RedRoxsSons

New Member
Dabs are just so intense for me, even a small little poco petit baby dab. After I hit, im like woahoahoahoah, , then I feel a little dizzy.

In general I just feel very uncomfortable.

And the next day I will be very groggy for a longtime (and when im groggy I tend to get angrier/annoyed more, so I have to keep calm, breath deeply works for me) :)
 
RedRoxsSons,

Krazy

Well-Known Member
The thing that concentrate fanboys forget is the tolerance and dependency issue.
True; but only because you included the fanboys descriptor, lol. I know plenty that use and prefer concentrates without being clueless OMG fanboys.

My meds are privately and organically grown. And I'm low dose. I'v got the know how to do any number of extraction methods, including solventless. I'm not motivated to do so for the small amount I use.

As others have mentioned: Clean, self grown plants will always be healthier than poorly maid concentrates. Well made concentrates will always beat pesticide laced buds.
 
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Krazy,
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lazylathe

Almost there...
@MinnBobber

If you have access to high quality flower why not try making some rosin for yourself at home?
I have recently started doing this and find the end result incredible!
All you need is a hair straightener, parchment paper and a vice or a clamp.
Give it a Google and you will see how easy it is to have your own supply of high quality dabs at home!
And the left over weed chips can be used to make edibles since they are already activated!

My MiniVap tastes amazing but these rosin dabs taste incredible!
All you need is a tiny amount and the effects are almost instantaneous.
Very clear headed high for me that basically kills all my aches and pains!

It cost me $30 for the straightener at Walmart.
 
It seems cocentrates are healthier because of the loss of vegatative material. However there is a loss of the complexity of flower which i don't like. An extraction eliminates some of the effect along with what is less desirable.
 
MonsterWithoutBorders,
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