Recently, a friend who is very new to the smoking scene was asked to pack a bowl. He did so, and handed it to me. Being the conneseiur that I am, I immediately undid everything that he did and taught him how to do it properly. In the interest of public service, I hereby impart the lessons to you, gentle reader, in the hopes that your smoking sessions will be more enjoyable.
The first question to ask yourself is what kind of weed you have in your possession. If you have what is known in various parts of the country as schwag, mexican brown, or "north carolina's finest", here's what to do: Stop reading this article, go turn your Linkin Park back on, and do some homework so you don't fail out of high school.
Now, assuming that you have some decent bud, the first question to ask is "What form is this in?" There are two major subcategories for this issue: Seed count and packing density.
Most likely if you have kindbud the grower has helpfully picked out the seeds for you, or if you're smoking a cloned plant then there weren't any in the first place. However, if there are seeds, do everyone a favor: Remove them all. That includes breaking apart buds to get at hidden seeds within. Just jamming a bud into the bowl causes it to burn badly, giving poor hits, wasting bud, and damn it looks bad with the chicks when that popping noise occurs.
What you do from here onwards depends on what you're smoking out of. The first thing I will cover is packing bowls and bongs:
Hopefully you've got nice fluffy buds, but it's always possible that you've gotten your bud in brick form, which is unfortunate but survivable. If you've got a bag of shake, scroll back up and read about Linkin Park. Each kind of bud has a different procedure that you need to follow in order to get a decent bowl pack.
If your weed is in brick form, you're going to need to break it up. If you don't, you will end up with a dense wad in your bowl, air will have trouble passing through, and it will be hard to get a decent hit.
Even with nice fluffy buds, you want to do a **little** breaking up. The reason is the same as that listed above - air flow is crucial to a good hit. This is nowhere more true than with a gravity bong - if you don't get good air flow you'll completely waste the bowl pack.
And it's not just about air flow. Broken up shake lights more easily than a whole bud, and the heat generated by the burning shake will aloww the bud to catch fire more easily. If you want to get a nice glowing coal that stays lit as it's passed around, you have to do the same thing you do with a campfire: starter material. Would you try to get a campfire lit by tossing down a couple of big logs and holding a lighter under it until it gets going? Of course not, you've got to use kindling.
For fluffy bud, I reccomend the "orange peel" method. Take your bud, and just pull a little off the sides. Just enough to get nice starter fuel. If you break it apart completely, you'll end up with something that burns super fast and sears your lungs with its high temperature. You will actually get a bigger hit with a nicely burning coal than if you fire the whole thing at once.
The next step is to consider what you're smoking out of. Be aware that hot smoke is passing through the material and if the material has a low enough melting point small bits of it will go into your lungs. For that reason I do not reccommend plastic bongs or wooden hitters, although some people swear by the tokemaster series of bongs. The best material to smoke out of is glass, or metal if you drop stuff a lot. DO NOT EVER smoke out of a soda can. It does heat faster than you'd think, and aluminum intake has been shown to cause alzheimers. If you are in an emergency situation because there is no parephenalia to be had, don't panic: Get a potato and a screwdriver, and use your imagination. Don't forget to drill a carb if you're using a potato, and when buying a piece try to get one that has a carb.
For anyone who may be used to a different term, a carb is a hole somewhere on the piece that connects to the main chamber between the smoke intake and the inhaling point. You cover it with a finger while inhaling, and then right before you finish you let it go. As you remember from physics, air will follow the path of least resistance. Fresh air thus goes through the carb instead of through the place where the bud is, evacuating the smoking chamber and insuring that you get every bit of smoke. It has an additional value - there is no "stale smoke" left in the smoking chamber, one of the biggest party fouls imaginable. It also frees you from risking the mistake of trying to blow the smoke out through the mouthpiece, which can result in what is variously known as "backblow" or "volcano", when the bud and possibly bongwater comes spewing out of the bowlpiece. If that happens, people will never let you forget it. For bongs, I highly reccomend bowlpieces with carbs over the "pull slide" variety - I've seen too many people drop the pull sliders, and tragic events such as breakage can occur with glass... a glass bong is finished if gets broken even a little.
Now, for the final step: The actual packing. It's important to know the answers to these questions: Is there a screen? If not, how big is the entry hole? Nobody wants a bowl to shit in their mouth, so you have to be careful. Where is the hole located? The packing technique is different based on where it is - some have holes on the bottom, some in the back. I personally prefer bottom holed bowls, but this is a minor matter.
The important thing is that you get your main piece of bud positioned over the hole but not actually completely blocking it. If you want to go through the effort of breaking your bud into smaller buds, the absolute best way is to have a couple of small buds interlocking near the bottom, allowing air flow through the middle as well as on the sides. On top of your base, depending on the size of the bowlpiece, you may want to add more buds before adding the top layer of shake. My advice is to go about 75/25 bud/shake - you don't want it to burn up too fast - the goal is to get a nice coal burning. Remember, if you blocked up the passageway, all your shake will burn away, all you'll do to the buds is crisp the outside edges, you'll get a tiny hit, you'll feel like an ass, and you won't get laid that night.
The final step: Turn on some Pink Floyd and enjoy!
Now, on to smoking joints and blunts:
First of all, I don't know why the ************ people smoke weed this way - so much of it gets burned up unneccessarily (and that's the ONLY excuse for smoking schwag blunts), but people like it so here we go...
The number one mistake I see people make with these is that they don't break up the bud well enough. You want to SHRED it. If you don't, the damn thing burns unevenly - called "boating" in some circles. If it burns unevenly, you end up looking like a tool. Don't turn it into powder, but come close.
As far as material goes, the best blunts I've ever smoked were rolled into a tobacco leaf that a friend purchased at a cigar store. It was totally fresh, and you could create your own custom sizes. I actually saw one once that contained a quarter pound and was the size of my forearm, but I don't reccomend that unless you are dealing in pounds like he was (and he shot himself because he knew he was going to jail for life, so I don't reccomend dealing in pounds).
If tobacco leaves are too much effort, make sure that at the very least your blunt is fresh. If it is old and dry, it will crack and your endeavour is doomed to failure.
When I roll, I prefer to use 2/3 weed and 1/3 tobacco. I'm not talking about the European fashion of smoking where they mix them together. I'm saying that the third of the joint or blunt that is closest to the mouth end should be completely tobacco, so that you don't have to deal with the searing hot effects of a roach, both on your lungs and your fingers. When you start tasting tobacco, the joint is done.
Clever tip: tobacco burns a little more evenly than weed, so you can actually put some at the front of the joint and use that as starter material - not too much, but it helps to get an even burn.
If you are not a good roller, it may help initially to buy a cigarette roller, but any true connesieur will learn to do it themselves. I don't know what the effects of adding a filter are, but I've tried it and it seemed to me that it was blocking out some of the THC - but maybe that was my imagination. Perhaps someone can enlighten me.
I tend to bunch the bud in the middle of a blunt a bit before I roll, because the hand motions I use tend to squeeze it to the outsides, just like when you bite off the end of a taco. I'm going to leave the motions up to you, suffice it to say that the end result should be tight, with little air space. It's hard but technically possible to get a joint or blunt so tight that you can't smoke through it, but if you're at that point you're good enough to loosen it up.
To get the ends of a blunt or joint together, you need to use some good old fashioned spit. Don't overdo it or you'll get the thing soggy, just moisten lightly and then seal it off.
Turn on some Bob Marley, and enjoy!
I've done my best to be accurate and complete in this analysis, and if I've left anything out feel free to add something or ask me a question.
