Back in my early days of smoking weed, I used to go to the Oaksterdam University student lounge to attend the movie nights. I was never a student at the world’s first Cannabis college, but I was a Cannabis enthusiast, and I loved the idea of being able to go to a lounge space and smoke with other people.
It was there in the lounge, somewhere around 2013, when I saw my first dab rig. A person at the lounge showed me how to use it, and I immediately loved how high I got smoking Cannabis concentrates as opposed to flowers. Before the lounge closed, I bought my first dab rig for myself, a tiny pink beaker, which I coupled with a titanium nail and a butane torch that I acquired through my work as an editor at Cannabis Now magazine.
The 2010s were the heyday for Cannabis concentrates. New extraction methods made butane hash oil more plentiful, and the dabbing culture began to rise. I used to call BHO “pizza box slabs” because I’d often see it drying in pizza boxes. During this time, other methods of Cannabis extraction also became popular. These were the days when I began to see ice water hash heated, pressed in parchment and smoked off the cleanest quartz nails.
My friend Allie Butler — the force behind the Hepburns brand, which made hash-infused joints — used to haul a giant industrial press along with her to demos at dispensaries and press out fresh rosin from flowers that she squished. I loved how the culture that came up around Cannabis concentrates also meant new words. We’d laugh about not “chazzing” the nail, otherwise known as making sure there was no residue left on ultra-clean quartz bangers. People would bring bottles of isopropyl alcohol and Q-tips along with them to gatherings that we’d just call “the sesh.”
Sesh and Setting
At first, I was dabbing exclusively from titanium nails heated with a butane torch. Later, I moved up to a tabletop e-rig that my work colleagues and I would plug in and attempt to take sneaky dabs off of in the Cannabis Now office. That first e-rig I tried had a ceramic nail that you would attach to your own glass piece.
Back in the 2010s, dabbing culture in the San Francisco Bay Area got so popular that concentrate enthusiasts would meet up all the time to sesh together. The sesh culture led to some strange places to get high. We dabbed in a pet store that was closed for the night. We dabbed in a Jewish synagogue, where one of our smoking circle buddies was the son of the rabbi. We dabbed in a gym. We dabbed at a biker bar. One time, I drove more than an hour away to dab at a roadhouse in the middle of nowhere.
Almost every week, we dabbed at parties hosted by Stoney Steve (also known as Little Stevie on “Weed Wars”). At these parties, you’d sample all the concentrates first before buying them for prices that were much cheaper than the ones you’d find at dispensaries. At the end of the night, Stoney Steve would buy stacks of Little Caesars pizza for all of us who were stoned out of our minds.
Dabbing was huge at the 2014 High Times Cannabis Cup in Denver. I sampled a lot of dabs at that event and also went to a few private smoking clubs. One was inside the Grassroots hat store. Another was way the hell out of town near the highway. I loved the adventure of finding new places to get high.
E-Rigs Dominate the Scene
As dabbing culture continued to evolve, the e-rigs that came as all-in-one devices, complete with glass elements, started to dominate the scene. This meant no more butane torches to heat the nail. And while this method of dabbing did eventually take over because of the convenience of these e-rigs, some people still swear by the taste and high of concentrates heated by a butane torch.
Back to the Beginning
I lived through the days of THCA diamonds. I watched live resin and live rosin come into being. I have all the dab accessories I could ever need. These days, the butter drawer in my fridge is filled with concentrates, and I still smoke them occasionally, but my heady days of dabbing have passed. When California made Cannabis legal for adult use, it killed the sesh scene.
At first, the underground Cannabis markets still existed due to the high taxes in the legal scene, but somewhere along the line, and I can’t mark just where, my Cannabis community stopped gathering together like we used to. In the years after COVID-19, nothing is the same. I will smoke with other people on occasion, but it’s nowhere near the levels that I did when I was less in tune with the potential health risks of sharing a dab rig.
Throughout my time smoking concentrates, I always enjoyed the traditional form of hashish. My main mentor in the weed game, esteemed Cannabis cultivation author Ed Rosenthal, once gifted me a hash hammer, which remains one of my prized possessions. Smoking traditional hash doesn’t require fancy equipment. You can just put it on top of a bowl of flower in a pipe or sprinkle it into a joint. It’s been fun to watch hash holes become a product in the legal Cannabis market, but people have been rolling up hash “snakes” into joints for a long time.
Hash is always going to have its place as the beginning of Cannabis concentrate culture, and I’m sure we’ll continue to see the scene around dabbing evolve even further. For me, though, I will never be as high as regularly as I was back in the late 2010s. The sesh scene was a time that I miss because it brought me together with so many different people. The only real thing we had in common was that we liked to get really, really high. And, fueled by the encouragement of my weedy community, I got the highest back then. Here’s to stoney nostalgia — maybe I’ll pick up the torch again tonight.
