How to Make Weed Last Longer

There comes a time in every weed smoker’s life when the supply runs dry—and it can feel like a time of crisis. With that in mind, you may wonder how to make your weed last longer, or how to save weed when you can sense the impending catastrophe. Here we offer 21 tips on how to make the most of your supply, and how to avoid crisis in the first place.

1. Grow Your Own

“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime”.

Wise words.

Averting a crisis is always better than dealing with it once it comes. Depending on where you live, supplies of weed can be fragile, with droughts coming hard and fast. So the best thing you can do for yourself is grow your own! Even a few high-yielding plants will produce enough bud to tide you over until the next crop. Don't leave your fate to the mercy of others—take control!

Growing your own weed is the #1 way to ensure your stocks stay full.

2. Invest in the High Grade

We’ve all heard the phrase “quality over quantity”. When it comes to weed, quality is quantity. One gram of 20% THC weed will (in theory) go twice as far as one gram of 10% THC weed. Therefore, investing in top-shelf strains is worth it. A bag of the very best bud will last a lot longer than poor-quality weed.

You'll need to combine this with a bit of restraint, though. High-quality weed is going to be even more tempting to smoke, and you can't rely on whiteying to stop you. Good weed, in conjunction with a little self control, can go a long way.

3. Conversely, Invest in the Low Grade

That being said, you can also stockpile some cheaper weed for those desperate moments. Have it forever sitting at the bottom of the stash jar until the fateful day arrives when you can’t buy the good stuff. Fear not, as you’ve got a Q in reserve!

4. Hide a Semi-Secret Emergency Stash

Treat this like a piggy bank. Pick somewhere that you won’t come across on a day-to-day basis, and store some backup weed there. Put it from your mind, pretend it doesn’t exist—write it from existence. Then, if a day arrives when you just can’t source any, you can rediscover that hidden gem and thank your past self for their ingenuity and restraint.

5. Store Your Buds Perfectly

Proper storage of your weed has a twofold benefit. First, it will retain its strength for much longer, meaning it will go further, and you smoke less. Second, you reduce the danger of it going bad. Nothing is worse than finding mould on your stash, tossing it, and realising that there’s no weed available anywhere. A glass, airtight jar in a dark place can save you a lot of heartache.

With all the best planning in the world, tragedy can still occur. It’s important to have contingency plans in place for those occasions when you simply can’t source weed anywhere.

6. Rationing

It may not be sexy, but strict rationing will get you through the worst of it. Don’t freak out and smoke the last of your weed in a panic. Take a breath, take stock of your supplies, and figure out a realistic plan for how to divide your weed up in a way that will make it last!

7. Use the Kief From Your Grinder

You’ll thank yourself for paying a little extra for a grinder with a kief catcher when the bud runs dry. In fact, you can even view this as a treat. When herb is scarce, a healthy dose of kief can keep you comfortably high. As it’s super strong, you’ll find that even a little goes a long way. Scrape it out, ration it, hit it in a bong. It may not last forever, but it can help you forget for a bit.

8. Save Your Trim—Make a Brew

Making tea from your trim maximises your cannabinoid intake. There’s not much in trim, but hey, it’s something! Plus, it has all the great flavours of cannabis and lands you with a soothing tea. Even if it doesn’t get you super high, it’s a comforting way to get over the drought.

9. Roll Like a Master

Efficient rolling will optimise your cannabinoid intake. Fat cones with a lot of tobacco may look great, but they can also waste a lot. Rolling thin joints with thinner papers means that they burn slower, delivering more smoke to your lungs and less to the outer air.

Taking it one step further, backrolling your spliffs truly minimises paper and allows them to burn more or less as slowly as possible. Either that, or you could just hit a bong!

10. Use a Rolling Tray and Don't Waste a Crumb

A rolling tray will minimise wastage. Gone are the days when you can afford to let crumbs drift away into eternity. You’d be surprised how much of a mess people make when they roll. Collecting up the post-spliff debris yields a surprising amount, and it won’t be long till you've salvaged a whole new spliff.

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11. Downsizing

Placebos can be almost as powerful as the real thing. Using tobacco or other herbs alongside weed can help to bulk out your spliffs and reduce the amount you need to use. Of course, you won’t get quite as high, but you can retain the sensation of smoking a fatty!

Adapting your smoking habits can also help to alleviate the dearth of weed. Joints and spliffs are all well and good, but they’re not the most efficient means of smoking. Adopting other methods can help you get every last molecule of THC out of the weed and into your brain.

12. Invite Your Friends Over

People love to share. So share your strife with your friends and hope that they share their weed with you! Don’t be a scrounger, though. Be up front with them, and maybe offer them a delicious dinner in return.

13. Use Another Medium

Using a glass pipe, bong, or vaporizer can make your weed go much further. A pipe or bong, used properly, shouldn’t waste much of the smoke. A vaporizer is even better. Vaporizers do not combust the material, meaning you get the most from your cannabinoids. On top of this, you can save your vaped weed and bake it into edibles to extract anything that might remain.

14. Cook Up Some Edibles

When you ingest THC, your body converts it into 11-hydroxy-THC. This compound is more potent and longer lasting than smoked THC. So if you cook your weed up and eat it, you’re literally making it stronger. Of course, the effects are not identical to smoking, so it will be a slightly different experience. But you most certainly will be high.

What’s more, you don’t just need to use top-shelf bud to make edibles. Collect your trim, your vaped buds, a bit of raw flower, and throw it all in together. The end result will be a potent and, hopefully, delicious narcotic snack.

15. Try a One-Hitter

One-hitters: it’s in the name. There’s no wastage here, as everything is burnt and inhaled in a single hit. It may remove some of the ritual of smoking a long and indulgent spliff, but it will make up for it with a long and indulgent high.

To make sure this is worth it, learn how to smoke a one-hitter effectively. It’d be a shame to waste it.

Changing your attitude toward smoking will help you get through a dry patch. In fact, changing your attitude to smoking might just be good in general.

16. Don’t Wake and Bake

You don’t need to be high all the time. And you can be certain that once you start smoking, you’re going to want to keep smoking. So no wake and bakes, sadly. Save it for the evening, when you can smoke one or two bowls and spend the rest of the day happily high.

If you smoke too early, you’ll be chasing that high all day; and before you know it, you’ll have burned through your week’s supply before bedtime. You don’t want that!

17. Smoke Efficiently, Not Greedily

Sip, don’t gulp. Or in this case, take a small hit. Our lungs aren’t able to process everything that goes into them, even if we hold in our hits. So the most efficient way to smoke weed is with many small hits. This will maximise the amount of THC that makes it out of the smoke, into our lungs, and then onward to our brains.

Legendary hits may seem like the way to go, but think of the hare and the tortoise: slow and steady wins the race.

18. Exercise

Doing some exercise before smoking will increase the feeling of the high. Endorphins, anandamide, increased oxygen levels: all these things contribute to a stronger high. Plus, they feel good in themselves.

Perhaps you’ll discover that there are more sources of feeling good than just weed, and you’ll get healthier in the process.

19. Boost Your High Eating the Right Foods

Certain foods can increase the effects of THC, including:

Mangoes, for instance, contain the terpene myrcene, which is also found in many strains of cannabis. It’s thought that this compound may increase the speed at which THC crosses the blood–brain barrier, thereby increasing the strength of the high. Even if it doesn’t, you get to eat a delicious snack.

20. Take a Tolerance Break

Taking a tolerance break will increase your sensitivity to weed. In effect, this makes each gram of cannabis go further. Planning tolerance breaks is the best way to use this tip. Don’t wait till you’ve run out to wish you were more receptive to the once-potent powers of the cannabis plant. Every few weeks, consider taking a few days off the good stuff to let your brain reset. Not only does it make getting high better, but helps to clear your head, too.

21. Acceptance

You might have to come to terms with the fact that you just don’t have any weed. And, the thing is, that’s okay too. Spending too much time stressing about how to get the very most from what you have left can potentially turn something that isn’t problematic into a cause of anxiety and panic.

Enjoy what you have left, understand you will find more, probably very soon, and enjoy the novelty of being sober in the meantime!