How to Avoid the Biggest Weed Scams Right Now

Image via Complex Original

The days of buying your tree in a Ziploc sandwich bag are gone. If you’re buying top-shelf exotic flower in 2020, odds are the weed is coming in a resealable Mylar bag complete with a bright graphic label and lab test results featuring cannabinoid and terpene percentages on the back. Unfortunately, just because your weed came in a fancy bag does not mean the contents inside match the label on the front. Thanks to overseas wholesale websites like DHGate and Alibaba, and even Amazon and Etsy (yes, that Etsy), black market dealers can buy empty and ready-to-sell bootleg Mylar bags that can be filled with whatever low-grade weed they want.

For smokers without the local access or excess cash, paying less for high-cost brands like Cookies or Zackwoods may seem like a no-brainer, but once you’re done flexing that Gary Payton or Runtz bag on IG, odds are you’ll still be smoking the same Reggie Bush you used to buy in sandwich bags. If you can’t verify that your dealer is tied in with the official connect, don’t get taxed for a fancy bag full of filler.

If you’ve bought or been offered black market edibles over the past year, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of Medicated Nerds Rope or Stoney Patch Kids. If you haven’t heard of them, check the local news stations and federal health warnings. From California to Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Minnesota, and everywhere in between, law enforcement has seized thousands upon thousands of identically labeled Nerds Rope and Stoney Patch edibles. So how are dealers in every corner of the U.S. getting the same product, and how do they look so much like real Nerds Ropes and Sour Patch Kids?

The answer goes back to those same bootleg packaging sellers who make thousands of fake BackPackBoyz mylar bags. Instead of popular weed brands, though, these bags are marked with fake Nerds Rope or Sour Patch Kids candy graphics and labeled with arbitrarily high THC quantities—as high as 400 milligrams. With those ready-to-seal bags easily available online, all dealers need to do is unwrap bulk quantities of real Nerds Rope or Sour Patch candies, spray them with cheap THC distillate, and repackage them in the pre-labeled edible bags. In most cases, the THC distillate is the same illicit pot product that is used in the counterfeit vape cartridges that sparked a health crisis last year.

Since eating edibles doesn’t affect the lungs, it is unlikely tainted distillate edibles will result in another health crisis, but the facade of professional packaging hides product of uncertain and widely varying potency and potentially unsafe manufacturing and handling techniques. The knockoff edible market is so big that Nerds Rope parent company Ferrara Candy Company has made public statements distancing itself from and rebuking the popular black market product. At the end of the day, there is nothing stopping dealers from repackaging plain candy in edible-labeled bags without any THC added at all.

If your stoner tendencies have evolved past flower and edibles into the realm of shatter, badder, rosin, and live resin, there is still plenty of sketchy maneuvering to watch out for. Because most black market dabs do not undergo lab testing, they often contain high levels of residual solvents or pesticides that you probably don’t want to be inhaling. Even worse than improperly purged BHO, some dealers are now selling completely fake slabs of shatter made out of pine rosin.

The cheap and completely benign tree wax is yellowish gold in color and can be heated and made to look almost exactly like THC-rich cannabis concentrates. To make it look even more like the real thing, dealers will mix in small amounts of cannabis terpenes or THC distillate to create a deceptively dank smell. Unfortunately, when you try to take a dab of pine rosin shatter, you don’t get high at all, and instead muck up your rig and possibly your lips with gross sap. If you’re buying shatter or dabs of any kind from a new source, make sure you know someone who can vouch for the product, or make sure you get to sample it before you pay.