With So Many Products How Do You Know What to Choose?
The sudden emergence of cannabis in the medical community has greatly increased the use of cannabis within the adult populations that had previously never given thought to using cannabis as a recreational product. This has left many consumers going into dispensaries or making online purchases of CBD products with little experience or understanding of the products themselves or the language used by retailers to sell these products.
This can leave consumers feeling overwhelmed and uncertain about the purchases that they are making. This is unfortunate to say the least. The consumers who are turning to these products later in life are doing so because they are seeking some sort of therapy and not knowing about the products can impair their ability to decide which products are most likely to be successful for them.
This article is intended to help those consumers that may need some extra information to decide which products might be best for them. Since there are so many products and a number of considerations associated with each, this article is being broken down into two parts in order to make the information easier to digest. In Part 1 we will look at how different lab techniques can lead to different products and in Part 2 we will look at some of the products themselves and some of the pros and cons associated with each.
This article is not intended to tell consumers which products are best for them. Health care and therapy are unique to each person. You know you so you are the most qualified to make decisions regarding your personal health care and therapy. This article is simply intended to give you the necessary background information to make those decisions when it comes to cannabis products.
Marijuana or Hemp
The first consideration that must be made when making an informed choice about which products to choose is marijuana or hemp. Both are variations of cannabis and both contain a wide range of cannabinoids and other natural plant compounds. The primary groups of compounds for both marijuana and hemp include cannabinoids, terpenes and flavonoids.
The biggest difference between marijuana and hemp is that marijuana strains produce higher concentrations of tetrahydrocannabinolic acid (THCA) while hemp strains produce higher concentrations of cannabidiolic acid (CBDA.) While the sum therapeutic effect of any cannabis strain is dependent on all of the compounds found in cannabis, the most basic consideration for any new consumer is the psychoactive effects associated with tetrahydrocannabinol (THC.)
Marijuana and hemp both have therapeutic effects associated with many of the natural compounds found in them, but hemp strains do not have the psychoactive effects associated with higher levels of THC. Fortunately consumers can find nearly all of the different product types in THC, cannabidiol (CBD) and THC:CBD mixes so regardless of whether the psychoactive effects are desired, the same therapeutic options exist.
Therapeutic Options
Cannabis can come in a wide variety of products. Now more than ever consumers are able to choose their products based on the therapeutic benefits that they are seeking as well as the method of consumption that they can feel comfortable with. Raw cannabis flower is still a highly desired method of consumption for many consumers however there are drawbacks to smoking cannabis flower that may reduce the appeal of smoking flower for some consumers.
Other products that consumers can choose from include pain salves, lotions, pills, edibles, tinctures, epidermal patches, and more. In fact manufacturers have found ways to infuse cannabis into nearly any type of product that a consumer desires. This gives consumers the opportunity to select products that fit their lifestyles. This can be an overlooked aspect for new consumers when first becoming introduced to cannabis products. Start with something that sounds easy to incorporate into your lifestyle.
Extraction Methods
Different extraction methods and cannabinoid purification techniques can yield a wide range of cannabis extracts that can be used to make the plethora of therapeutic options. Manufacturers will often use different extraction and/or purification techniques depending on which types of end products that they are looking to make. As such it makes sense to spend a few minutes going over some of these techniques to understand how they are performed as well as the types of jargon that you can expect to hear associated with the methods and products associated with them.
Extraction is something that may sound complicated to anyone that doesn’t have a background in chemistry, however it is actually so simple that most of us do some type of extraction on a daily basis without ever realizing it. In the simplest terms extraction is using a solvent to pull certain types of compounds out of raw plant material.
Think about your morning coffee or tea. In either case there is a raw plant material (coffee beans or tea leaves) where plant compounds (caffeine, and flavonoids among others) get removed using a solvent, in this case hot water. We can build off of this basic understanding of extraction as we discuss the extraction methods employed in the cannabis industry.
Bubble Hash
Water can also be used to make cannabis extracts. This is typically done by filling a mesh bag with raw plant material. The bag is then put in a machine that is very similar to a washing machine which spins the bag of plant material in a large drum filled with water and ice. The ice water removes the plant compounds that get knocked off of the plant material and sifted through the mesh bag. The water containing the plant compounds then gets run through a series of different sized filters to produce different qualities of what is often referred to as bubble hash.
It is important to note that cannabinoids fall into a class of compounds known as lipids which means that they are highly greasy. This also means that the cannabinoids do not readily dissolve into the water and it is actually the agitation and ice that causes the trichomes of the plant to break free from the plant. Another method of hash production that is similar is dry ice hash where a screen is used in conjunction with dry ice and raw plant material to freeze the trichomes and knock them through the screen. This is a common method of producing kief. The bubble hash and kief that are produced using these techniques are often the form that the product will be sold as.
Hydrocarbon and Organic Solvent Extraction
As mentioned, bubble hash and kief are produced by freezing the plant compounds and knocking them free. This is actually quite different than the example of making coffee that we initially started with. I doubt that coffee would be as popular as it is, if it left chunks of plant material in your cup of joe. In coffee the plant compounds are completely dissolved in the water. This is because caffeine and the other compounds that get removed from the coffee beans are water soluble.
The general rule for solubility is that likes dissolve likes. This means that the greasy lipids of cannabis do not dissolve in water but instead they dissolve in hydrocarbons and other organic solvents. The most common solvents used in the extraction of cannabis using this method are butane, propane, carbon dioxide and ethanol.
Butane and propane are what can be called hydrocarbons as they only contain hydrogens and carbons. Carbon dioxide and ethanol contain oxygen atoms so they are considered organic solvents instead of hydrocarbons. In practice however, they all work as solvents to extract the cannabinoids in the same way.
Even though the solvents are slightly different, the extraction methods used are all very similar. Plant material is loaded up into some sort of extraction vessel which then gets filled with the desired solvent. After some time the solvent with the cannabinoids dissolved in it (this is analogous to coffee) gets removed from the plant material.
At this point the solvent that was used to dissolve the cannabinoids and remove them from the plant material must be removed from the cannabinoids. This is typically done by evaporating off the solvent using either a vacuum oven or some other sort of solvent recovery system.
The products of solvent based extractions can go by many different terms, among the terms that you may hear however are: dabs, shatter, wax, butter, and crumble are common when referring to marijuana derived extracts, while hemp derived extracts are commonly called either crude, or simply oil. While a great many extracts are sold as end products to the consumer, solvent based extraction is also the starting material for most of the other products that are infused with cannabis.
Rosin Pressed Hash
Another common type of hash is rosin pressed hash. It is unique in that it does not use any liquid solvents. Instead rosin presses extract cannabinoids using heat and pressure. The raw cannabis material is placed inside of a filter which then gets placed between two sheets of parchment paper. A hot press is then used to press down on the plant material, the combination of pressure and heat then causes the cannabinoids to liquify without burning. This allows the cannabis oil that is produced to run out of the filter filled with plant material and onto the parchment paper where it can be collected. Like bubble hash and kief, rosin pressed hash is often sold as is without any further processing.
Extraction Purification Techniques
As mentioned, solvent based extracts are often used to make a number of other end consumer products. Before making the products with the extracts however, the extracts often need some sort of purification technique to be performed. The most common purification methods employed in the cannabis industry include: winterization, distillation, column chromatography, and crystallization.
Winterization
Winterization is a purification technique that exploits the different freezing points of the compounds found within the crude extract. In this method the crude extract is dissolved in a solvent (typically ethanol) and it is then frozen. As mentioned, the cannabinoids are lipids. Another type of lipid compounds are fatty acid chains. These are the compounds that make the fats in the oils of our foods as well as being a major constituent of cell membranes.
Long chain fatty acids will dissolve in ethanol but when they get too cold they become solid and crash out of the solution. This allows for the fatty acids to be filtered out of the rest of the solution as long as the solution is taken to a low enough temperature.
After filtering out the fatty chains, the ethanol must then be removed from the cannabis extract. Many different cannabis extractors are built to use cryogenic solvents that allow for the winterization process to be carried out at the same time as the extraction process. This prevents the need to remove the solvents twice.
Distillation
Just as winterization is able to separate compounds based on the freezing points, distillation is able to separate compounds based on the boiling points. During distillation the crude extract gets heated to remove different fractions that contain the different compounds found in the crude extract. Using distillation the terpenes in the extract can be removed and collected as one fraction while the cannabinoids are collected in another fraction.
While winterization is able to increase the purity of a crude extract a small amount by removing the long lipid chains, distillation is able to greatly increase the purity of a crude extract by removing terpenes and flavonoids. The product of distillation is often called distillate, the clear or full spectrum.
The term full spectrum is in reference to the fact that at this point the distillation product is extremely high in purity for total cannabinoids yet the individual cannabinoids have not been removed giving the distillation a “full spectrum” of cannabinoids without the other plant compounds, hence full spectrum.
Distillate can be sold as is or it can be incorporated into a variety of products. Most vape pens are made from distillate which has had the terpenes that were removed reintroduced to the distillate.
Column chromatography
Column chromatography is one of the least common techniques employed that is covered in this article. Column chromatography is typically used to remove the THC from hemp derived extract. It is popular in the hemp industry because it is often regarded as the best way to produce a hemp extract that can be used in CBD vape pens.
The extraction and workup techniques discussed up to this point will remove nearly all of the cannabinoid compounds with the same efficacy. This leads to a CBD oil that is actually too high in THC to be sold as a hemp product under the Charlotte’s Web Act. The CBD oil can be used to make other products so long as the end consumer product is under the 0.3% THC threshold defined by the Charlotte’s Web Act. In the case of vape pens however the oil does not get diluted enough to meet this limit. Column chromatography is the answer to this problem for the industry.
Column chromatography involves dissolving the oil in a solvent, this is known as the mobile phase. The column itself is packed with a solid substance that will interact with the compounds as the mobile phase passes through. When the mobile phase is run through the column, it is run through in a changing concentration with a second solvent. The change in the mixture of the two solvents cause the compounds in the oil to move at different rates which allows them to be collected in fractions similar to distillation.
The fractions taken from column chromatography have an even greater level of separation when compared to distillation which allows for the THC to be removed. Even the different cannabinoids can be separated out using this technique which can allow for them to be recombined using only the cannabinoids desired in the end product. This provides what is known as THC free or broad spectrum distillate that can then be sold as an end consumer product for vaping or it can be used to make vape pens and other THC free products.
Crystallization
Crystallization is the lab technique that leads to the most pure end product. Using crystallization labs can get extracts that are up to 99.9% pure. This is to say that many of the cannabinoid compounds can be completely isolated from the others to create pure solids. The benefit of crystallization is that in isolating the individual compounds it is easier to accurately dose products as well as to predict the therapeutic effects of the products.
This method is also extremely helpful to those doing research on the individual compounds found in cannabis. The downside to this is that some compounds are harder to crystallize than others. THCA for instance will form crystals fairly easily while THC does not.
The crystallization of compounds is unique to the compound being isolated, but the same basic concept applies to most crystallization methods. After getting the compound as isolated as possible using the other methods listed, the compound gets dissolved in a very minimal amount of solvent. The atoms of the compound dissolved in the solvent then begin to align in such a way as to create an organized crystal structure.
The easiest household example of this is boiling water and dissolving sugar in it. You can then put popsicle sticks in the water and sugar solution, as the water cools sugar crystals will form on the popsicle stick creating rock candy. In the case of THCA it is often the case that the extraction will be performed at a low enough temperature that as the solvent used to extract the THCA gets removed the THCA crystals begin to form. Exactly how that process is done really depends on how the lab is set up to extract to begin with. The products of crystallization are typically referred to as diamonds or isolate.
Ready to make products
Having looked at the different methods used to produce a variety of cannabis extracts, it is now easier to look at the wide range of products that come from those extracts. In the second part of this article we will do just that. Picking the right therapeutic method for your needs could have a big impact on the success that the therapy has for you.