After a wretched smoking experience, these Snow Rocks gave dull effects.
The store was “DJ’s Smoke Shop” in St. Petersburg, Florida, a state with medical but not adult-use cannabis. In such states, countless stores sell products with “hemp-derived cannabinoids.” These intoxicating chemicals are synthesized from CBD that (supposedly) came from hemp that complied with the 2018 Farm Bill, meaning it did not meet the classification of “marijuana.” All such “alt-cannabinoid” products exist in a state of plausible legality untested in the courts.
I bought the “Blue Dream” flavor of “Snow Rocks” from Gold Silver Cannabis in Raleigh, NC. Gold Silver uses hemp and alt-cannabinoids to make products that imitate marijuana. The Snow Rocks label says “D8+THCP cannabinoids,” suggesting that they contain delta-8-THC and tetrahydrocannabiphorol (THCP). The website doesn’t mention the THCP: “We use our infused Delta 8 Flower with one of our 8 terpenes and coat it with Delta 8 nano isolate smokable powder to give it a more potent effect.” One 2 oz. jar sells for $220 on their website.
I packed my trusty bowl with this, sparked it up, and managed to take a couple of hits. It tasted like wood chips that had been rolled in someone’s chemicals. If some “Blue Dream” terpenes were in there, I did not detect them. Perhaps I am not sufficiently experienced a taster of Snow Rocks to appreciate the flavor, but I found it disgusting.
I definitely “felt something,” so yes, these could get you high. And I didn’t get any terrible headache or sickness, so appear to have been spared severe penalties for my experiment. I haven’t gone back to the Snow Rocks yet, though, and I don’t believe I shall.
I got to test these Snow Rocks with @Jill Carriero of Orange Photonics, using their LightLab 3. Jill was also grossed out by the Snow Rocks (see photo), and suggested to the bystanding @Jeremy Klettke that this “snow” is a great way to cover up powdery mildew. We extracted a mixture of the powder and underlying flower, injected it, and were pretty surprised by the results.
Our sample was just 11.3% D8-THC. That’s it. I wasn’t too surprised by the absence of THCP; the “THCP” name gets thrown around a lot, but I suspect the compound isn’t widely available yet. THCP has a longer tail of carbons than THC and CBD, so would be less readily synthesized from CBD as are isomers of THC.
The shock was, we found zero CBD or CBDA, the carboxylated precursor. In flower that was supposedly hemp. So, even more gross than before.
This foul product doesn’t belong anywhere, and certainly not on a strip mall store shelf. If hemp flower at all, it has lost all its CBD. This product also illustrates a recent new trend in the alt-cannabinoid market: products that claim several intoxicating compounds, but contain fewer.
#TastingTesting #Cannabis #Science #HonestData
TL;DR
🚨 Ever smoked something that tasted like chemical-dipped mulch?
Yeah… we did. 😬
In our first Tasting/Testing Journal, we cracked open some “Snow Rocks (Blue Dream)” from a strip mall hemp shop. The label promised Delta-8 and THCP — but our lab results told a very different story. Spoiler: No THCP. No CBD. Just 11.3% D8 and a whole lot of 💩.
🧪 With help from Orange Photonics and their LightLab3, we uncovered what’s really in this stuff — and what’s not.
📸 See the full test results, pics, and reaction video from the lab. This is what transparency looks like as we develop the website to host all the raw data!
