Smoking weed and having fun is easy. It’s only once you get to know the plant and have had different experiences with it that you start to grow interested in the details and how it can produce different effects. Although not always top of mind, there’s more to weed than the strain and THC content.

Buying marijuana can be an intimidating experience if you don’t have the right knowledge, but there are ways to make more informed purchases.

Use your senses

High-quality flower, no matter what it’s made of, should have a strong and pleasant smell. The buds should also look fresh and healthy, with the best products showing off different kinds of colours. The feel of the bud should be spongy, with stems that snap when cracked and that don’t crumble when touched. Something that might be easier to notice is low-quality flower, which shouldn’t look as bright and might have brown spots. Poor-quality flower shouldn’t smell as ripe and might feel dusty or almost wet to the touch.

It’s not all about THC

The best type of cannabis isn’t the one with the highest percentage of THC. Cannabis is a complex plant, made up of different elements, all of which play a part on your high. A cannabis batch where there’s high THC content and not much else might lead to highs that are one dimensional, or perhaps feels of paranoia or anxiousness.

Harvest dates and packaging matter

While the quality, texture, smell and feel of cannabis might be hard to grasp when visiting a dispensary in the U.S., there are other factors that are easier to spot and that indicate whether or not a product is high quality. Harvest dates and product packaging matter. Always check the printed date since marijuana tends to lose its effect the more that time passes, perhaps even losing most of its terpenes within six months. Packaging should also be accounted for, with plastic bags tending to destroy the trichomes on the outer surface of the plant. Glass jars tend to preserve the quality of the flower.

Keep trying

At the end of the day, what matters most is your experience with the plant. If you have had a great experience with a particular kind of cannabis flower, write down its name and the effects it produced, whether the high was uplifting or creative. The more you do this, the more you can talk it out with your budtender, explore similar types of cannabis and return to products that have worked for you in the past.