A Stoner’s Holiday Shopping Wish List
One of my favorite parts about doing the work I do is the opportunity to travel to various cannabis expos. There, among the various vendors of glass and t-shirts, I scout around for the most imaginative and useful stoner gadgets I can find. I’m never disappointed by the ingenuity and craftsmanship I find from tokin’ inventors.
So here, in time for your holiday shopping, is my collection of the most useful stoner gadgets I’ve found in my years of traveling coast-to-coast and across the ocean covering marijuana events. [Full disclosure: some of these products have been given to me, others have not. But I only write up reviews for products I actually use and endorse.]
The Kasher – a poker attachment for your lighter
Early on in my career, I met the young man right here in Portland, Oregon, who makes a little device called The Kasher. It is simply a piece of metal that has been shaped into a kind of sleeve with a long flat point to it. You slip it over your standard Bic lighter. Then when you need to scrape out your bowl, you slide The Kasher past the bottom of your lighter and the flat point becomes your poker.
The Mouthpeace – a prophylactic for your puffing
Southern California’s Moose Labs has created a few different silicone devices meant to protect you from “Cup cough” – that cold or flu you get from sharing bongs, pipes, and joints at public marijuana events. These devices come on a nice lanyard and fit between your mouth and the item you are smoking. They’ve also now added products for your concentrate storage, including molds to fashion your dabs into cool shapes.
PotPockets – a classy wooden container for three joints
The Johnny Road King Company out of Wrentham, Massachusetts, makes these hand-crafted wooden joint or blunt holders that are both attractive and practical. The joint case consists of four blocks cut with joint-sized grooves that are held together by elastic. Bend the case and you can slip a joint into each of the three sections. The elastic pulls the case back flat and extinguishes any of the smoldering joints you’ve put into it.
EcoPen – a color-coded vape pen system with premium case
EcoProducts from Michigan produces a vape pen that stands out from the many similar pens with its sleek packaging. The cases, batteries, and cartridges are color-coded for ease of identification; white is sativa, black is indica, silver is hybrid, gold is a premium hybrid, and copper is a CBD-dominant. The batteries are buttonless; the consumer only needs to draw on the pen to get nice clouds of vapor.
Vapor Slide – makes vape pen cartridges smokable in your bong
I met the young man behind Vapor Slide at an event shortly after he had won a business competition to get his initial funding. It is a tube-like battery that tapers at one end and has a small handle protruding from the side. I told him his product reminded me of the end of a microphone cord. He told me that’s exactly how he got his inspiration – by modifying parts from his music studio.
It functions by allowing you to screw on a standard vape pen cartridge on the tapered end, then fitting that onto your standard 14mm or 18mm glass aperture on your bong. A twisting dial on the fat end sets the heat level for your vaporization, with colored LED lights that brighten as you draw your hit, each color representing a certain temperature.
Oblend – the premium custom cannabis Keurig
I’ve saved the best for last. It’s a product I just saw demonstrated at the most recent MJBizCon in Las Vegas that is well worth saving your money for.
Altopa is a company based in Seattle that has plucked a vision from my dreams. Have you ever been to a fancy movie theater that has one of those deluxe touch-screen Coke machines? The kind where you select your soda type, then get to select flavors like vanilla and lime to mix and match into your drink?
Think that, but for cannabis.
The Oblend is a device coming to market that looks like a Keurig coffee machine. Inside it, the operator installs up to 24 pre-filled cartridges with various cannabinoid constituents, like THC, CBD, and CBG, plus associated terpenes, like linalool, myrcene, and beta-caryophyllene, as well as standard flavors, like grape, orange, or vanilla. Then, a Bluetooth-connected app from your phone or tablet dials up recipes from its crowd-sourced database and squirts the proper ratio of ingredients into your vape pen cartridge or other receptacle to add to butter, oil, etc.
Best of all, you can create your own recipes and add them to the database. You can mix and match your ingredients on the fly, or your can use their step-by-step program to design your cannabinoid recipe based on effects you’re seeking, flavors you like, or maladies you wish to relieve.
The machine also isn’t limited to just the cannabis community. Numerous producers are signed up to make the pre-filled cartridges for Oblend. You could buy one of these for your non-toking aunt who loves aromatherapy and essential oils, letting her fill it with non-cannabis pre-filled cartridges like lavender and cinnamon.
Unfortunately, you won’t be able to get one in time for the holidays. But check out the demos on the website to learn why the Consumer Electronic Show picked it for an Innovation Award. You’ll want to get your pre-order in to get half-off the price when it is released next year.
