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Smoking is a common habit for people to develop. If you aren't a smoker you probably know someone who does or did. I have been a smoker for about a decade. The only real difference is that I am not a tobacco smoker, I smoke cannabis/hemp/dope flower. Though admittedly I did pick up cigarette smoking for a year as a teenager I fortunately got out of that before it became an addiction.
For about 10 years now I have smoked cannabis in various formats, hand bowls, bongs, gravity bongs, one hitters/dugouts, joints, blunts. Lots of experience with all sorts of pieces, pipes, and papers. However one thing that has illuded me until a month ago has been 'dry herb vaporizers'. And this is what I would like to write about today. What dry herb vaporizers are and how it has made my smoking like far better for my health and wallet.
To start off, I would like to quickly go over the main form of smoking everyone is familiar with. When you take a small fire, say from a lighter or wick, and ignite the plant, thusly the smoker inhales the smoke as it burns off the flaming plant matter. This is almost certainly one of if not the oldest form of smoking that people have had access to. Most cultures all over the world have practiced some form of smoking either recreationally or ritualistically. Typically with a pipe made of wood, bone, or ceramics. Also sometimes also using dry plant leaves to make a joint.
This form of smoke is very raw and dirty, to put it plainly. First off it is VERY HOT, somewhere between 1000-2500 degree farenheit. exposing that kind of heat to your lungs is already bad enough. Second, the rapidly oxidized plant produces a lot of vaporized carbon tar as a byproduct. This tar will absolutely coat your lungs and irritate your throat, and it can take many months for your body to fully expell it. If you ever wondered what that black gunk smokers are always coughing up are, its literal carbon and a bit of plant matter gunk. Third, you are also certainly inhaling in noxious fumes or soot produced as a byproduct of your fires ignition source. Regular old butane lighters produce carbon monoxide and hemp wick coated with bees wax still produces carcinogenic soot. This affects the flavor of the smoke in a very bad way on top of being a health issue.
There are ways to make combustion smoke signifigantly more bearable for your body to handle. The most obvious way is to extend the tube that the smoke passes through (called the stem) this allows the smoke more time to cool and condense before it reaches your lungs.
Going beyond that, The water bong is an essential piece to every true dope smokers kit due to the many advantages of water filtration and percolation. forcing that hot dirty smoke to pass through a water barrier really cools it down and removes a lot of excess carbon plant tar. Throw ice on top in an ice catcher and you have cool smooth smoke that while not clean by any means is at least significantly cleaner. You can tell just how much gunk that the water is pulling out by how quickly the water color changes to brown green and how dirty the main filter chamber gets. Percolator chambers and stems with slits in them help combine the smoke with cool air for added smoothness on top of that.
However, there are also disadvantages to filtration. one being that many of the active psychoactive cannabanoid oils and flavor giving terpenes are also lost to the water. If you are a flavor chaser or want maximum potency per hit, excessive water filtration or even making the stem too long will negatively affect these qualities of smoke. Cooling the smoke down also causes it to condense which means more throat irritation in the long run as the oil droplets stick to your throat.
There exist a second, much less widely known way to produce smoke. The ancient pioneers of hashish smokers over in asia at some point discovered that throwing herb onto hot coals and letting it slowly bake instead of igniting it directly produced a different kind of smoke that could be inhaled over much longer periods of time. This smoke also had the benefit of being much cleaner as the herb did not get hot enough to burn away as vaporized carbon tar.
The act of slowly baking the herb at a moderate temperature over a long time while slowly releasing the cannabanoid oils and terpenes as vapor is known as 'vaporization'. Compared to the quick and dirty hot flash that is combustion smoke, vaporized smoke is fundimentally much cleaner, cooler, and can be extracted slowly over much longer time frames making the herb more efficent per gram over all.
However, historically it was much harder to get herb vaporized, it required specialized smoking equipment and hot coals. The hookah is a modern day incarnation of these ancient smoking apparatuses. thus vaporizing in ancient times was reserved for the rich and social gatherings. In the modern day we fortunately wield the technological magic of electricity, which has made vaporizers affordable and refined. Instead of coals we can now use what are essentially small electric ovens to cleanly heat up herb with no added carcinogens from burning fuel. These small electic ovens are called 'dry herb vaporizers'. Hopefully now you understand why.
They exist in two forms, a 'desktop dry herb vape' and a 'portable dry herb vape'. One is meant for stationary use to be plugged into a wall, more often as a party piece in the style of a hookah with multiple pull hoses. The other is a portable hand held device powered by a chunky rechargable battery. These are really only meant for personal use, and are limited in power due to battery limitations.
Wow I really went on a tangent with this one. Im kind of running out of time today so I will actually split this in two parts. I guess part one here is more like an introduction to combustion vs vaporization, the next one will be me actually talking about the device I set out to talk about when writing this lol. Thank you for reading, hope you enjoyed! Stay tuned!