It’s been a long hard day and finally, you’re sitting on the couch at home with a sigh of relief leaving your lips and your personal stash in your lap. The moment has come when you can kick off your shoes, leave your pants on the bedroom floor, and roll up some smoke. You open the top to that well-worn cigar box of treasures and breath in the aroma. Pretty green buds are waiting for you to grind them up and roll them up. But wait; life’s hard decisions didn’t stop coming at 5 pm when you punched the clock. Starring back at you from the confines of that cigar box is a hard choice. Will it be a joint or a blunt? Both certainly have their merits. The clock is ticking you’ve waited for this moment and now you are frozen in indecision.
Blunts
Blunts; smell so good you’ll want to spend ten minutes just taking in their aroma before even lighting the tip. When you do light it, your taste buds will dance in delight at the sweet combination of cannabis and the amazing flavour you’ve chosen to roll it up in. The positives of rolling up a blunt are obvious. If blunt is the choice it’s going to smell and taste incredible and its length and heft might just keep you smoking all the way through whatever tv show you’ve chosen to have a mini-marathon with after your long work day.
Blunts give you choices. If you’re feeling in a classic kind of mood you can break open a cigar scoop its guts out and replace them with the herb. It’s a ritual that some find very satisfying. However, if you just don’t want the process to take ten minutes to accomplish you can always go for an empty cigar wrap and skip the mess of scooping the guts from a cigar already filled with tobacco. These wraps come in a myriad of flavours so you can expect that you’ll always be able to mix up the flavour combinations or if you find a favourite you can always fall back on it.
Blunts make you feel like the gangsta you know you were born to be. Never mind that you’re sitting on your couch with your upper half still clad in your oh-so-grown-up and professional work attire and your lower half in only underwear Never mind that the tv is playing that show that always brings on the generous flow of tears. So you’re on your couch alone with tear-streaked cheeks as long as you have a blunt in your hand you’re certifiably gangsta cool.
And then you must think of the merits of the blunt in other situations. Believe it or not, you occasionally do entertain guests or go out for an evening of fun. Blunts are great for social situations. You still get the comradery of the old puff and pass ritual commonly associated with joints and on top of that, the blunt always offers more to go around. It lasts longer so you will never have to worry that you only got two hits while smoking up with a group of 5. And remember how gangsta you feel sitting alone on your couch with a blunt in hand, imagine if someone else could actually see you and verify all the street cred you know you’re packing.
So What’s The Problem?
Why haven’t you gotten to work on rolling that blunt up yet? As with anything else, there are negatives to think about as well. Do you want to spend the extra time it takes to prepare a blunt? Do you want to risk tearing the oh-so-delicate paper and having to start all over again with a new wrap? These are quite legitimate questions that might have you putting the blunt wrap back down. Not to mention the pretty much unavoidable fact that you’re going to be using two to three times as much herb to fill that blunt as you would for a joint.
And if you’re out about with friends? Maybe you’re smoking in the car before going into the theatre to watch a movie or you’re chilling in a discrete area of the local park enjoying the great outdoors. Blunts are never easy to roll on the go. You have to spread out and give yourself some room. They aren’t very discrete either. There’s hardly any hiding the pungent aroma of a blunt and the fact that they are so long-lasting might pose a problem if you’re trying to get a last-minute smoke in before a movie starts or a quick smoke at the park before a kid or a dog or any manner of people wander too close.
Joints
Joints are a quick roll and it’s really not likely you’ll be reaching for the pack again after tearing the paper, these papers have a resilience that a blunt wrap just can’t match. And if conservation is important to you as it is to most of us you’ll be happy to see that this one joint isn’t going to put such a big dent in your stash.
Then there are the merits of the joint on the go or in a semi-public situation. Joints are easy and quick to roll and you don’t need a lot of room to spread out with them. They also smoke pretty fast if you’re trying to get a last-minute smoke in but you literally only have the last minute. They are easy to extinguish and put away from sight and though they certainly do produce an aroma it is not quite as pungent as that of a blunt. Not to mention your friends might be right there with you when it comes to the appeals of nostalgia.
The joint is seeming like a pretty sound choice. But nothing is ever perfect so you have to wonder if the nostalgia hasn’t made you nearly jump to the wrong conclusion. There’s no way a joint is going to last through an entire episode of your favourite tv show. Shortly after you’ve reached that first joint you just might find yourself reaching for the pack of papers again to roll another one. Now you’ve thrown conservation out the window when the end of the night comes and there are four roaches in the ashtray because the joints just never last long enough.
Out with your friends, you run into the problem of getting highly disappointed when you realize the joint has turned into a tiny roach after its second rotation and you were just beginning to cultivate your buzz. Or what about when you roll a seemingly perfect joint and the next time it returns to you it has an inch-long run and you have to take a paper hit for the team just to fix it before reluctantly passing it back to your expectant friend?
Blunts vs Joints
Now you’ve got that two-pack of delicious strawberry mango blunt wraps in one hand and that trusty book of papers in the other and still indecision is a plague nearly as deadly as procrastination. You look to the left for some sign from the tasty, long-lasting, street credibility giving blunt wraps and then to right at the easy, nostalgic, conservation-promoting book of papers and they are silent having presented their arguments with sound resolve.
You are a hung jury of one, every moment the debate rages on is a moment that you spend not getting high but instead contemplating the best way to get high. The flicker of the glowing blue tv screen urges you on in your decision-making process. There is only one sound-sane choice in the great war of blunt vs joint. You get to work furiously grinding, rolling, tucking, licking, and producing a masterpiece. When you are finished you set the cigar box down and reach for the lighter. There is a smile on your face, a joint in your hand and a blunt on the coffee table. The decision came to you in your moments of toil with glaringly obvious clarity.
Perhaps if you were out with friends or even enjoying an evening in with people you’d spend way too much time debating even further on which decision to make and perhaps you’d decide that a joint is really the go-to on the go-smoking choice while a blunt wins out for a relaxed chill session with your 5 favourite people but today you are sitting on your couch alone just you and your two best friends the joint and the blunt.
Of course, the hard-won and long-debated decision was a joint as an appetizer and a blunt as the main course. You’ve examined the pros and cons and surely there is a time and place for both joints and blunts. Today that time and place crash into one. In the end, you have chosen the herb and the herb deserves variety as much as you do. You’ll pat yourself on the back for your stellar decision-making skills in a few hours when you’re sufficiently high with the sting of cold from the refrigerator kissing your tear-streaked cheeks. You’ll be onto a new debate as you contemplate a cream cheese-covered dill pickle vs Colby jack and honey ham rolled into one and accompanied by the honey mustard dipping sauce. But for now, you’ll feel confident and satisfied that In the war of blunts and joints everyone wins.
