Using Terpenes to Call Bullshit on Your Weed Guy

Drug dealer (via Flickr / Lenny Montana)

It's a classic first-world stoner predicament: Your guy rolls up with a veritable tackle box of assorted and sticky product. You throw him some cash, and he plunks down a plump 8th of White Widow, a strain that you've just been, like, really jamming on lately. After a shared toke of good will and some awkward small talk, he carries on into that good night, off to the next customer. Alone, you blaze some more. (It's Friday, so fuck it.) You inhale good and deep, hold, and release. Ah yes, that's it. That's the stuff, right there.

One problem. You've got a pretty discerning palate by this point and, well, This is not White Widow.

OK, so you're not 100 percent sure. (You are stoned.) It's just a hunch. The stuff looks like White Widow. The stuff is clearing the fogs of stress—a hallmark therapeutic trait of the Widow—that thickened throughout the work week. And yet it doesn't have that sweet, pine-y taste and scent so characteristic of the indica-heavy strain, leaving you with the couch-sinking suspicion that your guy, standup dude that he is, made off like a bandit on a bit of false advertising. If only there were a way to prove it.

There is—and as it turns out, it may all come back to the proverbial sniff test. Sort of. It's one of a few threads teased out in a fascinating piece in High Times by Marin Lee that centers in on terpenes, those organic and resin-y compounds common to conifers and that are known in certain casual pot-head circles as the shit that gives buds their distinct scents. Rigorous testing of cannabis for terpenes (or terpenoids) could well point to a future where picking up White Widow means picking up White Widow, and having some very sound science to back up the name and the score.

“A terpene analysis is like a fingerprint,” Jeff Raber, president of the Werc Shop, the LA-based analytical lab that in 2011 became the first to test cannabis strains for terpenes, tells Lee.

Read the rest over at the new Motherboard.VICE.com.