“There’s a lack of quantitative research on joint smoking. I want to understand what happens during inhalation on the chemistry side,” says Markus Roggen, president and chief science officer of Delic Labs (OTCPK: DELCF), a cannabis and psilocybin research facility in British Columbia. 

Using a coffee grinder and a sieve, Roggen and his team prepared batches of one-, three and five-millimeter-diameter particles then rolled joints from 0.5 gram of each sample, pouring the particles into pre-rolled paper cones. Next, they connected the joints to a “smoke cycle simulator” that uniformly inhaled six times for three seconds each, then exhaled. Filters collected the aerosols at the machine’s 3-D-printed mouthpiece and the researchers used analytical chemistry techniques to measure the aerosol levels from puffs taken at the beginning, middle and end of each joint. Wiess correctly noted that a human volunteer would have been in no condition to assess this many samples back-to-back.

“Smaller chunks exposed a greater surface area to the flame more quickly, providing a faster and more efficient burn,” Wiess explained. “And regardless of particle size, the highest concentration of cannabinoids per puff came toward the end of the joint. Meanwhile, more terpenes, chemicals in cannabis that contribute to flavor but not active drug concentration, came out of the plant at the beginning of the joint. This suggests that a joint will provide the best flavor at the beginning and deliver the strongest concentration of cannabinoids at the end.”