Thanks to mainstream marijuana-themed marketing, even those who have never inhaled are now aware of 4/20, but celebrations of 7/10 (aka OIL Day or Dab Day) still remain largely confined to connoisseurs of cannabis concentrates. I’m first and foremost a fan of the full flower as found in nature, but it’s impossible to compete with THC extracts — especially in the form of 510 cartridges or disposable all-in-one vaporizers — when it comes to convenience and discretion. With its potency and portability, it’s easy to understand why oil has exploded into a vital element of Florida’s medical marijuana industry, but with a vast variety of methods available for extraction, patients are learning that not all vapes are created equal.
Enter AYR (pronounced “air”) Wellness, a well-established multi-state medical marijuana operator that expanded into the Florida market in 2021 with their acquisition of Liberty Health Sciences. I patronized LHS a few times during my early days in the MMJ program, lured in by their low prices. But I soon found their Dompen brand of distillate-based vapes flavored with botanical terpenes to be the THC equivalent of Everclear with Kool-Aid: strong, sweet and certain to leave you with a headache.
After AYR took over, they introduced their Haze line of live resin extracts, an upgrade over distillate that uses native terps, but still extracted using harsh hydrocarbons; as well as Camino chews, which were my first (and remain my favorite) exposure to sleep-promoting CBN. However, the gold standard of live rosin remained beyond AYR’s grasp, in part because their plants were being grown at a hybrid indoor/outdoor greenhouse in Gainesville that didn’t produce the consistently high-quality bud required for expensive solventless extraction — which uses only pressure and ice water instead of chemicals, preserving the plant’s natural terpene profile — to be profitable…