There are a lot of gimmicky products in the legal cannabis world, but I’m more familiar with basics like flower buds and hashish.
I was lucky enough to know friends in college with hashish connections.
Usually it was this disgusting black hash that tasted like old resin when you’d smoke it. If I was lucky, I would get access to brown hash or blonde hash. This stuff would vary somewhere between $20 and $40 a gram depending on the quality of the hash being sold, which seems like a steal in retrospect. Nowadays if I purchase hashish from a cannabis dispensary the price is often much higher than this, but the quality is sometimes better as well. However, the extracts that you can get at dispensaries are much more diverse nowadays. There are solvent-based extracts like BHO and EHO, the former of which stands for butane hash oil while the latter is ethanol hash oil. Depending on who you ask, one type of solvent is better than another for potency purposes. For one, the terpene content in a cannabis product is often directly correlated with the potency. Ethanol extractions often involve high temperatures that are deleterious to terpene preservation, often making them somewhat inferior to butane and carbon dioxide extractions. Still, many of the cannabis oil pens on the market are made with ethanol based extracts. I gave up on the cannabis oil pens when I discovered live rosin extracts, which are heat pressed from freshly harvested plant material. The freshly harvested flower buds have terpenes that degrade during normal dry curing procedures. It makes for a unique product since freshly harvested plant material is too “wet” to smoke or vaporize by conventional means.