During a recent Zoom meeting, I was surprised that some of the attendees, all folks who work in drug treatment programs, weren’t clear on the meaning of some common street terms. In this case, shatter and dab.
Sounds like a rap duo, right? Both terms describe aspects of THC use.
Shatter refers to a type of cannabis concentrate, made by using a solvent (such as butane) to extract THC from the cannabis flower.
The extracted material will invariably be many times the THC content of the original flower — when concentrated, 60-80% isn’t unusual, and 90% isn’t unheard of. At those levels, the drug’s effects on the user can be closer to a powerful hallucinogen, such as LSD — a far cry from ordinary cannabis.
Because of its extraordinary strength, shatter and its brother concentrates tend to attract more experienced users, in search of greater impact from drug use.
The name shatter reflects its odd appearance. Resembling a chip of rock candy or very thin tinted glass, it’s easily broken into smaller pieces, sometimes amber in color.
Shatter’s close relatives among the concentrates include others named primarily for their appearance — such as wax, budder, and crumble.
All of the above can be heated, ordinarily in a pipe, to yield vapors that can be inhaled. That’s also where we first encounter the term dab, used to describe the individual piece of concentrate.
As in, “I’m’a smoke this dab, okay?”
Dabbing in that context describes the act itself. Both terms can be used as verb noun.
Yes, it’s true: just as someone could conceivably “shatter shatter” — meaning break a larger piece into smaller ones — so could they describe themselves as having “dabbed a dab”.
Sorry if that’s confusing. But if you didn’t know, well, now you know.
