On a recent trip through Grass Roots, I stumbled upon a demo for Heshies, a brand of pre-rolled joints that feature a cigarette-like filter.

Me and the demo guy chopped it up for a few minutes-- they're always fun people to talk to and they tend to know their shit. We talked ganja for a few and I scored a free joint (with a cigarette filter on it).

At this point, I gotta admit it: I'm kind of hung up on this filter. I'm not sure what I'm trying to filter out and what I'm not trying to filter out. I know that cannabis has a lot of active components that are carried via the smoke, so I don't know what a cigarette filter is going to do for all my cannabinoids and terpenes. And how much tar and ash am I otherwise inhaling that I wasn't that worried about before we started talking about filters?

I fire up my Heshie as I walk down Polk street. It's an easy smoke for sure. It's well manufactured; smooth, tight, and burns consistently. It's also got plenty of cannabis flavor, but that's about as descriptive as I can get with it. It tastes like a pre-roll, which generally tastes like a scratch-n-sniff sticker of a cannabis leaf. But if the filter is taking anything away from the taste, I can't tell.

After smoking the whole joint, I'm nicely baked. For a single pre-rolled joint, it's a lot more potent than I was expecting. The high is very clean and pleasant, and a beautiful day in San Francisco doesn't hurt one bit.

Along the way, I hop on Instagram a few times and tell a story about my Heshie. I make sure to use their hashtag #HighHeshies pretty aggressively. A few days later, the demo guy reaches out and hooks me up with a pretty dope swag bag.

Heshies didn't ask me for any commitment to produce content around their product, FYI. They gave me all this stuff in good will for participating in their hashtag.

I tried the sativa, hybrid, and indica. Wake-and-baked them, smoked them at 4:20, smoked them alone and with friends.

They are pretty good pre-rolls. They taste like cannabis, smoke consistently, and have effects that are true to their claim. Sativas give me some zip, indicas chill me out, hybrids get the job done.

There was a joint all rolled up with kief and hash and stuff too. They call it the Commander-in-Kief. I don't really fuck around with those things so I gave it to a friend and they said it was great. 

As a cannasseur, Heshies won't be my go-to joint. They seem to be a bit more focused on packaging and manufacturing than they are on growing weed, and that shows in the final product. That's not entirely a bad thing, though.

I can see myself buying a pack of Heshies for my next trip out of town; if I am traveling to a place that is still under cannabis prohibition, or if I'm keeping the company of non-smokers (like my family) for a few days. I could very easily buy a pack of cigarettes, clear a few out and replace them with Heshies. It still boggles my fucking mind that smoking tobacco is a more accepted practice than smoking cannabis, but hey, that's just life in communist Russia I guess.

I would also be likely to buy a pack if one of my friends visits from out of state. When people live under prohibition and then travel to SF, they want to see what it's like in the future. When I was a kid, I used to imagine that in Amsterdam you could buy packs of joints just like cigarettes. A few years ago, a photoshopped image of "Marlboro Greens" cannabis cigarettes tore up the internet. There is just something about seeing cannabis looking more and more like the sleek, smooth, smokable behemoth that makes people marvel at the market potential of the pot in their hands.

But I still just can't get past that filter.

As I walked back from Grassroots (same day I got the sample Heshie) I sort of just heard this old Simpsons quote in the back of my head. I might've even said out loud to myself. NBD on Polk Street, trust me. I got home and quickly sketched this piece out in my Moleskine:

A couple of days later I crushed out the ink and color while smoking Heshies at my illustration desk. I think I'll have to pick up another pack to keep in my art kit.