10 Ways to Consume Cannabis, From Joints to Topicals

Picking a strain is half the decision. How you consume it changes the speed, strength, and length of the experience at least as much as the genetics do. The same gram smoked, vaped, or baked into a cookie produces three noticeably different evenings. Here’s the full menu of methods, grouped by how the cannabinoids get into you.

Inhalation: fast on, fast off

Anything inhaled reaches your bloodstream through the lungs within minutes, which makes dosing easy to control: take a puff, wait, decide.

1. Joints, blunts, and spliffs. The classics. A joint is pure cannabis in rolling paper. A blunt uses tobacco-leaf wrap, and a spliff mixes tobacco in with the flower, so both add nicotine to the equation. If rolling isn’t your craft, pre-rolls exist for exactly this reason and we stock a wall of them.

2. Hand pipes. The lowest-commitment hardware there is. No water, no paper, no charging cable. Fits in a jacket pocket.

3. Bongs and bubblers. Water filtration cools the smoke, which makes for a smoother, often bigger hit. Bubblers are the portable middle ground.

4. Hookahs. A social novelty more than a daily driver. Cannabis is usually mixed with shisha tobacco to keep it burning, so know that going in.

5. Vaporizers. Heat without flame. Dry herb vapes warm flower to the point where cannabinoids and terpenes release as vapour rather than smoke; cartridge pens do the same with concentrated oil. Better flavour, less smell, no ash. We wrote a full vape pen guide if you’re starting here.

6. Dabbing. Flash-vaporizing concentrates like wax, shatter, or rosin. Potent enough that it’s an experienced-user method; concentrate doses are measured in grains of rice, not grams.

Oral: slow on, long ride

Anything swallowed routes through your digestive system and liver, so onset takes 45 to 90 minutes and the effects run 4 to 6 hours or more. The golden rule for everything in this section: wait the full 90 minutes before taking more.

7. Edibles. Gummies, chocolates, baked goods, beverages. Ontario caps edibles at 10 mg THC per package, which is friendlier to beginners than the homemade brownie of legend.

8. Tinctures. Liquid extracts dosed by the drop under the tongue, where absorption is partly sublingual and somewhat faster than a gummy. Precise and smoke-free.

9. Capsules. The least romantic, most consistent format. Exact dose, zero taste, no equipment. Popular with people who treat cannabis like a supplement rather than a ritual.

Topical: no high at all

10. Creams, balms, and sprays. Applied to skin for localized effect with no intoxication. The full rundown is in our cannabis topicals guide.

Picking your method

Want control and quick feedback? Inhale. Want it to last all evening with no smoke? Eat it. Want your knees to feel better during a movie, not your head? Topical. Tell the budtenders at High Park or King West which of those sentences sounds like you, and they’ll handle the rest. Pickup orders are ready in minutes if you order ahead. 19+ only.