Let's Be Blunt: Today's Best Cigar-Style Joints Are All-Flower and Tobacco-Free

Premium pre-rolls wrapped in hemp appeal to non-nicotine smokers

By Ed Murrieta

You don’t have to be a rich rapper with your own personal pot posse to smoke perfectly rolled cannabis blunts, the rough-hewn but high-end cigar-style joints bursting with chunky whole flowers and status-flexing bravado. 

Even better: 

You don’t have to inhale nicotine (and myriad other toxins) from blunts’ most popular wrappers -- paper made from tobacco pulp, which triggers nicotine’s stimulating beats when burned. For cannabis smokers who don’t smoke tobacco by either lack of preference, tolerance or experience, tobacco’s essence and nicotine’s effects sully pot’s pleasures faster than ashtray-mouth kills French kissing. 

Here’s the best part:

Your next blunt doesn’t have to be saturated with the saliva of someone who tongued a hard-to-seal wrapper with the sloppy determination of a horse licking a salt block. 

Unlike machine-filled cone-shaped joints fashioned from thin papers and cardboard mouthpieces that dominate California’s commercial cannabis market, blunts are hand-rolled in thick hemp wrappers using chunky pieces of flowers rather than ground and pulverized material for even draw and slow burn, and after rolling, the best commercial blunts are cured in humidors to ensure integrity, flavors and smooth smoking. 

Broad-tipped and more rustic looking than cone joints, commercial cannabis blunts are classing up a 19th-century rolling style named to distinguish inexpensive cigars wider than slim cigarillos but measuring beneath pricier Corona-sized cigars’ industry benchmark girth. 

20th-century cannabis consumers with tastes for tobacco combined their smoking pleasures by discarding blunt cigars’ interior tobacco and using the outer wrappers to stuff or roll joints of various cigar sizes. 

Blunts became status symbols. Size mattered. In prohibition times and places, blunts’ burning tobacco wrappers masked the smell of combusting cannabis. 

And, of course, nicotine in the tobacco gave smokers an extra buzz.  

Thanks to state law against combining cannabis and tobacco in commercial products, California’s legal cannabis blunts are 100% cannabis. Hemp-pulp paper wrappers (sealed by moisturizing means other than saliva) are unflavored -- unlike the kind sold at smoke shops and convenience stores. Blunts’ mouthpieces are made from wood, ceramic and glass.

A handful of blunts brands roll top-shelf single-strain cannabis to create premium products and experiences, the kind you savor sinking deep into a leather chair at the end of the day, beholding the bliss connoisseurs seek in blunts’ heady haze. 

Here are reviews of blunts sold by stores and delivery services in the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento and Los Angeles. Blunts range in size, weight and price from half-gram blunts in $20 2-packs to 2-gram blunts for $40 each, basically twice the price of pre-rolled cones of all qualities. 

One caveat:

Cannabis blunts aren’t to be mistaken for cannagars, the ultra-premium humidor-cured joints the size of large cigars that are hand-rolled with multiple grams of cannabis flowers plus powerful cannabis concentrates, priced from $75 to $200 and often sold only by special order, the smoking flex of the highest order.

These blunts are up for smoke sesh consideration:

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