How Many Grams Are in a Pound of Weed?

Perhaps you’ve made a trip to your local dispo and have admired the lush green ganga, its pearlescent trichomes, its sweet smell of pine, lemon and skunk and thought to yourself, “I love this so much I could smoke it by the pound!”

When you see that packaged eighth - the most common denomination of pot sold in a dispensary - you are looking at about an 1/8 ounce of herb, or 3.5 grams. With a pound of weed weighing 453 grams, you would have to buy 128 eighths to reach that high of a number. 

Here’s the good news/bad news about having a pound of weed around: on the good news side, over time, you can definitely smoke a pound of weed, especially if you are a medical cannabis patient who needs a steady supply, or like to share the good stuff with your friends. The bad news is, your licensed, legal dispensary will never, ever sell you a pound of weed.

Unless you are an industry insider, run a marijuana business, or work on a cannabis farm, you are unlikely to come across enough weed to fill a watermelon (unless you live in New York; beginning April 2022, residents may keep up to five pounds of weed in their homes).

But if you did have access to that much weed at once, you could: 

• Roll 453 one gram joints
• Pack 1,000 bowls
• Make 89.6 grams of wax

Let’s say you did get your hands on a pound of weed. The challenge would be to store it properly. After all, if you spend anywhere from $1,000-4,000 on a pound, you wouldn’t want to let those hard-earned Benjamins go to waste. When cannabis is stored properly in something like a mason jar in a cool, dark place like a cupboard, you’ll keep the mold away, and cannabinoids and terpenes may stay active up to two years beyond the purchase date.

Or, shall we say, the metric system versus the Imperial system. Here’s where the confusion comes in. Legal and illicit market consumers alike ask for cannabis in Imperial weights, but —  cannabis is weighed out in grams. 

A dime bag is a gram of weed in a small bag for $10. photo credit

To elucidate, let’s take a look at the dime bag. Though this term is falling out of the cannabis lexicon in the days of legal weed, a dime bag containing about one gram of weed could be purchased for $10 - hence the term “dime.” It’s this mix of old school cannabis lingo and the U.S. insistence on sticking to the Imperial system of weights and measurements that we have this nomenclature mishmash.

As an average cannabis consumer, it’s unlikely that you’ll ever be able to legally buy a pound of weed at one time. Nonetheless, there are 453 grams in one pound (16 ozs.) of weed. Rosin, edibles, joints or bowls, whatever you choose to do with your cannabis, you’ll have plenty to work with.

Photo Credit: eskymaks (license)