I’ve been asked more and more lately by members of the media ‘how many joints are in an ounce of marijuana?’ Using the ‘joint measurement’ is very popular for journalists who are trying to quantify how much marijuana is in an ounce to their readers who likely don’t consume marijuana. Marijuana veterans of course already know the answer, which is ‘it depends.’ It depends on how big the joints are, which vary in size. Asking ‘how many joints are in an ounce of marijuana’ is similar to asking ‘how many drinks are in a can of soda.’ Obviously, it depends on the size of each drink, which are not uniform.
However, despite the fact that there is no right or wrong answer to the question posed in the title of this article, it is possible to give an estimate that is fairly accurate. First, let’s start with how much an ounce of marijuana weighs. Even the most experience marijuana veterans get this wrong sometimes. Marijuana veterans will be quick to throw out the number of 28 grams. That’s based off the ‘eighth,’ which is the most common quantity of marijuana purchased by most consumers. An ‘eighth’ weighs 3.5 grams, so multiply that by 8, and you arrive at the round number of 28 grams in an ounce. However, an actual ounce weighs 28.3495 grams. Feel free to have this conversation with your dealer, who will likely maintain that an ounce is 28 grams, period.
Next, let’s turn to how much a tobacco cigarette weighs, because that’s really what non-marijuana consumers and most mainstream media consumers are trying to compare the size of a joint to. Admittedly, I don’t smoke tobacco cigarettes because they are basically poison and highly addictive, so I had to turn to Google. Tobacco cigarettes themselves come in different sizes, but it seems that the most common answer is that the tobacco in a cigarette most often weighs .7 grams. So there are roughly 40.49929 tobacco cigarettes in an ounce, which would be about my guess for how many joints there are in an ounce of marijuana.
I have seen joints rolled with as little as .3 grams (they are called ‘pinners’ in case someone is reading this that isn’t hip to the lingo), and some joints that have multiple ounces in them, as they make rolling papers these days that can be about as big as you want them to. Hangout at the right marijuana festivals and events, and it’s not uncommon to see a joint being passed around that is 4-16 ounces in weight and beyond. To sum up, there is no easy answer to this question, but if I had to give an answer that was true ‘most of the time,’ I’d say there are between 28 and 56 joints in an ounce of marijuana. Of course, there will no doubt be someone out there that says ‘there is only one joint in an ounce of marijuana,’ and that would be true too!
