At the risk of sounding un-American, I’m going to complain about choices and having too damn many. Aren’t we taught from a young age how lucky we are to live in America and have the freedom to choose? I agree, the freedom to choose is amazing. Choosing our leaders is great. The choices often suck, but the freedom to choose is sacred. 

That’s the distinction I want to make before continuing. The freedom to choose is awesome, but the downside is often ignored. There are often so many choices that it becomes difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff…or, in this case, the chocolate edible from the mint chocolate edible from the blueberry chocolate edible from chocolate taffy from the turtle from the….well you get the point. One of my local stores has 16 variations of chocolate edibles spread over about half as many brands. How is one supposed to choose? As a friend once told me, “When choosing candy, choose carefully, as you never know when it’s the last choice you’ll make.”

Many of us have preferred brands and products. I do, but I’ve also been shopping and trying different products for years. And, even though I have preferences, I often find myself traveling and shopping somewhere new that doesn’t carry my preferred product. I once traveled through the southern coast of Mexico and found that each town I visited either sold Coca-Cola or Pepsi, but not both; the distribution of one product in the town automatically froze the other out. This reminded me of my childhood, a time when Coors beer was not sold east of the Mississippi river. This soda and beer issue, and the problem with preferred brands, comes down to distribution. You simply cannot find certain brands in certain states, let alone in specific dispensaries. 

Alas, I digress. While distribution is an important issue for companies to solve, it’s not my issue. My issue is that I’m a new customer and there are 54 types of candies to choose from. I have to assume they will all get me high, but how am I supposed to pick one over the other? The candy makers do a slightly better job than the chocolate makers by creating more strain specific varieties, but the choices are still overwhelming. 

Once while traveling, I stopped by a dispensary but forgot my license (legal state ID). My lovely non-smoking, teetotaling wife offered to shop for me and strolled in thinking she’d ask for my edible of choice (being familiar with name and packaging) and be on her way in five minutes. No less than ten excruciating minutes passed on the phone while she rattled off names from the menu for me to choose from. Names that held no meaning to me, like Blue Raspberry Lime (blue is a color, not a flavor), Mystery (I kid you not) and Elderberries…which led to a Monty Python and the Holy Grail reference that was completely lost on my poor wife, and only exasperated the situation. With so many choices but nothing to differentiate, I asked her to grab the flavor she found least offensive and whatever the budtender recommended. I wanted to help her help me, but is this the cannabis market we really want?

Some brands distinguish by strain, and some distinguish by flavor - but that’s it. Other than anecdotes and reviews, there’s little information available to distinguish one product from another, and that goes for most on the market. Most products market their flavor, which is the least significant factor in the entire edible experience, yet it seems to drive 80% of the decision. The edible is in your mouth for a minute or less. The effects of the edible are felt for hundreds of minutes. This is the (marketing) world we live in, but I don’t know if this is a case of the tail wagging the dog or vice-versa. Is the marketing being driven by consumer demand, or is the demand driven by what’s presented to consumers? I also don’t know if this is a problem with cannabis, marketing cannabis, consumers or just me. Maybe it isn’t a problem and I’m just easily agitated by frivolous things. What I am absolutely certain of is that my decision within a store takes two to three times longer than it should because I have difficulty with an overload of choices. 

All of this has me feeling nostalgic and missing my dealer. He was awesome, would swing by my house on a semi-regular monthly basis with a backpack and half a dozen or so mason jars of really good pot. When my state legalized cannabis, my dealer either changed jobs or retired. At first it didn’t phase me, and I gladly began to shop like a kid in a candy store. For quite a while I relished and touted all the choices found in my local dispensaries. I loved trying a little of this and a bit of that. But, over time, I found there wasn’t much difference, and that often felt or tasted like this, or was it the other way around? I eventually realized that I only needed a few good options to choose from, and I was subsidizing those choices, whether I wanted them or not. 

I conclude this piece with a question that contradicts my introductory query. Is there really anything more American than having an abundance of choices and complaining about them?