An Ounce of Weed: Grams, What It Looks Like, and How Long It Lasts

An ounce of weed is 28 grams. Technically 28.35, but nobody in this trade has ever weighed out the extra 0.35, and every shop in Canada sells an ounce as a flat 28.

That is the short answer. The useful part is everything that follows from it: where an ounce sits in the weight ladder, what the pile actually looks like, how long one lasts, and why the price per gram falls off a cliff once you get there.

The full weight ladder

Cannabis weights are a mix of imperial fractions and metric reality. The imperial names stuck, the grams are what gets weighed.

Joint counts assume roughly 0.35 to 0.5 g per joint. Heavier rollers get fewer.

Those are not arbitrary tiers. They are the actual steps our flower is sold in, which is why the size options on a flower listing run 1, 2, 3 to 5, 7, 14, 28, 56, 112, 224 and 448 grams. The ladder is the market.

One point of confusion worth clearing: a pound is 448 grams in cannabis, not 453.6. Sixteen ounces of 28 grams each gives 448, and the trade uses the rounded ounce all the way up rather than the true conversion.

What an ounce actually looks like

This is the question behind most searches and the hardest to answer in text, because the honest answer is that it varies more than people expect.

An ounce of dense indica and an ounce of fluffy sativa weigh the same and look nothing alike. Dense, tightly trimmed flower packs down small, roughly the volume of a large orange or a standard sandwich bag about a third full. Airy, loose flower of the same weight can take up close to double that space and fills a sandwich bag.

So if you are eyeballing a purchase, volume tells you about density and trim, not about weight. The only thing that tells you about weight is a scale. Anyone buying by appearance is relying on the seller’s honesty, and the fluffier the flower the easier that is to get wrong in good faith.

How long an ounce lasts

Depends entirely on consumption, but here is a realistic frame rather than a vague one.

• One joint a day at half a gram: about 8 weeks
• Two a day: about 4 weeks
• A bowl or two a day at roughly 0.3 g each: 6 to 9 weeks
• Heavy daily use, 2 g a day: about 2 weeks

For most occasional smokers an ounce is a two to three month supply, which raises the one real argument against buying that much at once.

The storage problem nobody mentions

Cannabis degrades. Terpenes evaporate, THC slowly converts to CBN, and the flower dries out. Over two or three months in a bad container, an ounce loses a noticeable amount of what you paid for.

So the saving on an ounce is real but it is not free. It is only a saving if you store it properly: airtight glass, dark, cool, and not in the fridge where humidity swings cause more problems than the cold solves. In a plastic bag in a warm room, the last week of that ounce is a different product from the first.

If you go through less than a gram a week, a half is often the smarter buy even though the per gram price is worse, because you will smoke all of it while it is still good.

Why the price per gram collapses at an ounce

The single gram price and the ounce price are not on the same curve, and the gap is larger than most people assume.

A gram bought alone carries all the handling, packaging and transaction cost of a sale. An ounce spreads that across 28 grams. Buying 28 single grams costs dramatically more than one ounce of the identical flower, which is the same arithmetic that makes cartons cheaper than packs in any other trade.

It keeps going above an ounce too. Our bulk flower tiers run through quarter pound, half pound and pound for exactly that reason.

Grade moves the price as much as quantity does. Flower here is sorted AA, AAA and AAAA, and an ounce of AA against an ounce of AAAA is a bigger price difference than most people expect. If budget is the constraint, dropping a grade saves more than buying a bigger bag does.

Buying an ounce sensibly

Three things worth doing.

Try a smaller size of a strain before committing to 28 grams of it. An eighth costs little and tells you whether you want two months of it. This is the mistake people make most often, and it is expensive in a quiet way, because an ounce you do not enjoy does not get thrown out, it gets slowly smoked without pleasure.

Buy for the grade you actually want. AAAA at an ounce is a real outlay. If you are going to grind most of it into joints, the difference is less visible than it is in a bowl.

Check what the ounce is. Twenty eight grams of flower, or 28 grams including stem. Trimmed properly, an ounce is close to all usable material.

If what you are really after is the cheapest route to 28 grams rather than the weights explainer, our guide to the cheapest ounces of weed in Canada covers the pricing side.

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