Can You Smoke Weed Leaves?

The short answer is yes, the leaves, just like the stems, flower buds and extracts from the marijuana plant can be smoked. They can also be vaporized, eaten, brewed in a tea or put into a tincture. But how effective would smoking the leaves be exactly? When we talk about the leaves of a cannabis plant, we are referring to those big fan-like leaves called “sugar leaves.” They grow during the flowering stage of the plant and get their name from the trichomes that cover them and sparkle, like sugar. Trichomes are the tiny mushroom-shaped crystals that carry all of the therapeutic compounds, called cannabinoids, in them. Some cultivars produce more trichomes than others, and the results are visible on the sugar leaves and the buds. If you have a plant where the sugar leaves are covered in trichomes, there are a few ways to use them. Some people will trim them to create hash or canna-butter because trying to smoke them is a little bit tricky.

One thing to remember is that the sugar leaves are necessary to the plant’s total growth. They are the leaves put out by the plant to gather light energy to synthesize and grow flowers to their fullest potential. Just like you learned in science class, the green chlorophyll traps the sun’s energy and transforms it into plant “food.” Without enough healthy leaves, the plant will not be living up to its full potential. Harvested too soon, the flowers—the most potently smokable part of the plant—will not be as big and trichome-filled as they could be.

The leaves are flavorful; some people juice it fresh to glean all of the phytonutrients, though the juice itself won’t produce any psychoactivity unless you leave it out in the open for a few days.

So, what can you do with this most underrated part of the cannabis plant? According to some seasoned growers, smoke from the sugar leaves is harsher than that from the flowers and could lead to some irritation. And the potency is substantially lower. Ask an expert, and they will advise that the best thing to do is stick to the flowers. What you might consider doing with the leave is scraping the trichomes off of the sugar leaves and use anywhere that you might use kief, or trichome powder.

If you are going to process a lot of leaf material into something smokable, you will need a contraption called a pollinator machine. A pollinator is a machine that rotates plant material in a motorized drum with a sieve around it to harvest the trichomes. It takes about 30 or 40 minutes to get the leaves clean of their crystals, which will gather as a powder in the drum. The power created from pollinator processing can be pressed lightly into something called “scuff,” pressed further into a hash, sprinkled into a joint or bong bowl, turned into a resin, or decarboxylated in an oven and use it to make canna-butter or cannabis oil.