Gorilla Glue #4 (marijuana review)

When you’re sampling so many strains, it takes something jarring, something so singular in effect to rise to the top. This undoubtedly qualifies.

An example of the Gorilla Glue #4 strain from another Colorado dispensary. (Ry Prichard, The Cannabist)

When I talk about self-medicating with cannabis it’s with trepidation, as if I’m an illicit drug user and not one of the millions of Americans who choose something like coffee or seconds at dinner instead. It’s that pesky “self” in there. Diagnosis is fine when it comes from a medical professional, not Google.

So when I say that tonight I’m treating the mild obsessive-compulsive disorder that I’m fairly sure I have, and I’m doing so with Gorilla Glue #4, I’m painfully aware of the potential reactions. Then, I get to exhale them away until they vanish into the yellow light below my ceiling fan. And I don’t need to clean the ceiling fan.

Gorilla Glue #4 by the numbers: $13/gram, $240/ounce at Holistic Life, 1395 S. Sheridan Blvd in Lakewood.

If there was anything I missed in the recap of my recent trip to Amsterdam, it was how refreshingly sticky the buds were. A grinder felt like an essential accoutrement instead of just another weed gadget to put away.


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While the Gorilla Glue #4 is very much a product of Colorado (read: dry as the Devil’s turkey), I can see where the moniker comes from. It might as well have been a floating cluster of trichomes that someone surreptitiously added raw plant material to so it would still be recognizable as pot.

After shooting a message over to my favorite herb nerd and fellow Cannabist weed critic Ry Prichard (“Um, have you seeeeen this?”), he volunteered a breakdown of the genetics in a way that made my brain hurt a little bit. Chocolate Diesel x Sisdub sounds simple. Consider, then, that Chocolate Diesel is Chocolate Trip (which is ((Chocolate Thai x Indigo Diamond) x (Indigo Diamond x Chocolate Thai)) crossed with Sour Diesel. That’s only one half of the genetic equation, which seems more like a quadratic equation. I failed Algebra 101 three times in high school.

The smell of diesel is there, but there’s also enough chem in there to give it something resembling glue. What’s notably absent are the chocolate notes, instead it’s more of a stale coffee you’d get from a Starbucks cup discarded to a passenger-side car floor. What I keep coming back to is the body, with pointier calyxes that fail to round off like Chem Dawg or Sour Diesel. It’s a Christmas tree, but stripped of the bulbous ornaments.


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I’m researching for an upcoming interview, my browser filled with a daunting collection of unread tabs, playing whack-a-mole with my digital neurosis. Inbox went up? Better click on over to Gmail. A big red “1” on my Facebook? Have to check it before it gets to “2”. Everything is covered, so everything suffers a little bit. I need to self-medicate.

Two hits in, I pause. Hybrid can be a deceiving term, and every indication initially is that I’m in for a sativa head trip that will keep me up until they no longer bother airing infomercials. Gorilla Glue #4 starts as a quasi-focused high, temporarily turning me into a city horse with blinders on that’s a little too concerned about what’s happening on the periphery. I’m working, but I’m also keenly aware of each cycle the dishwasher goes through. Somewhere around rinse, it all slows down.

For the next hour and a half, I forget the internet and commune with my interviewee’s book in a way that seldom happens for me anymore. Too often, I’m reading ESPN for 10 minutes, then bouncing to The Cannabist, then over to HitFix, remembering that my favorite music column is already out over at Grantland. That voracity stopped translating to books at some point. With a deep body stone to match a calmer concentration, though, I’m not fiddling with anything or checking tabs. I’m making connections to other interviews of his I’ve read without falling out of place with where I’m at. And while I’m feeling slight hunger pangs, I don’t have the desire to munch for the sake of munching. Sometimes, feeling engrossed is satiating enough.


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As a proud pessimist, believing the hype isn’t one of my strong suits. Yet, there’s a reason that Gorilla Glue #4 has taken home top hybrid honors at the 2014 Cannabis Cups in Michigan and Los Angeles. When you’re sampling so many strains, it takes something jarring, something so singular in effect to rise to the top. After self-medicating my entire adulthood, this undoubtedly qualifies.

 

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