By Jake The Professor

The El Dorado is the most luxurious, and most expensive legal cannabis product ever produced.  Crafted by Ariel Payopay, owner of Leira, the El Dorado is a 24 Karat Gold cannabis cigar – or Cannagar.  At $10,000 a pop, this high-end cannabis experience is perfect for the special occasion – Weddings, Bar Mitzvah’s and the launching of your new yacht.

Made with a full ounce of premium Clean Green cannabis, El Dorado is thinly-wrapped with 3 Grams of award winning Polar Icetracts — organically grown, mechanically extracted ice Hash pressed into pure rosin. This assembly is set aside to cure in a humidor for weeks. Meanwhile the larger outer cannabis leaves that will wrap this creation are carefully selected without blemish. At the proper time these selected leaves are strategically placed and carefully wrapped around the now cured cannabis base that is wrapped around a skewer while being produced.

This method leaves a perfectly round whole in the center of this crafted masterpiece.  Now, almost complete this piece is placed back into the humidor for several more weeks until perfectly cured through and through. The El Dorado is now ready for the finial wrap. 24 Karat Gold leaf is carefully wrapped around the cured Cannagar, a final touch that makes the El Dorado the very best, and most expensive cannabis product ever created.

It was not too long ago when something like the El Dorado could not even be dreamed of in our wildest stoner fantasies.  Back in the day, when we wanted to roll a special “cigar,” we would use a couple of yellow Zig-Zag wheat straw rolling papers stuck together. In 1972, as an 8^th Grader at Kempsville Jr. High, I was introduced to my first nickel bag of weed. I scored it from a classmate’s older brother. The pot I purchased was a combination of Mexican “brick weed” with a fair amount of oregano probably mixed in. Yes, oregano! It’s not just folklore.

Mexican Brick weed — with plenty of seeds and sticks and stems included — was the most common type of marijuana you would see back in those days. In addition to its poor quality, our weed may or may not have been sprayed with Paraquat, the very poisonous non-selective herbicide the federal government used to kill pot fields in Mexico in an attempt to eradicate marijuana before it got imported to the states. Mexican farmers would harvest the weed and sell it anyway, and so that sometimes made it into our baggies as well. It may have contained toxins, but at least the weed back then was cheap. You could buy a one-finger “nickel bag” for 5 bucks or a two-finger “dime bag” for a ten spot. There was something called a “lid” for $15 – three-fingers inside your folded over Glad sandwich bag.

Early on we didn’t really know or understand the proper botanical names like cannabis Indica or Cannabis Sativa. We only concerned ourselves with amount of seeds and the earthy smell we quickly began to relate to how stoned it made us. We would occasionally get access to better strains — Acapulco Gold or Panama Red — and after a few years, the market started to see the appearance of pot that came from Columbia. This South American iconic weed could be purchased for $35 per ounce — pretty expensive at that time, but most people agreed it was worth it.

Columbian weed still had plenty of seeds, but the earthy aroma and serious intoxicating effects, made old Mexican Brick weed second rate schwag. With better marijuana came more precise measurements.  The finger system was soon replaced with more scales, and soon we all became expert on the metric system. Around 1978, a new kind of cannabis occasionally became available. Sinsemilla, Spanish for seedless, was green and not brown and cost $100 per ounce or more.  Not having to remove the seeds before you smoked it was nice, but it was expensive and in short supply.

Our cannabis community has grown much in knowledgeable and sophisticated in the methods of production, processing and consumption of our favorite plant over the years.  We have seen domesticity grown cannabis explode in popularity and potency. We’ve seen indoor grow operations create an environment that fostered the cultivation of several superior strains of cannabis. Cannabis that originally came from the Hindu Kush regions or perhaps South America or Jamaica were brought here to America, and we grew and cross bred these strains until we produced the very best.

With the release of the Leira El Dorado Cannagar, we are at the zenith of cannabis quality and customer satisfaction.  If you are ever lucky enough to have El Dorado passed in your direction, I hope that you savior every moment.  As you take a slow draw, I encourage you to enjoy the opulence and smooth flavor and think about the first time you smoked weed, and celebrate just how far we’ve come.