You’d be surprised how many patients scoop a random glob of salve onto their knee and wonder why Tuesday’s relief felt different from Saturday’s — and it almost always comes back to never learning how many grams in an ounce in the first place.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you at your first dispensary visit: knowing how many grams in an ounce — that’s 28.35 grams, by the way — isn’t just trivia for people buying flower. It’s the backbone of every smart portioning decision you’ll make with topical salves, too. When you buy a one-ounce jar of cannabis-infused salve, you’re working with roughly 28 grams of product. If you don’t break that down into consistent doses, you’ll burn through your jar unevenly and get wildly different results from one application to the next. That’s frustrating, and honestly, it’s expensive.

We see this all the time at Green Legacy. A patient from Dupont Circle will come in saying their salve “stopped working” after a week. Nine times out of ten, they started with conservative little dabs, got impatient, and started slathering on three times as much — which isn’t how cannabinoid absorption through the skin actually works. Our staff walks every patient through basic weed measurements and portioning so they can stretch their purchase and keep their relief steady. It’s one of those small conversations that makes a huge difference in someone’s quality of life.

I’ll never forget a retired letter carrier — a regular who lives over near Shaw — who’d been dealing with arthritis in both hands for years. She told me she’d been eyeballing her salve amounts and genuinely thought the product was inconsistent batch to batch. We sat down together, grabbed a tiny kitchen scale, and portioned her jar into daily doses right there at the counter. Two weeks later she came back grinning and said it was the first time she’d had truly even relief, day after day. That’s the kind of moment that reminds you why the boring math stuff actually matters.