You spent good money on that flower — and if you don’t know how many grams in an ounce you’re actually working with, you’ve got no real way to track what’s losing potency in that nightstand drawer.

Here’s the thing most people get wrong about cannabis storage: they focus on the container but forget about the math. Knowing how many grams in an ounce — that’s 28.35 grams, by the way — isn’t just trivia for your next dinner party in Adams Morgan. It’s the foundation for understanding exactly how much flower you’re buying, how fast you’re using it, and (this is the big one) how long it’s sitting around degrading before you finish it. Most DC medical cannabis patients we talk to are buying in eighth or quarter increments without ever thinking about shelf life relative to their consumption rate. That’s where potency loss sneaks in.

At Green Legacy, we walk patients through this all the time — especially folks who are newer to the DC medical cannabis program. We’ll literally pull out a scale and show you what a gram looks like versus an eighth versus a quarter. It’s not condescending; it’s practical. Because once you can eyeball your weed measurements and connect them to how many days of medicine each size represents for you personally, you start making way smarter purchasing and storage decisions. If you’ve got questions before you come in, our FAQ page covers a lot of the basics.

I had a patient last spring — a retired teacher from Dupont Circle — who’d been buying a full ounce every month to save money per gram. Smart move on paper. The problem? She was a low-dose patient using maybe a gram every three days. By the time she got to the last quarter of that ounce, the flower had been sitting in a plastic bag on her kitchen counter for three weeks. She described it as “crunchy and flavorless.” We helped her switch to buying quarters every two weeks and storing them properly, and she told us it felt like a completely different product. Same strain. Same batch. Just better storage math.