OK- So I've been having problems with this recipe from the start as some of you may know, and I've had some success as well. In order to better explain this to some others who may be confused, I came up with this analogy.

Making these capsules work can be compared to making yourself a cup of coffee in the morning. Just like you dissolve sugar into your coffee, you are trying to dissolve THC into your liquid oil. It's important to remember that this is only a PHYSICAL change and not a chemical reaction... Sure, the heat from the crock pot or oven or whatever may act as a catalyst to complete the curing process, and thereby complete some incomplete metabolism of the psychoactive components (of your weed) along the way, but for purposes of example, we're going to ignore that effect.

Secondly, it is important to understand why we use oil in the first place: Everything you eat first goes to your stomach. DUH. From there, solids go to the intestines, and liquids go to the liver. When you take one of these pills, you must not think of yourself as "eating" the THC, but rather "drinking" it. Since the melting point of coconut oil is 70F, your body heat is more than enough to melt it shortly after entry, so it's in liquid state and goes to the liver and not the colon. Remember, we're trying to get as much of the THC in your weed as possible to dissolve into the oil so that it goes to the liver ad NOT the intestines. If you read flames explanation, the reason is because the Liver not the stomach, small intestine, or colon, metabolizes the THC differently than the digestive track does, and actually does change the THC chemically. Marinol/dronabinnol works almost exactly the same way BTW, which is why it's not uncommon to see people who take it legitimately to either use less or claim they can't use it because it gets them too high, even though the dosing amount per pill is rather small. For that (the explanation about the liver) reason, you should consider any THC that doesn't dissolve in the oil to be wasted since it's not concentrated enough to have much effect at all once it goes to the intestines.

Getting back to the coffee cup analogy. When you make a cup of coffee, you can add sugar to it, but if you keep adding sugar to the coffee, you will reach a point where it doesn't matter how hot the coffee is, you simply can't melt any more sugar in the coffee- it'll just stay slushy at the bottom. Once you've reached this point it doesn't matter how much you stir or how hot you get your mix. It simply won't absorb any more sugar unless you add more coffee first. This is because you have reached the maximum point of solution, where the coffee physically can't absorb any more. By definition it is saturated.

If you think of the THC in the weed as the sugar, and the oil as the coffee, this is the point you want to arrive at: Oil at 100% saturation, so as to ensure every gram of oil contains as much activated THC as it possibly can, and at the same time, you want as little THC remaining possible left in the powdered weed, since the powdered weed will be digested and not metabolized by the liver, and can therefore be assumed as having the lowest contributing factor. Getting a standardized figure for exactly how much weed to use with how much oil is almost impossible because we're definitely not all using the same grade weed and most of us can't even get a bag of the same stuff twice in a row... Hash would be better for this recipe because it has a high THC content to begin with, but in my part of the country at least, it's almost impossible to find...

Anyway- the problem with reaching 100%THC saturation in your oil, without leaving lots of THC behind in your weed, is that you won't be able to tell when you've achieved these results by any physical means. Mobyone suggested using just enough oil to barely cover the weed, and the idea worked for me but I didn't save any weed. I'm guessing that I was able to saturate the oil I used 100% because there was plenty of wasted THC left behind in the powdered weed as well.This would explain why I still got REALLY high but didn't save much weed over smoking. The moral of the story here is that this recipe WILL work when executed with care and control, BUT in order to start seeing the 'savings' anyone serious enough to do this on a regular basis will have to do a substantial amount of tweaking to get the 'magic formula' for them.

Another physical phenomenon that no one in this thread has given any consideration to is the property known as 'diffusion.' Remember- the cooking portion of this exercise is PHYSICAL SCIENCE not chemistry. The chemistry which drives this thing takes place in your liver, not in the kitchen. Remember that. Anyway, diffusion refers to the natural tendency of things to transition from the point of greatest concentration to a state of concentration equilibrium on their own. Examples include:

Putting a drop of food coloring in a glass and not stirring it: the color will eventually mix itself
Leaving a jar of scented oil open on a counter top until the whole room smells (ever heard of a 'reed diffuser'?)
and so on...

So based on that physical property, there is bound to be some THC left in your weed no matter what because according to the properties of diffusion, the THC is in it's greatest concentration while it is in the ground plant material, and is 'diffusing' into the oil from the weed in order to reach a concentration equilibrium. By equilibrium what is meant is that if you sample a regulation amount of the mix, you should have he same potency of THC per weight, no matter whether you sample a section that is mostly oil, or has lots of powdered weed ground up in it. Or in other words, even if you could calculate exactly how many micrograms of THC you were starting with, and you were able to do the math and figure out how much oil to use in order to saturate that amount of oil 100% with that amount of THC, you still won' get the oil 100% saturated because some THC will need to stay in the weed in order to satisfy the rules of diffusion and reaching the so called equilibrium, where the concentration of THC throughout the homogeneous mix MUST be the same no matter which portion of the mix you sample. This SUCKS because some of the THC, by definition, HAS to stay trapped in the weed, where it will inevitably be wasted because it is digested and NOT metabolized by the liver where we want it to be.

In order to express this concept a little more clearly- imagine if weed was legal and Walgreen's was renamed Allgreens lol. So anyway you go down to your local pharmacy and buy a gram of this oil, which has already been saturated 100% with activated THC- with all the powdered weed removed. If you put that oil in a container in a crock pot, and added ground commercial HEMP (with NO THC content), and try to work this recipe in REVERSE you will probably slowly dissolve a small amount of your THC from the oil into the plant material in order to satisfy the rules of equilibrium- equal concentration THROUGHOUT a homogeneous mix. In theory, you could strain off the ground hemp material, dry it, smoke it, and get high. This is just an example for purposes of clarity to explain the physics at play here a little better, so don't try it. What I'm trying to say is that you'll never remove 100% of your THC from your weed, but you do need to figure out the point at which you're getting diminishing returns by adding more oil, and stop adding oil at THAT point.

Think of this like a teabag- you can make a cup of tea with it, but if you save it, you can make a second cup of weak tea because it's impossible to dissolve all of the tea components into the water because of equilibrium. The first cup of tea will be the strongest, but each cup brewed from the same bag thereafter will be logarithmically weaker than the previous cup. It's not a direct relation. I'm working on another theory that you can strain the weed particles back out of the oil and make a second batch from the same weed that will be as strong as the first batch by using less oil. Think of the teabag again- you can brew a strong cup of tea the first time, but you can make tea with the reused bag that's almost as strong as the original tea by using less water the second time... In order to do this with powdered weed, the project may require expensive sophisticated filtration equipment which would make the process impractical, but I'm hoping that understanding how it works will help everyone out in the first place... If there was a way to strain your ground wed back out of the oil without losing the oil, then re-cook the weed using 1/3 as much oil, I'd bet you could stretch your yields without much affect on potency, but technology does not allow us to perform that kind of filtration with any degree of efficiency so it'll have to stay a theory.

This whole project is best explained using the teabag analogy- you're trying to make the greatest quantity of the strongest tea possible from ONE teabag, but you don't know how potent the teabag is in the first place. I hope this helps others to understand what's going on here a little better, and doesn't serve to discourage or confuse. What I'm really trying to say is that anyone serious of this should experiment with a constant amount of the same weed, and a constant temperature and cook time, and vary the oil content to determine the ratio which will work for them. If you've read my other posts, I'm planning on doing this myself within the next month, but I'm strapped financially right now... Best of luck to those who are going to try this- don't give up! it's worth it in the end Also, if anyone here has a degree in chemistry or whatever and would care to clarify what I've said; my ears are wide open.

-Mark