Your Cannabis (Zoom) Happy Hour

There are few things better than rolling a joint with your friends, passing it around and just chilling while listening to music or watching Tik Toks. It creates an atmosphere of openness and fosters camaraderie. A little bit of this comes from being high, but mostly it comes from just spending time together. It takes time to choose your weed, roll the joint, and then puff-puff-pass.

In the age of social distancing you can still smoke with your friends while being a good citizen by using a video chat platform. Because of the rise in video calls either for business or personal reasons, many platforms are now offering free limited versions of their services.

Zoom offers free 40-minute meetings for up to 100 participants for free. For some that might work, but for most that’s not quite long enough. Other options include Google Duo, Skype, FaceTime, or Microsoft Teams. Choose your platform, and make sure your friends have access to a computer and a reliable internet connection. Schedule a time to hop on and prep for your smoke session.

Zoom: America’s New Favorite Video Chat Service

If you’re using Zoom, it’s free to sign up and only the meeting host needs to have an account. Go to the Zoom website on your favorite internet browser and create an account. Download the app. From there, you can choose to schedule a meeting in the future or to start a meeting right now. For a future meeting, choose “Schedule” and choose a date and time. Zoom will generate a link to the meeting which you can email to your friends. If you choose to start a meeting in the moment, choose “New Meeting” and you can add your participants then.

Once you’ve collaborated with your friends on a time, roll up your favorite strain and prep your lighter and a beverage and snacks. You might be here for a while. Start your J session and make sure you’re sharing your video and your mic is unmuted.

If you’d rather have your J session on the beach or on the Golden Gate Bridge, click the arrow next to the video camera icon and click “Choose Virtual Background.” You can’t go wrong with one of these five Zoom backgrounds for stoners. 

Once you’ve chosen your virtual meeting place, if you want to see all your participants, choose “Gallery View” from the upper right corner of the screen. With this view, you can see up to 49 participants. Once all of you have chosen this view, you can spark up your joints. Obviously you can just smoke together, or you can make things interesting by “passing” your joint from screen to screen. Start in the bottom right corner. That person takes a hit (or two) and passes it to the person on the left. That person reaches across to the right of their screen and “takes” the joint. Continue until you’ve made it all the way around your screen. You might have to take a few sneaky hits of your own joint to keep it lit!