For the past hundred or so years, maintaining a cannabis habit has been a private affair. Consuming a substance deemed illegal in most parts of the world has long required discreet apparatus – that ideally leaves no trace but ash.
As time has progressed – through the rise of 1960s counterculture and changes in medical legislation in the decades after – the stigma around the plant has waned enough for an ancillary realm of accessories to emerge. These include a sea of intricate, handmade borosilicate glass goods, typically made for stoners, by stoners: pipes in an array of shapes and finishes; bongs (water pipes) of every height, with complex filters and percolators for a smoother smoke; assortments of small, stubby chillums (for a single inhale or two).
That sea was aesthetically limited, though: either resembling scientific beakers or embodying the psychedelic colours and bulbous shapes associated with the hippie movement. And it remained that way until the mid-2010s, when parts of north America – including Canada, Colorado and the entire West Coast of the United States – started legalising cannabis for anyone over 21.
It’s not that the laws included support for the production of more interesting accessories, but rather that the trickle of legalisation is making it safer and less stigmatising for consumers and craftspeople to explore this space. It’s increasingly socially acceptable to own cannabis accessories and, by the look of the latest trends, that freedom is being celebrated. We’re done hiding our habits; today’s tools are made to be seen. They are beautiful, interesting, carefully made and expensive pieces meant to double both as functional objects and art. Squiggly, abstract pipes by glass artist Nicole Berger, a.k.a. Coldberger, are now sold in the Corning Museum of Glass’s shop. Her lampwork pieces reimagine how we’re used to seeing pipes work, playing with our expectations of where we should inhale and where we pack the weed.