# Brick weed

> Brick weed is seeded, lower-grade cannabis pressed into dense blocks for smuggling and cheap sale, historically the bulk of imported cannabis.

- Canonical: https://genetixbay.com/knowledge/glossary/brick-weed.html
- Also written: brick, brickweed, compressed, compressed weed, brick schwag, pressed weed
- Glossary category: Grower slang and culture · Evidence: Supported
- Status: Draft: awaiting expert review · Updated: 2026-10-31
- Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), attribute "GenetixBay cannabis glossary"

Brick weed is cannabis compressed into hard blocks, typically including leaf, stem and seed, and dried and stored with little care. It was the standard form of imported cannabis in North America for decades.

## In practice

Brick [looks](https://genetixbay.com/knowledge/glossary/bag-appeal.md) flat, brown and crushed, often smells of hay or must, and is full of seeds and stems. Compression ruptures [trichome heads](https://genetixbay.com/knowledge/glossary/trichome-heads.md), and long, warm, poorly sealed storage oxidises [THC](https://genetixbay.com/knowledge/glossary/thc.md) toward [CBN](https://genetixbay.com/knowledge/glossary/cbn.md) and evaporates [terpenes](https://genetixbay.com/knowledge/glossary/terpene.md). By the time it was sold, brick had lost much of whatever it started with.

## Don't confuse with

- **Sinsemilla**: seedless, carefully dried flower.
- **Pressed hash**: compressed resin, a deliberate concentrate rather than a smuggling shortcut.
- **Mids**: middle-grade loose flower.

## Myth check

"Old weed was weak, so modern genetics must be much stronger." GenetixBay position (*Supported*): the numbers mislead. Government monitoring series tested largely seized commercial brick and mixed material (leaf, seed, stem) rather than [sinsemilla](https://genetixbay.com/knowledge/glossary/sinsemilla.md). Old samples sat degrading in storage, methods and [sampling](https://genetixbay.com/knowledge/glossary/homogenisation.md) changed, and the seizures were not representative (ElSohly et al. 2016 discusses the series). Source regions also had little reason to export their best sensi when the import market paid for cheap brick. The genetics did not suddenly change; growing technique and the material sampled did. See [old cannabis was not weak](https://genetixbay.com/knowledge/genetics-history/old-cannabis-was-not-weak.md).

## Related terms

[Sinsemilla](https://genetixbay.com/knowledge/glossary/sinsemilla.md), [Mids](https://genetixbay.com/knowledge/glossary/mids.md), [Shake](https://genetixbay.com/knowledge/glossary/shake.md), [Potency testing](https://genetixbay.com/knowledge/glossary/potency-testing.md)

## Read more

- [Old cannabis wasn't weak: the "so much stronger than 20 years ago" myth](https://genetixbay.com/knowledge/genetics-history/old-cannabis-was-not-weak.md)

## Sources

1. ElSohly MA, Mehmedic Z, Foster S, Gon C, Chandra S, Church JC. 2016. Changes in cannabis potency over the last 2 decades (1995-2014): analysis of current data in the United States. Biological Psychiatry 79(7):613-619. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2016.01.004
2. Clarke RC, Merlin MD. 2013. Cannabis: Evolution and Ethnobotany. University of California Press.