Multitrance Cannabis Incense Sticks, Dry Cannabis and Cookies

Is there actually cannabis in these?

Three sources in this supply chain give three different answers.

The trade description our supplier carries says the sticks combine the natural essence of dry cannabis leaves with complementary aromatic notes. A large Dutch retailer selling the same range goes further and states outright that the aroma contains a combination of dried cannabis leaves. And the manufacturer's own consumer-facing site says the sticks are for fragrance only, that cannabis incense is legal, and that it will not produce any intoxicating effect.

Those cannot all be describing the same thing. The wider incense market is unanimous in the other direction: cannabis-scented incense is a perfumery product built from fragrance oils, and the honest sellers say so plainly.

The reason this matters in Britain rather than being a pedantic aside is that cannabis leaf is a controlled substance here. The industrial hemp licensing regime covers seed and stalk, not leaf or flower. So a phrase like contains dried cannabis leaves is not something that can be left sitting on a UK product listing unexamined.

Our reading, and we are calling it a reading rather than a fact: Dry Cannabis is the name of the base scent, in exactly the same way Nag Champa is the name of a scent. The word essence in the trade copy is doing fragrance work, not ingredient work, and the manufacturer's own answer to its own customers is fragrance only. We have asked our supplier to confirm the composition in writing, and we will publish it here when it arrives.

In the meantime, nothing on this page suggests these contain a cannabinoid, produce an effect, or are anything other than scented incense. If that is not what you wanted, this is the wrong product rather than the wrong page.

What you actually get

Fifteen sticks in a box, hand-rolled in India using traditional methods, and sold by the manufacturer either as a single box or as a carton of six. Each stick burns for around thirty to forty five minutes.

That burn time is the most useful specification here and almost nobody publishes it. Thirty to forty five minutes is long for an incense stick. A standard supermarket stick often burns closer to twenty. It means one stick will comfortably scent a room for the length of a film, and it also means lighting one is a commitment rather than a quick freshen-up.

Fifteen sticks at that length is a lot of burning. If you light one a day, a single box lasts a fortnight.

We are still confirming with our supplier exactly which unit ships against this listing, so read the box and carton figures as the manufacturer's formats rather than as a promise about what arrives.

What Cookies actually smells like

The cannabis base is the constant across the whole range, and it is the honest part of the product. It is green, herbal, slightly resinous and a little peppery, closer to the smell of the plant material than to smoke. If you have ever walked past an open bag of dried herbs in a health food shop, you are most of the way there.

Cookies sits on top of that as a warm, sweet, vanilla and brown-sugar note. It is the bakery register rather than a chocolate one, and it is doing the same job the sweetness does in the brand's edible range: softening something herbal that would otherwise be quite austere.

The combination works better than it sounds. The sweetness stops the base being medicinal and the base stops the sweetness being sickly. It is one of the more balanced scents in the line, which is why it is one of the ones we carry.

Two honest notes on incense generally. First, the scent in the room is not the same as the scent from the box, and it is always stronger. Second, it lingers. A stick burned in a small room will still be noticeable the following morning, and in soft furnishings for considerably longer than that.

How to burn them without making a mess of it

Nobody in this market publishes any of this, on a product whose entire function is producing smoke indoors, so here it is.

Use a holder. An incense stick needs the ash to fall somewhere and the unburnt end to be supported at an angle, and a proper holder or ash catcher does both. Put it on a heat-resistant surface, well away from curtains, paper and anything else that will catch.

Light the coated tip, let it flame for a few seconds, then blow it out. What you want is a glowing ember and a thin thread of smoke, not a flame. If it goes out, relight it. If it flames again, blow it out again.

Ventilate the room. This is the part everyone skips. Incense smoke is smoke: it is fine particulate matter, and burning something for forty five minutes in a closed room is a lot of it. Crack a window or leave a door open. If anyone in the house has breathing difficulties, incense is a poor choice full stop, and we would rather say that than sell you a box you regret.

Never leave a burning stick unattended, and let it burn all the way down or extinguish it properly in water or sand rather than leaving it smouldering in a bin.

Store the rest of the box somewhere dry and sealed. Incense loses its scent to open air, and a box left open for a month is noticeably weaker than a fresh one.

The other scents we carry

Multitrance builds this category as two lines. The Dry Cannabis line puts a single top note over the cannabis base, and there are around fifteen of those. The Haze line does the same thing in a different house style, and there are around twelve.

We carry a selection rather than the whole thing. The table below is what is actually on our shelves, and it is worth knowing that one of our listings pools several scents as options while others sit alone.

Where this sits legally

It is an air freshener. That is the whole of it.

There is no cannabinoid content stated by anyone, so none of the CBD rules apply: not the one milligram per container test on controlled cannabinoids, not the Novel Foods regime, neither of which has anything to say about something you burn rather than consume.

What does apply is the point at the top of this page. If a cannabis-scented product genuinely contained cannabis leaf, that would be a controlled substance matter in the UK regardless of what it was sold as. Every credible source in this category, including the manufacturer's own consumer site, says these are fragrance products. We are satisfied with that and we have asked for it in writing anyway.

We sell it as eighteen plus, in common with everything else here. The manufacturer age-gates its own site. Several of the retailers selling this range do not.

Who should skip these

Anyone with asthma or another breathing condition, and anyone sharing a home with someone who has one. Burning anything indoors for forty five minutes produces a lot of smoke, and no scent is worth that.

Anyone expecting a cannabinoid. There is none, and if that is what you came for the rest of this shop is a better place to look.

Anyone who dislikes strong lingering smells. Incense does not fade politely, it moves into the curtains.

And anyone who wanted the cannabis smell without the sweetness. Cookies is the sweeter end of the range, and the plain Dry Cannabis Leaves scent is the one that gives you the base on its own.