Weed and lasers just seem to go together. Like weed and black light velour paintings. Or weed and peanut butter. Or weed and my friend’s 1995 Mitsubishi Eclipse. When you stop and really think about the pairing, you are simply left saying “nice.” And that’s exactly what I said the first time I fired up the Hitoki Saber. It’s a $299.99 bong powered by a laser and it’s expensive, but it is, again, a laser bong, and can one truly put a price on the delight of watching weed light up via a laser?
I don’t think I can.
The USB-C-powered Hitoki Saber doesn’t ask you to taste the laser. It doesn’t ask you to worry about the laser or even think about the laser. The laser is both functional and attractive. It is the heating element, which means, instead of holding a fire directly to flower and scorching your lungs and giving yourself a bong voice that makes you sound like Ted Levine, you can generally get a very smooth hit.
Everyone is impressed when you fire up the laser bong because, again, it is a bong, and it has a laser in it. Even the teetotalers in my life have admitted that it’s very neat, even if they have no desire to puff and pass. The laser appears like a bright blue beam of light, and the smoke that curls up around it is blue, too. You feel like you are in the future when you hit the laser bong. After a few hits, you will then feel like you are even more in the future because you are smoking a laser bong, and you’re probably high.
Prepping the laser bong for your journey is relatively easy. You pack the bowl, lock the big laser apparatus in place, and then fire a laser directly into the weed for 10 seconds. What results is a surprisingly smooth cloud that will get you high, wow anyone watching you fire it up, and cost you so much money.
The bowl is ceramic, and it gets sticky and full of weed detritus over time, so you have to periodically replace it. Hitoki sells three bowls, or “Ceramic Loading Chambers,” for $21.99. With regular enjoyment of the lasers and the bong, you can expect to replace a bowl every two to three months. The bowls are also tiny, and filling them with ground-up weed will make you feel like a person who does drugs, because you are. But what I really mean is it’s not as simple as an edible or a vape pen or even a larger bong where you can pack whole buds in. No, you have to grind up the weed and then carefully sprinkle it into the bowl, pack it, sprinkle more in, and pack it again.
Because it heats up via a very efficient and precise laser, you’re usually left with a ring of unsmoked weed around the edges of the bowl, so you’ll need to sometimes stir the bowl to get all the value out of the weed. I had to do that every three or so hits, and it only added to the feeling of doing some drugs. I don’t really want to be a person who has to keep multiple tools on the coffee table just to take a rip, but with the Hitoki, I had to do exactly that. But the hits themselves are extraordinarily smooth, and there’s a lot less stinkiness to smoking a laser bong versus a regular bong.
It’s also pretty hard to overdo it and smoke too much, which is very common with normal bongs. It lasts for about a month on a single charge and will warn you when it’s low on battery and needs a juice up with a red flash of its power button. Charging is as easy as plugging it into any USB-C charger, but you won’t be able to use it while it charges.
While you can use the Hitoki Saber with most bongs, you can also opt to spend $358.98 to get both the laser bong apparatus and a glass pipe built to work with it. That’s the route I went, and the pipe was solid and very easy to clean. It was also small enough that you could only really take one hit at a time. Everyone who sampled it agreed it was one of the nicer features, so if you’re already planning to spend $299.99 because it’s a laser bong, then do yourself a favor and save up the extra $58.99 for the glass pipe.
Now, at this point, you may be asking yourself why on earth you’d spend all that money when you can get a perfectly fine bong for a fraction of the price at any head shop or NYC bodega. And I need to reiterate that this is a laser bong. That is the appeal. The hits aren’t that much smoother than a vape like the $279 Crafty Plus or the $200 Pax 3, and the loading process is just as finicky. You really are just paying to have a bong that shoots a laser, and friend, that is okay. Because if you’re getting high, you might as well have a show.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/20/23500415/laser-bong-420-nice-hitoki-saber