Cannabis slang marking disappointing quality—weed that fails to deliver on appearance, potency, or value expectations.
Boof is what cannabis users reach for when they need to warn someone: this isn't worth your money. It's the word that separates disappointing product from what you actually came for—weed that looks wrong, hits weak, or just fails to deliver on its promise.
The term emerged organically in US cannabis communities during the 2010s, spreading through Reddit forums and stoner circles as legalization created new ways to compare quality openly. What makes boof interesting is how it appeared simultaneously across distant regions—California, Michigan, beyond—suggesting online cannabis spaces enabled rapid national spread that obscured any single origin point.
Boof exists because cannabis culture needed precise language for a specific frustration: the gap between what you paid for and what you got. It's more pointed than "mid-tier" and less dramatic than "garbage"—it's the exact register for "I'm disappointed and you should skip this." The word survived commercialization intact, adapting from street slang to dispensary reviews as users applied the same standards to legal retail.
One complexity: a completely different prison slang meaning exists (documented since the 1990s), but the cannabis usage shows no connection—either parallel evolution of the same sound or deliberate reappropriation with new meaning.