I stood in a dispensary in Sheridan last fall looking at a shelf with fourteen different topical products and felt the same thing I feel at the feed store when there are nine brands of mineral supplement and the price range goes from twelve dollars to forty-eight dollars for what looks like the same bucket of powder. The labels were busy. The jars were handsome. None of it told me what I needed to know.

I have been using cannabis topicals on my back and hands for five years now. I've bought products that worked and products that were twenty-eight dollars' worth of fancy lotion. The difference between them wasn't obvious from the packaging. It took trial and money and a few jars that ended up under the bathroom sink with the other things that didn't deliver.

Here's what I've learned, evaluated the same way I evaluate fence wire and cattle feed: by what it does, what it costs per use, and whether it holds up under actual conditions.

Milligrams per application, not per container. This is the first thing. A jar says 500mg on the label and a man thinks that's a lot. But if the jar holds four ounces and a single application for a lower back takes a quarter-ounce, that's sixteen applications at about 31 milligrams each. Another jar says 1000mg for twice the price but holds eight ounces, and the math comes out the same. I started writing it down — total milligrams divided by the number of applications I actually get from the jar. That's the real number. Everything else is packaging.

Texture matters for working hands. Some topicals are creamy, like hand lotion. Those are fine for someone who puts it on and sits at a desk. A man who applies a topical at 4:30 AM and then handles halter ropes, gate latches, and hay twine needs something that absorbs in under five minutes and doesn't leave his hands slick. The thicker salves and balms work better for this. They absorb slower but they don't leave a film. I've grabbed a wet calf with lotion-hands. Once.

Full-spectrum means the whole plant went in. A budtender in Casper explained this to me in plain language. Full-spectrum topical uses an extract with all the compounds from the plant. Isolate topical uses just the THC or just the CBD, separated out. In my experience — and this is five years of one man's experience, not a laboratory — the full-spectrum salve works better on the arthritic hands. The isolate CBD cream I tried for a month did something, but less. The full-spectrum brought more relief in the same fifteen-minute window. Whether that's the “entourage effect” the budtender mentioned or something else, the hands don't care about the explanation. They care about closing around a pair of pliers at 5 AM in January.

How long relief lasts is the other real number. The topical I use now gives me roughly four hours of reduced stiffness in the hands and a looser lower back. Some products I tried gave two hours. One expensive one gave maybe ninety minutes. Four hours means I apply twice on a hard day — dawn and midday. Two hours means four applications, which burns through the jar twice as fast and doubles the real cost.

Price per day of actual use. The salve I buy costs forty-five dollars and lasts about three weeks at two applications on heavy work days, one on lighter days. Call it roughly two dollars a day in spring, a dollar fifty in summer. The twenty-eight-dollar jar that lasted nine days cost three dollars a day and worked half as well. Cheap is not what's on the sticker. Cheap is what it costs to get through the day.

A few things that don't matter as much as the labels suggest: scent, organic certification, and the design of the container. My salve smells like a plant. That's fine. I smell like a horse and diesel fuel most of the day anyway.

What I look for now is simple. High milligrams per application. Full-spectrum. A texture that lets me use my hands after I apply it. And a track record — I buy the same jar from the same company because it works and I've stopped experimenting. The same reason I buy the same brand of fence staples.

There's no trick to it. Just arithmetic and paying attention.