...

I hate to be blunt but this is ignorant and wrong. Most carts I see marketed as live resin these days are nothing more than a mix of HTE and distillate, no live resin to be found. They call them "live" in this case because the terps are from a "live harvest," which is dumb and misleading. In addition to this, I have also seen mixes of live resin and distillate; you get the terp profile from the live resin, but the distillate allows it to vape more uniformly. Thing is though, none of these carts I described are necessarily bad -- HTE + distillate has been popular for a long time and it's what I prefer assuming you start with some nice, clean distillate and use cannabis derived terpenes. It's all just misleading and most often the end user truly doesn't care as long as they're getting the desired effects.

Lastly, you absolutely can make carts out of live resin and they do still exist, but it's trickier to do so. Typically a real, properly made live resin cart will look either a little bit cloudy or it'll have super tiny THCA crystals that you can see floating uniformly throughout when looked at under direct sunlight. A lot of producers will also decarb their live resin and at this point it can be visually indistinguishable from distillate (eg a clear, uniform sappy liquid), but it's also not truly live resin at that point to me; that's really a matter of opinion though.

Anyway, I hate to be rude and go on like this, but I just don't think you really understand this topic as well as you're putting off and I think that's VERY damaging in a harm reduction forum. That being said, I can at least agree that nobody should trust black market carts. I wouldn't even trust sourcing your own distillate because of issues like pesticides. If you live in an illegal state, think about switching to delta 8 for the time being. Take your health seriously.

Source: I make carts