The first thing you need to do is make sure that you are smoking weed grown in a regulated marketplace or are doing a good job of growing your own. This means that if you live anywhere except for Colorado, DO NOT SMOKE WEED unless you grow it yourself.
I'm serious. I smoked street weed for thirty years and after finding myself unemployed, I started growing and selling weed three years ago during the Colorado Green Rush. I meticulously follow Colorado law while saying "Fuck the Feds" every morning as I head off to work. After about three months in the Wild West period of the Green Rush, I started to feel like Upton Sinclair in a Chicago meatpacking plant.
After watching an "organic" grower spray his crop with Bayer Tree and Shrub two weeks before harvest, I realized weed needed to be regulated. Shortly thereafter, the Colorado Legislature and Governor Ritter passed HB1284 and the first regulated marijuana marketplace in the United States was born.
There is a lot about the Colorado Medical Marijuana Enforcement Division that is Kafkaesque, but the framework necessary to deliver safe, high quality cannabis to customers is in the regulations promulgated by the MMED in 2011. It's not perfect, but it's a start.
Now that you have moved to Colorado, you can get your recommendation and start looking for a high quality Medical Marijuana Center. For $60.00, a doctor will give you a recomendation and you are on your way.
I'd start in Boulder. The competition is fierce and the prices are currently $150-$275 an ounce plus tax depending on quality. Soil or hydro matters less than you think. Instead focus on the strains they have and ask the Budtender questions about the methods that they used to grow. Ask about guest strains and in house strains. Ask for the pesticide list used in the garden. If the Budtender tells you only OMRI certified pesticides are used, you have gotten the best answer. Ask to see the buds under a scope. Make sure the trichomes are cloudy when you look at the scope before you buy. Cloudy trichomes with a touch of amber mean your grower timed the harvest right. Look for Centers that do not carry or rarely carry guest strains. Most centers that can supply their own shelves have a basic handle on their garden and feel that another gardens product would hurt the quality of their shelf.
Once you have a good center, you will be able to smoke the very best cannabis that has ever been grown.
Buy a gram of few different varieties. Currently there are 3873 named varieties and it can be a daunting task to figure out what you want to smoke. Ask the budtender for a gram of their best indica, best hybrid, and best Sativa. For about $30.00 you'll be able to evaluate the Center.
A good sativa will give you an enjoyable head high without an edgy feel. If the grower has let the plant finish properly, you will experience a euphoric feeling. Think joy and laughter. A racing heart beat, paranoia, and tunnel vision are all a result of an early harvest. Early sativas are a very unpleasant smoke for almost everyone and have turned more folks off to weed than anything else.
A good indica will lock you to the couch and make any pain you have seem unimportant. If your tolerance is low, you will be asleep in 30 minutes after you have eaten half of the food in your refrigerator. Early harvest of indicas results in the same negative effects found with early sativas.
A good hybrid will give some pleasant combination of the sativa and indica effects. Once again, early harvest will ruin the effect.
You should not cough on the inhale. Any harshness is the result of a poor flush or a poor drying and curing process. If you experience a biting, bitter taste on the tip of your tongue or a sore throat, the crop was not flushed properly or improperly treated with pesticides. The ash should be white/gray and light. A black mass in the bottom of your bowl or a joint that won't burn and has a hard black tip are signs that the salts were not flushed from your buds. Unfortunately, you won't know until you have smoked it.
Flushing cannabis of excess salts results in a dramatic improvement in taste. Hydro growers should flush their crop 8-14 days depending on variety. The best soil growers usually begin cutting back on fertilizers two weeks into flowering. Yield is negatively impacted but taste, smell and potency improve.
Now for a nice Kosher Kush joint.