With a Huff and a Puff... Hash Oil Explosions

Houses and motels, basements, apartments, downtown, Colorado, Illinois, Florida… Your kitchen and your space is used for making hash. Extracting hash oil, that is. THC. Cannabinoids – there, just let that word sink in for a moment…

It was that legalization legislation of 2012. You’re not just ok to smoke pot; you can process and sell it, too. American innovation. Like brewing beer at home. Or making little bitty Etsy crafty stuff.

“The explosions occur as people pump butane fuel through a tube packed with raw marijuana plants to draw out the psychoactive ingredient tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, producing a golden, highly potent concentrate that people sometimes call honey oil, earwax or shatter. The process can fill a room with volatile butane vapors that can be ignited by an errant spark or flame.”

Colorado had 32 of these explosions in 2014. No one was killed, as of Jan 2015. People claim they were cooking (not entirely false), and the law doesn’t quite know where to take it, either. Or at least not consistently. People go up for arson (pun subconscious; left in).

And the people get burned. Their homes or workspaces end up with the walls bulging out from the explosions, and the people who were inside take the skin off their arms and legs.

“O'Connor said the blast was so powerful that it blew the roof off the structure, hurled an aluminum roll-up garage door across the street and displaced all four walls, throwing one of them 20 feet.”

It’s the butane element that does it, both for the fireballs and for the law. You can buy, smoke, tinker with and sell cannabis, but you can’t do the whole manufacturing thing at home where it’s uncontrolled and dangerous. It’s a semantics law, as it always is with drugs. Legal highs aren’t actually legal; they’re sold as fertilizer or whatever, even though they come in handy little dosage sized bottles. And the law’s doing its version in the states with making pot at home. It’s not the pot that’s illegal; it’s using all that butane when you’re residential.

A couple who totalled their home in Colorado in May last year were, initially at least, charged with “first-degree arson, reckless endangerment and child abuse.” Another guy who blew up his family home has a four year prison sentence for arson, dealing and child abuse, and his children have been adopted by their grandparents.

The vocabulary’s all about reckless endangerment; not making drugs. Same ends, different means. You are allowed to ‘process’ cannabis, but you’re not allowed to ‘manufacture’ it. As George Carlin said about censorship: “You can prick your finger but you sure as hell can’t finger your prick.”

The defence (both the line and the lawyer) of a guy in Colorado who blew up his home:

““There are thousands of people in Colorado who are doing this,” Mr. Corry said in an interview. “I view this as the equivalent of frying turkey for Thanksgiving. Someone spills the oil, and there’s an explosion. It’s unfortunate, but it’s not a felony crime.””

In short, because of the legal weed thing, these explosions should, the advocates say, be treated as accidents, not crimes.

Don’t get it wrong, either. Hash oil is the strong stuff. This is not about being casual, usage and dosage wise. Psychoactively, it’s at 80-90% to regular weed’s 15-18%. It’s got a whack to it, so you’ll only need a tiny taste. Supposedly that’s why smoking it is called dabbing. Having a [little] dab.

And because you have to oh so carefully cook the butane out of the end product before you can consume, you end up with a very hard, glassy like substance. This means that you also have to get pretty hardcore to get your use out of it:

“To smoke dabs, you need concentrate ("shatter"or its softer cousin, "earwax"), a small, sturdy pick, a specially crafted bong and a blowtorch.

You twirl a dab of the concentrate onto the pick, apply a blowtorch that looks like it belongs in an auto mechanic's shop to the bowl of the bong until it's glowing hot, then touch the dab to a nail head inside the bowl. The dab vaporizes instantaneously and the user sucks up the smoke—almost pure THC.”

Those crazy cats, the adult heads in South FLA, contextualize their own experience with talk about professional stoners (professional in terms of having middle class pro jobs in law and medicine, and a healthy weed habit). Everyone does it: weed. Dabs, hash oil: less so. But the FLA heads, living in dirty and outdated apartment sleaze and watching the white collars smoke the same thing in prime real estate, they do it. They say a dab is equivalent to doing a bowl. It takes a lot of weed and conspicuous equipment. Vice found a guy pressing it in a pair of hair straighteners, and recommended t-shirt presses for quantity. Butane stays the most common extraction method, though. Kids take the final product to high school (plus middle school, plus elementary) in lip balm containers. And e-cigarettes are a good, odourless way of enjoying it. Junior only gets caught when or if he or she passes out in class.

It's a big distinction though, isn’t it? I mean, it’s a cherry on the middle class free spirited teen cake to add a little weed or coke to your high school or college experience, or career when you get older. You get the house, the grades, the fun first jobs, the car, the family knitted together for all the extracurricular bliss they can afford to provide, and when you wanna get loose you can add a little illicit stuff because you’re that well-read when it comes to knowing the best way to party. But the folks in the scuzzy homes cooking it up on the supply side – they look different, right? They are somehow wrong, dirty, loserville and illegal, while the kids and the people at the party smoking it are just having fun. 

“It’s probably one of the greatest days of my life,” said Robert Wylie, who the kids call Papa. “There’s a light in them that’s just wonderful.”

CBS Denver, ‘Children Who Survived Hash Oil Explosion at Home Officially Adopted By Grandparents.‘