About two-and-a-half years ago I wrote an article entitled “The Danger of Dabs.” It got me more hate mail than just about anything I’ve written, presumably from the 710 crowd reading the title only and thinking I was vilifying the cannabis concentrate itself. Had they continued reading, they would have reached the point, which was this:
With dabs your local action news team gets to do a marijuana story that shows crack pipe torches used on sticky heroin-looking goo made from a process that blows up like meth labs. The danger of dabs isn’t so much physical as it is a public relations nightmare.
Lately, it hasn’t just been the “local action news team,” it’s been one of the big four national networks and the Associated Press. ABC News had done many stories of the phenomenon of residential explosions from home butane hash oil (BHO) manufacture gone wrong. Their latest reprint of an AP story, “Hash Oil Explosions Rise With Legalized Marijuana,” offers some alarming statistics.
Referring to marijuana concentrate as “the drug’s intoxicating oil,” the story notes Colorado’s burn center treated one victim of a BHO explosion in 2012, 11 in 2013, and just four months into 2013 they’ve treated 10 people, on pace for 30 by years’ end. Firefighters say they’ve responded to 31 BHO explosions in 2014, compared to 11 for all of last year.
