EXPLOSIONS AND FIRES FROM THE PRODUCTION OF HONEY OIL FROM MARIHUANA PLANTS USING BUTANE
DENVER — When Colorado legalized marijuana two years ago, nobody was quite ready for the problem of exploding houses.
But
that is exactly what firefighters, courts and lawmakers across the
state are confronting these days: amateur marijuana alchemists who are
turning their kitchens and basements into “Breaking Bad”-style
laboratories, using flammable chemicals to extract potent drops of a
marijuana concentrate commonly called hash oil, and sometimes
accidentally blowing up their homes and lighting themselves on fire in
the process.
The
trend is not limited to Colorado — officials from Florida to Illinois
to California have reported similar problems — but the blasts are
creating a special headache
for lawmakers and courts here, the state at the center of legal
marijuana. Even as cities try to clamp down on homemade hash oil and
lawmakers consider outlawing it, some enthusiasts argue for their right
to make it safely without butane, and criminal defense lawyers say the
practice can no longer be considered a crime under the 2012 constitutional amendment that made marijuana legal to grow, smoke, process and sell.
“This
is uncharted territory,” said State Representative Mike Foote, a
Democrat from northern Colorado who is grappling with how to address
hash-oil explosions. “These things come up for the first time, and no
one’s dealt with them before.”
Over
the past year, a hash-oil explosion in a motel in Grand Junction sent
two people to a hospital. In Colorado Springs, an explosion in a
third-floor apartment shook the neighborhood and sprayed glass across a
parking lot. And in an accident in Denver, neighbors reported a “ball of
fire” that left three people hospitalized.
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.
“They
get enough vapors inside the building and it goes off, and it’ll bulge
out the walls,” said Chuck Mathis, the fire marshal in Grand Junction,
where the Fire Department responded to four explosions last year. “They
always have a different story: ‘Nothing happened’ or ‘I was cooking
food, and all of a sudden there was an explosion.’ They always try to
blame it on something else.”
There were 32 such blasts across Colorado in 2014, up from 12 a year earlier, according to the Rocky Mountain High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area,
which coordinates federal and state drug enforcement efforts. No one
has been killed, but the fires have wrecked homes and injured dozens of
people, including 17 who received treatment for severe burns, including
skin grafts and surgery, at the University of Colorado Hospital’s burn
center.
The
legal complexities played out one snowy morning in a Denver courtroom
as a district judge puzzled over the case of Paul Mannaioni. Mr.
Mannaioni, 24, was charged with committing fourth-degree arson and
manufacturing marijuana after explosions ripped through a marijuana
cooperative in Denver that was filled with cannabis plants and littered
with boxes of butane, burners, pressure cookers, metal pipes and other
equipment commonly used in butane hash-oil extractions.
When
emergency responders showed up, they found Mr. Mannaioni and two other
people with severe burns “all over their arms and legs,” according to a
police affidavit. The police said that one of his companions, Danielle
Cordova, later told them that she did not know who had been
manufacturing the concentrate, but that the “hash bath” exploded when
the three stepped into a tent where it had been cooking.
To
prosecutors, a crime had taken place. Legalization may have given
licensed and regulated marijuana manufacturing facilities the ability to
extract hash oil legally in controlled environments, but officials say
dangerous, homemade operations using flammable butane — a fuel for
lighters, portable stoves or heaters — are still illegal.
Mr. Mannaioni’s lawyer, Robert Corry, a prominent marijuana advocate, had a different take. When Colorado’s voters passed Amendment 64 to
legalize marijuana for personal use and recreational sales, Mr. Corry
told the judge, they called for a fundamental shift in how Colorado
treated marijuana. It is no longer an issue for the police and courts,
he said, but for the regulators and bureaucrats who enforce the civil
codes surrounding marijuana growers and dispensaries.
“That
constitutional provision renders my client’s accused conduct to be
legal,” Mr. Corry said in court. “The court system is not to be used for
marijuana regulation anymore.”
He
compared making butane hash oil to processing olive oil, brewing beer
or distilling whiskey at home — riskier, perhaps, and vulnerable to
devastating results, but no longer a drug offense worth sending a young
man to prison, according to Mr. Corry. The state law being used to
prosecute Mr. Mannaioni, he said, was simply no longer valid.
“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.”
Judge
A. Bruce Jones of the Second Judicial District was not buying the
argument, but he grappled with the holes in the law created by
legalizing marijuana. Is making hash oil “processing” marijuana — an
action that was deemed legal under Amendment 64 — or is it
“manufacturing”? What is the difference? How should the law view hash
oil? As marijuana concentrate, or as something else entirely? And how do
you produce it, exactly?
“I have no real knowledge of how you make hash oil,” Judge Jones said during the hearing.
Mr.
Mannaioni has pleaded not guilty and declined to discuss the details of
the explosion. He said he had worked jobs at dispensaries and helped to
build marijuana cultivations since he was 18, and that it felt surreal
to be prosecuted for a marijuana charge in a state that embraced
legalization, where hundreds of medical and recreational dispensaries
sell marijuana buds, edible treats and their own hash-oil concentrates.
“I
was blown away that they even charged us,” he said. “The court system,
they are having a really hard time of letting go that pot isn’t bad.”
And
so far, the legal system has not budged. The state attorney general has
weighed in to say legalization does not apply to butane extraction.
This month, a western Colorado judge overseeing the case against a
70-year-old man charged with making hash oil in his home rejected arguments that drug laws in Colorado were now unconstitutional.
In
the mountain town of Leadville, a landlord named Bill Korn spent a
month last spring cleaning up after one of his tenants blew apart the
kitchen trying to make hash oil in his 1880s home. The tenant pleaded
guilty to an arson charge and agreed to pay Mr. Korn $7,000 in damages, a
sentence Mr. Korn said felt “a little bit light.”
“They apparently don’t enforce any laws anymore,” he said.