Wed, Jan 21, 2015 page7

• Exploding homes accent Colorado conundrum

  • NY Times News Service, DENVER, Colorado
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  When Colorado legalized marijuana two years ago, nobody was quite ready for the problem of exploding houses.

  However, that is what firefighters, courts and legislators across the state now face: Amateur marijuana alchemists are turning kitchens and basements into Breaking Bad-style labs, using flammable chemicals to extract a marijuana concentrate commonly called hash oil, and sometimes blowing up their homes and lighting themselves on fire in the process.

  The trend is not limited to Colorado — officials from Florida and Illinois to California have reported similar issues — but the blasts create a special headache for legislators and courts in Colorado, the US state at the center of legal marijuana.

  Even as cities try to clamp down on homemade hash oil and legislators consider outlawing it, some enthusiasts argue for their right to make it safely without butane, and lawyers say that the practice can no longer be considered a crime under the 2012 state 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 the problem of hash-oil blasts. “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 a Denver accident, neighbors reported a “ball of fire” that left three people hospitalized.

  The blasts occur as people pump butane fuel through a tube packed with raw marijuana plants to draw out the psychoactive tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), producing a golden, highly potent concentrate that people sometimes call honey oil, earwax or shatter.

  The process can fill a room with butane vapors that can be ignited by a spark or flame.

  “They get enough vapors inside the building and it goes off, and it’ll bulge out the walls,” Grand Junction fire marshal Chuck Mathis said.

  His 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,” he added.

  There were 32 such blasts across the state last year, up from 12 a year earlier, according to the Rocky Mountain High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, which coordinates US 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 considered the case of Paul Mannaioni.

  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 Mannaioni and two other people with severe burns “all over their arms and legs,” a police affidavit said. 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 marijuana manufacturing facilities the ability to legally extract hash oil in controlled environments, but officials say homemade operations using butane are still illegal.

  Mannaioni’s lawyer, Robert Corry, a prominent marijuana advocate, disagrees. When state voters passed Amendment 64 to legalize marijuana for personal use and recreational sales, Corry said, 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,” Corry said in court. “The court system is not to be used for marijuana regulation anymore.”

  The state law being used to prosecute Mannaioni, he said, was simply no longer valid.

  “There are thousands of people in Colorado who are doing this,” 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.”

  Second Judicial District Judge A. Bruce Jones 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,” Jones said during the hearing.

  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.
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