One of the hottest products on medical marijuana dispensary shelves and on Craigslist is a potent hash oil often made at home with the help of DIY YouTube clips and canisters of butane.

Consumed by using discreet portable hash oil pens or water pipes heated with propane torches, butane hash oil is coveted for its quick and powerful high.

But that high can come with a cost: Butane-fueled blasts have sent 17 people to a Portland burn unit with serious injuries in the past 16 months, including one Northeast Portland man who later died from his injuries.

Growing demand for BHO -- which, according to one marijuana industry survey, accounts for about 17 percent of sales in Oregon medical marijuana dispensaries -- is met by an unregulated and largely underground industry that plays out in garages, basements and kitchens. A spark from something as ordinary as a refrigerator compressor can set off a fiery explosion.

Using public records and news accounts, The Oregonian documented nine major BHO-related blasts in Oregon since 2011, four of them in homes or hotel rooms where children, including a newborn, were present. In one case last year, a 12-year-old girl suffered multiple broken bones after leaping from the second floor of a Medford apartment building rocked by a butane explosion.

“This is an issue nobody apparently has any will to address,” said Bracken McKey, a senior deputy district attorney in Washington County, where three major BHO explosions have taken place since 2012. “It’s no safer than manufacturing methamphetamine.”

Medical marijuana patients, however, say BHO offers a quick and powerful relief unmatched by dried marijuana flowers.

Matthew Walstatter, a Portland medical marijuana patient who relies on BHO to treat a chronic gastrointestinal disorder, attended a party recently where people were using portable hash oil pens to consume the concentrated form of marijuana.

“Everybody had a (vaporizer) pen and nobody had any weed,” said Walstatter, who owns Pure Green, a dispensary on Northeast Sandy Boulevard. “I know people who were heavy flower smokers and now they don’t smoke flowers. All they smoke is BHO.”

NEXT: "New methods to consume marijuana add to its allure"

-- Noelle Crombie; news researcher Lynne Palombo contributed to this report