You’re seeing it more and more, although it’s been going on for well over a decade:

The words “hash oil explosion” are now becoming a familiar term on news programs, somewhat like “urban youth”, “racial tension”, “gun violence” and other terms used to deliberately distill people’s fears down into a single pat phrase.

But even though medical marijuana patients often benefit from the use of hash oil — which is a subject for a different discussion — we have nothing to feel guilty about. The problem is not weed, but greed. These people who blow themselves up are generally just doing it to make money, often illicitly. Perhaps they heard from a friend that they could “make money fast” by making hash oil, so they blindly follow some directions someone scrawled on a piece of paper and blow themselves up.

They didn’t take the few seconds necessary to think about what happens when you use an explosive, volatile solvent like butane indoors with a heat or spark source present. And they sure as hell didn’t do any research themselves, because every single article I’ve read anywhere about how to make butane hash oil (BHO) always says the same thing quite clearly: Do Not Do This Indoors.

No, I’m pretty sure that most of these people either can’t or don’t choose to read or think. And if we can have the word Cannatourism to describe people visiting a place because it’s known for its nice policies regarding weed, and the word Cannabusiness to describe the business opportunities surrounding the hopefully-soon-to-be-legal cannabis market, then I’d like to describe this phenomenon as CannaDarwinism (a hopefully obvious portmanteau of Cannabis + Darwin Awards).

CannaDarwinism: An instance of astoundingly stupid judgement that’s somehow connected to cannabis.

After all, we might as well poke some fun at people who do stupid things and blame it on cannabis somehow (although their deaths and injuries are not in themselves the least bit amusing). The mainstream media and opponents of cannabis will attempt to use these instances as serious “proof” of something or other anyway.

And while I’m on the subject of danger, let me remind you that nobody in history has ever died from a toxic overdose of cannabis, because in that regards, cannabis is one of the safest substances known to science.