BHO started as a hydrocarbon experiment, often using raw butane and DIY rigs that carried risks. Even with today’s refined, regulated extraction systems, solventless options like rosin and hash remain the purest way to consume cannabis without chemical solvents or complicated gear.
Before Colorado had dispensaries, regulations, compliance trackers, or certificate-of-analysis stickers, it already had a thriving cannabis economy. Flowers were everywhere, growers were experimenting, and the underground market worked as a decentralized but surprisingly efficient distribution system.
In that liminal pre-legal era, long before modern concentrate menus and terpene labels, the community was already consuming waxes, early oils, improvised resins, and the product that would define a generation: butane hash oil, or BHO. People still recall those one-gram jars of thick, amber honey, sticky enough to require metal tweezers, unrefined in appearance, and circulating through garages, student apartments, and mountain towns.
The rise of BHO came from basic economics: Colorado had too much flower, and extractors wanted ways to transform surplus bud into something stronger and more portable. Hydrocarbon extraction, meaning forcing liquid butane or butane-propane blends through cannabis to dissolve cannabinoids and terpenes, offered an elegant solution. It created an intensely potent, compact product, unlike anything being smoked in joints at the time.
But early BHO was not the polished extract we know today. It emerged from makeshift workshops and improvised equipment. Extractors used stainless-steel or even glass tubes, hardware-store filters, and cans of consumer butane. Some of the rigs were welded by hand. Others were held together with whatever parts people could find. It was resourceful, experimental, and dangerous.
Colorado’s strong vocational culture accelerated the trend. Young people who had learned welding or metalworking in trade schools built their own extraction tubes. These improvised systems helped shape an entire generation of concentrate makers.
As butane was released in open environments, it pooled invisibly on floors and ignited with the smallest spark. Colorado fire departments responded to a series of explosions in the early 2010s, some of them devastating. These incidents became a turning point: they pushed regulators, firefighters, and the emerging legal industry toward requiring closed-loop systems, certified extraction equipment, and strict fire-code protections.
This was the moment when the frontier chemistry of BHO collided with public safety.
As legalization began, Colorado’s extraction culture matured. Amateur open-blast systems were replaced with closed-loop hydrocarbon machinery designed to contain gases, prevent leaks, and operate with laboratory precision. Instead of consumer-grade butane, licensed producers used solvents refined to pharmaceutical purity, free of the mercaptans, lubricants, and industrial residues commonly found in lighter fluid.
Toaster ovens were replaced by vacuum ovens. Today, there are digital temperature controls, chromatography, and lab testing. Colorado’s concentrate makers embraced technical sophistication and, in doing so, helped elevate the entire global extraction scene. Within a few years, the state became home to some of the best producers of hashish, live resin, and solventless rosin in the world.
But the fundamentals of hydrocarbon extraction did not change. It is chemistry, and controlling solvents like butane, propane, and pentane requires training, engineering, and equipment capable of operating under pressure.
Early BHO often contained impurities. Consumer butane frequently includes mercaptans, which are sulfurous compounds added to make gas leaks detectable, along with oils and manufacturing byproducts that can end up in the final extract if not properly removed. Homemade BHO can expose users to these hazardous substances. Poorly purged concentrates can retain measurable levels of hydrocarbons. Incorrectly built extraction tubes can leach metals or plastics.
Why People Love the Dab
Despite its risks, BHO transformed cannabis culture because the experience is fundamentally different from smoking flowers. A single dab delivers cannabinoids almost instantly, producing rapid onset and intense effects.
Hydrocarbon extraction preserves fragile terpenes in ways that combustion cannot, giving dabbers access to bright citrus notes, deep fuel aromas, or complex floral layers that get lost when a joint burns.
Ritual is part of the appeal, too. Heating a quartz banger, timing the cooldown, preparing the rig, and inhaling the vapor gave birth to a new set of cannabis practices, apart from the classic Marley-style joint and the 1980s hookahs. BHO is a modern way of consuming industrial-scale cannabis, and there are many other styles emerging as chemistry and industrial technologies evolve.
Many consumers describe dabbing as more controlled or more predictable than smoking flower, because the onset is fast and the effects are clear.
Beware. BHO is not for everyone. First of all, it is very strong. For people who are used to smoking joints, the intensity can be overwhelming. Anxiety, dizziness, nausea, and rapid heartbeat, what people call the “dab sweats”, can hit within seconds. Hits should not be excessively hot either. Excessive heat degrades flavor and breaks down terpenes into toxic byproducts, including benzene, which is harmful.
This means that even when BHO is made perfectly, the method of consumption still carries variables that require caution.
Safer Paths: Rosin, Traditional Hash, and the Humble Joint
There is a more natural alternative to BHO that does not use added solvents. It is called rosin. Rosin is made only with heat and pressure, so it avoids hydrocarbons entirely. It does not rely on flammable gases or chemical purging, although it requires industrial equipment when produced at a significant scale. Rosin is like getting the oil out of the olive by pressing it. The result is a clean, terpene-rich natural extract.
Traditional hashish offers similar benefits. Dry-sift and ice-water hash techniques have existed for centuries and rely on physical separation rather than chemical extraction. These methods often produce gentler effects, smoother flavor, and a cultural lineage far older than the dab rig.
And then there is the classic joint: simple, transparent, familiar. You can see what you are smoking, adjust your dose gradually, and avoid the uncertainties that come with solvents, heat profiles, or elaborate equipment. It is part nostalgia and part harm reduction. The fewer chemical and mechanical variables involved in producing and consuming cannabis, the lower the risk for the end user.
Photo by A. C. on Unsplash
