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 …
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Author: Rolando García / High Times
