I know there are a lot of researchers here, so this question is to them mostly. I have been getting into Cannabis extracts for a while now and was wondering if much testing had been done on Cannabis extracts from a health and safety perspective. In Cali, most extracts (hash oil, honey oil, wax, budder, shatter, dabs, etc) are done with Butane. Some are done with other solvents like Ethanol, Hexane, Isopropyl, Ether, Acetone, Naptha. Sometimes you will run across an extract that claims to be CO2 extracted but those seem to be rare and expensive. My question is, if purged correctly, using a 4x - 5x filtered commercial Butane (lighter refill fuel) as solvent, is a cannabis extract relatively safe to vaporize? What are the potential health and safety problems? In your opinion, what easily available solvents are best to extract THC and CBD from Cannabis herb? Any light you can help shed on this subject would be much appreciated.

Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

i am no expert, but i have heard (not from any reliable sources, mind you) that extracts had adverse effects regarding health.

again i don't know the chemistry but i do know that coca leaf is infinitely safer than cocaine.


i think hash oil is good for infusing bud, and i LOVE me some high quality bubble hash (orange gooey wax is best), but i tend moderate my use of those.

I'm really into BHO and mess arround with it's extraction for about 1 1/2 years now.

I always do a vacuum purge. With that you get most of the solvent out of it. Here is an example result of a lab testet vac purged bho, which was not made be me. We can see that there is residual solvent left, but in really small ammounts way below the "acceptable limit". It was made with Vector lighter refill gas.



Lighter refill gas isn't made from pure butane mostly. One thing one should care about is to use only brands, which have the "near zero impurities" logo. If that's the case one at least can be sure, that there aren't any anti rust agents in it or something like this.

Here is a list of some of the companies who are permitted to carry the "Near zero impurities" benchmark seal & are tested by Newport:

Newport
London
Colibri
Colton
Cora
CTC
Dunhill
Davidoff
David Ross
IMCO
K2
Unilight
Silver Match
Win
Sarome

And even those gases aren't pure butane. They mostly will have also propane in them. One can look at theis MSDS sheets to see what's relly in there. Here's an example of an MSDS for the Colobri brand.

I personally use Unilight.