cannabisnews.com: Medical Pot Activist Dies After Mishap Handling It





Medical Pot Activist Dies After Mishap Handling It
Posted by CN Staff on November 01, 2003 at 08:03:52 PT
By The Canadian Press
Source: Globe and Mail 
Ottawa -- An outspoken advocate of marijuana for medicinal purposes has died of burns he suffered when he tried to extract oil from marijuana. Donny Appleby died Thursday in the company of friends at an Ottawa hospital."He ended his life peacefully and surrounded by friends," said Mike Foster, a long-time friend and owner of Crosstown Traffic, a cannabis paraphernalia store. Mr. Appleby was an AIDS patient on a disability pension and couldn't afford the marijuana he used for his illness.
While his friends are trying not to turn his death into a political issue, many are blaming the federal government for restricting access to marijuana for medicinal purposes."It's a travesty that people don't have access to this stuff - a clean, safe good source and supply of it," said Eugene Oscapella, a lawyer with the Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy and a friend of Mr. Appleby.About two weeks ago, Mr. Appleby suffered severe burns while trying to extract oil from low-grade cannabis using butane, which exploded in his apartment.He was admitted to hospital with no chance of survival and had been on a ventilator until his death on Thursday.Mr. Oscapella, who was at Mr. Appleby's side when he died, described his friend as an "activist who tried to help people.""The guy didn't have a lot of strength physically, but he had a lot of strength in other ways, and I think you've got to hand it to him," Mr. Oscapella said.In a July protest on Parliament Hill, Mr. Appleby smoked a joint and burned his Health Canada exemptions to demonstrate dismay at the government's handling of medical marijuana. Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)Published: Saturday, November 1, 2003 - Page A10 Copyright: 2003 The Globe and Mail CompanyContact: letters globeandmail.caWebsite: http://www.globeandmail.com/Related Article & Web Site:Canadian Foundation for Drug Policyhttp://www.cfdp.ca/Medical Marijuana Big Expense To Needyhttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread10710.shtml
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Comment #18 posted by Max Flowers on November 03, 2003 at 09:23:44 PT
TecHnoCult
Yep, I just wish he hadn't tried it indoors, and had put some planning into it, went to a friend's place with a back yard, whatever. I'm very sorry it happened and I guess now that it has happened and we can't change it, I only hope that it will serve as a lesson to anyone who was also thinking so casually about the process.More irony: the other night when I went and made some at my friend's house, my own carelessness resulted in a small one inch burn on my thumb when I grabbed some heated glass too soon; it hurt pretty bad and all I could think of was poor Donny and every other burn victim who has ever suffered and how horrible it would be to feel that kind of pain on large portions of your body. It's almost unimaginable.MF
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Comment #17 posted by TecHnoCult on November 03, 2003 at 08:33:26 PT
To Max Flowers
Doing the procedure in doors was not very smart, I agree. However, I am sure if he wasn't worried that his neighbors would report him for running an aleged meth lab, he would have done it out doors. This is the key reason I have never done this procedure (I have used the poor Everclear extraction method.) The smell is just too strong.THC
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Comment #16 posted by jose melendez on November 03, 2003 at 08:32:34 PT
bathtub gin
http://www.arkansasnbc.com/Global/story.asp?S=1495641&nav=F8n2IiKQ
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Comment #15 posted by freedom fighter on November 02, 2003 at 10:30:42 PT
max
Just a note, I used to freebase and I know the dangers. One of the rules is not to use anything electricial around these vapors. Never turn the switch on while the vapors are around. It's not a good idea to use the fan.pazff
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Comment #14 posted by Max Flowers on November 02, 2003 at 09:57:02 PT
Regarding Mexican pot
The real answer is to just grow sinsemilla, seedless pot (sin semilla = without seed in Spanish so I think they know what it means!). They know how to do it if they really want to. You just identify and pull out the male plants as soon as they declare sex but before they've had a chance to mature and drop pollen. In the 1980s I saw a lot of what we called "mexican Indica" which was obviously their attempt at growing an indica-dominant strain, and it was far less heavily seeded than standard Mexican commercial. They know how to do it and I think the genetics are available to them as well, but those huge mota families/cartels would have to be willing to change the way they do things, including culling males, and I think they're just too set in their ways after doing things the "easy way" for several decades.And again, as soon as things change to the point where anyone can grow their own at home, or get it from their neighbor who grows, the market for lousy stemmy seedy Mexican schwag will evaporate and those farmers will have to switch to something else (let's just hope it ain't poppies).MF
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Comment #13 posted by FoM on November 01, 2003 at 19:42:49 PT
Thanks Virgil
You care enough to check the stats. Thank you. I do have the total for October but the stats like you said will be up tomorrow. We broke an all time record this past month with 3,270,735 Total Hits! I thank everyone who has made this site grow and I want to Thank Ron Bennett from http://www.cannabis.com/ for updating the banners and fixing a few things that needed fixed. The banners now open in their own window too which is a nice feature. We are making progress!
  
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Comment #12 posted by Virgil on November 01, 2003 at 19:26:56 PT
Too old to move
I appreciate the info on the one gram rule in Canada and I am glad to see we might have a critical mass of knowledge and people to answer questions like that at Cnews. I have been waiting all day to see the stats go up for October because it will be the first month that Cnews averages over 100,000 hits a day It will come with today's stats in the morning.Not only are there more people learning about the wrongs and reasons of prohibition, I think we have arrived. We have arrived at the point where no one or any spin can stand for the defense of continued prohibition. Now this is kind of corny and it comes from building shelves yesterday. It all reminds me of the prohibitionists driving nails into a harder wood. Everywhere people look they see a bunch of bent nails where the force of lies and repetition just do not drive home the point and people say look at all these bent nails. Something is just not right.We have a government in full knowledge of the facts that push a remedy for a problem that does not exists. What would happen if prohibition were to end tomorrow? Prices would fall and arrest and imprisonment would end. Well, that is no problem because baby would have new shoes and daddy would not be doing time or community service. Daddy might also keep his promise to the water throne to never get sickening drunk again. So the thing that would happen is use would go up and the distribution to the underworld and hard drugs would end. Do not see a problem. Use going up is a good thing and we could have hash oil for soup and vaporizers for some various strains of bud.So what is prohibition protecting us from besides honesty, freedom, responsibility to the citizens, and fiscal responsibility and a healthier distribution system and means of consumption? I would not know and the politicians are stuck on cannabis is a dangerous drug.Well congratulations to Cnews on what has surely happened on the 100,000 hits a day for October. I do not know anything else to say and the best course for me to help the cause would be to sell bumperstickers and put out a song and write a book. It is just time to make a turn.You know on that Mexican seed and stem problem. I bet they could use on of those slow moving dryers like in the wall at a laundry mat and shake all kinds of seeds and stems out- without heat of course.That is all.
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Comment #11 posted by Virgil on November 01, 2003 at 18:35:01 PT
I disagree
On another note: Mexican Herb is grown outdoors in huge volumes the cost of manicuring all that bud would be way off the chartThere is such a thing as grinders. I could see it a bitch to do it with the common hand grinders, but mechanized or motorized grinders would be more practrical. I mean we are talking big money. And I really do mean it is stupid to send the stems and seeds up here. Look how they value space as they bale their bricks and look at the penalties that come with weight. They really need to take the stems and seeds out and charge the $1 an hour it would take to do a couple of hundred pounds of stems and seeds.It just is not that complicated and it is that stupid.
A mountain of Mexican marijuana
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Comment #10 posted by VitaminT on November 01, 2003 at 17:15:55 PT
Virgil
In a story recently posted on C-News the following sentence appears: "Simple possession involves possession of up to 30 grams of marijuana or up to one gram of marijuana resin." That's Canada not DEA Land!As with the sentencing disparity between Crack and powder Cocaine the government would surely see Hash Oil as the "Crack" of Marijuana moronic though it is, but hey when you're dealing with morons . . . .On another note: Mexican Herb is grown outdoors in huge volumes the cost of manicuring all that bud would be way off the chart. I wouldn't mind the seeds and stems as much if it wasn't compressed and mistreated so. All things considered, we'd be in a world of hurt without Mexicans doing what they do - so I trust your remarks were made with tongue in cheek.
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Comment #9 posted by Max Flowers on November 01, 2003 at 12:09:35 PT
A final note
By the way this is all extremely ironic for me, because I had today already scheduled, for days, to go and make a bunch of this oil at a friend's house! So to wake up and see this story, and have this discussion, was very strange...MF
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Comment #8 posted by Max Flowers on November 01, 2003 at 12:05:12 PT
replies to Marc and Virgil
Marc, I see what you're saying, I can see you're hurting over this and I understand why. In the end we wish the same thing, that everything could be done right, out in the open with all facts shared and medicine supplied safely. I got hung up on the aspect I was looking at, but now that I step back from that I see this man is another martyr, as if Canada or any other country needs another martyr. He may have been doing it indoors out of paranoia, something that hadn't occurred to me before, and in that light, I see your point dead-on.Virgil, yes that is the one, I can assure you that I wrote it. But I do not claim to have innnovated the extraction or anything like that. Someone on another website had written about it, but his writing was atrocious so it needed someone to write it out in a coherent way if the method was to be shared. I regret having jumped into doing that too soon however, because I made two huge errors: I advocated using PVC which is a BAD idea because of the possibility that "plasticizers" and other chemical compounds might be leached out of the PVC and end up in your product, invisible, tasteless, but perhaps quite hazardous, we don't know. The other big mistake was telling people to get butane from a camping supply store, I later learned that that kind of butane has a stinky odorant added to it, possibly a high-boiling sulfur compound, that tells you if you have a leak or have left your gas on. It ruins the oil. You need to get the clean `triple-filtered' lighter-refill kind which at this point is found at better head shops near you as well as tobacco stores or easiest of all, online stores.Anyone out there reading this who is thinking of making this oil, I hope will see that there are dangers but they are almost nil if you do it outdoors and treat the butane with respect and maybe a little fear. If you don't have a yard or other big space to do it in, don't try it until you do. If there's no breeze, bring a fan out there and do it downwind of it (which is actually the best idea anyway). But the bottom line is if you don't feel confident about your understanding of the properties of something like butane, don't mess with it.
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Comment #7 posted by Virgil on November 01, 2003 at 11:41:28 PT
The Boffo Butane-PVC Hash Oil Extractor
Thanks Max for mentioning butane extaction. A few drops of that oil in shrimp cocktail would give a whole new meaning to appetizers. Here is the link to what may be your work on butane extraction
http://www.erowid.org/plants/cannabis/cannabis_info13.shtmlIt seems like the oil would be an ideal way to ship things as it is so compact and could be hidden in other products. With the criminal justice system so hung up on weights I wonder how they determine sentencing.Here in North Carolina 13 grams might get you a fine and probation and 14 grams might get you free public housing and 2000 calories spread over three intervals a day. for some reason those Mexicans cannot get it in their head that we do not want the stupid stems and seeds. They talk about not having jobs but then when there is work to do, they just ship it out.Now I have an extraction method that seems simple enough although it does not seem to have been translated into Spanish. It's basic principle draws on the fact that we do not want the stems and seeds that drive up sentencing and are an impurity to the product.Now here are the steps you dumb Mexicans.1. Remove bud from plant and cure.2. Remove stems and seeds.3. Ship and rest up from all that extra work.And quit complaining to your ONDCP officials because Canada has superior quality. You can have as good a product as them if you would work at it.I regret that I have ODed on stupidity of others, but that is what happens when you follow the cannabis story- you become stupidity intolerant.
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Comment #6 posted by Marc Paquette on November 01, 2003 at 11:32:16 PT:
Marc - 100%? No, maybe 5%...
Well, I don't agree with you because he was promised help for supply and they only gave him the choice of growing it himself and without help. That's a broken promise from our government which is affecting also 620 other people. Don's crop wasn't ready yet, he lived on welfare and he was broke after paying his expenses and rent, had no money to buy buds like I said. He had no choice but to make oil to releive his Aids conditions because shake is not strong enough and he couldn't eat it or make tea it. It wasn't his first time in making oil and I agree he should have been outside to do it..but it's too late now. It was a very unfortunate accident that wouldn't have happen if "Hell" Canada would have helped as promised. And why for the Lord's sake our government would force sick and dying people grow their own medication and risk their lives furthermore? Being victim of home invasions 4 times in 11 months in my case! Do the ill and dying need broken politician promises?Peace,Marc
http://www.medpot.net
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Comment #5 posted by Max Flowers on November 01, 2003 at 11:06:34 PT
Marc - 100%? No, maybe 5%...
I just read your comment which posted as I was writing out #4. I would agree that "Hell Canada" was part of the overall picture, but I believe strongly that when it comes down to matters of your own survival and safety when using things that are flammable or dangerous, at that moment, you yourself are solely responsible. When you fill up your car at a gas station, you are responsible for knowing that smoking a cigarette at that moment would be a bad idea, whether or not there was a "no smoking" sign present. At that moment in time, YOU are the one who has to watch out for you. It's like that guy in Vegas whose tiger grabbed him by the neck. He was 100% responsible, because he chose to do that activity and knew he was dealing with a large dangerous animal. You can't blame it on the tiger.MF
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Comment #4 posted by Max Flowers on November 01, 2003 at 10:59:28 PT
FoM
The reason people like to use cannabis oil (semantically nitpicking, "hash oil" is the traditional term for the product that's made from dissolving and extracting hashish, and if you extract cannabis you get cannabis oil, but in the end it's all the same thing: dissolved trichomes) is that it is the highest state of refinement you can get. Good butane-extracted oil is something like 80% THC. One tiny drop will get most people wrecked, and that is easier to smoke or vape than a bud many times the size of that drop that you'd have to smoke. Plus, oil is free of the plant matter so the issues regarding nasty side products from burning plant matter (smoking weed) are negated.The reason butane is used is that it appears to be one of the most selective solvents possible for cannabis. That means that when the butane passes through the cannabis, it pulls out the THC and closely related cannabinoids but leaves behind in the plant matter all the undesireable stuff like chlorophyl, waxes, fats, etc. The downside of course is the extreme volatility/flammability of butane, but that danger is easily reduced to almost zero if you do it outdoors with a nice breeze blowing. That way, the excess butane floating away from you and the extraction work is carried quickly away before it can accumulate and become a danger to you. To me, this principle is instinctive; no one had to tell me this safety measure. It comes naturally to me. And even before any ignition, I would be just as worried about breathing in butane fumes indoors, which are highly toxic if concentrated. So for someone not to have these same visceral survival instincts, I just don't know what to say, except rest in peace buddy, you won't need your hash oil anymore in the hereafter.MF
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Comment #3 posted by Marc Paquette on November 01, 2003 at 10:59:27 PT:
HEALTH "HELL" CANADA ARE 100% Responsible 
Hi Friends;Health "Hell" Canada was Don's main stress and deceptions since the beginning. First, they refused a dying man with Aids his exemption quite a few times, and we had to threaten and scare Health "Hell" Canada to bring them in Federal Court and that worked and got him his first exemption!Then, not only Health "Hell" Canada made a promise to supply all Exemptees with "quality" buds, but they also made the same promise to Don because he was one of us..see?Do you think if Don would have been supplied with quality cannabis as promised, that he would have had the need of making oil from shake that was given to him? Don didn't have money for buying buds at that time and the only thing that could work in strength for his condition was free oil from free shake.In my books, 2 + 2 still makes 4 ..they are RESPONSIBLE!Peace,MarcP.S. you can take a look Don's In Memoriam at the link below.
http://www.medpot,net
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Comment #2 posted by FoM on November 01, 2003 at 10:12:12 PT
Max Flowers 
Thank you for commenting on this article. I really feel bad about Donny Appleby's death and I didn't even know him. He was a brother in arms though. This is tragic. I don't understand why making oil is needed. I really don't understand what the purposes are with oil. 
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Comment #1 posted by Max Flowers on November 01, 2003 at 10:03:11 PT
I knew this was going to happen eventually... 
...with butane. If you don't understand the properties of a chemical or solvent then you are way out of your depth in trying to use it for an extraction. I feel very sorry for the poor guy, but at the same time I'm amazed that anyone could be so careless (I really want to say stupid) as to try the butane extraction indoors. I wonder what part he didn't understand; the part that it's extremely flammable, or that it's extremely volatile... no, I think he must have known those properties as the latter is one that makes it a very good solvent for this purpose, and everyone knows it's flammable as it's in nearly every cigarette lighter. If you wouldn't pour gasoline out in your apartment, then you would show the same caution with butane. One would think, anyway.Let this be a lesson to anyone who would even entertain the thought of doing this work indoors.I wrote up a method for this extraction about four years ago for the internet that ended up circulating all over the place on the net (it went on Erowid and then proliferated from there)... I titled it "The Boffo Butane PVC Hash Oil Extractor" and one of the main things I emphasized strongly in it was that you do it OUTDOORS, with a strong breeze going, lest you immolate yourself as this poor guy did. Maybe he didn't read it. The writeup included things that I later realized were bad advice---mainly, using PVC pipe as your extraction tube, which is NOT a good idea, use stainless steel or glass or copper instead---but one thing I was very clear about was the fire danger and to do the extraction outdoors.I assume he didn't read it, and was doing it based on someone telling him "how" to do it. I just don't understand how he didn't understand that doing it indoors was extremely dangerous...?!MF
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