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Legal pot prompts a question: What about hash? Is concentrated pot legal?
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SEATTLE (AP) — Jim Andersen has a 40-year history with hashish, the concentrated cannabis sometimes referred to as the cognac of the marijuana world.When he served in the Air Force in Southeast Asia, he said he smuggled it home in his boots. When he was in grad school in California, he made it with a centrifuge in a lab after hours.So when Washington was on the verge of legalizing the sale of taxed pot last fall, Andersen decided to move back to his home state and turn his hobby into a full-time, legitimate paycheck — a business that would supply state-licensed, recreational marijuana stores with high-quality hash oil.“Every major culture that has marijuana associated with it has hash associated with it as well,” said Andersen, whose company, XTracted, already has two Seattle locations serving medical marijuana dispensaries. He said his business would help prevent such pot extracts from ending up on the black market.Substance abuse experts are concerned that such increasingly popular, extremely potent and potentially dangerous pot extracts will be sold and that state regulators’ interpretation of the recreational marijuana law will allow people to buy vastly more hash than they need for personal use.That, they fear, will increase the chances that some of it will end up in the black market out of state.“It’s a concern not just for our kids, but for kids in neighboring states as well,” said Derek Franklin, president of Washington Association for Substance Abuse and Violence Prevention.The legal-weed law, passed by voters last fall, allows adults over 21 to possess up to an ounce of dried pot, 16 ounces of pot-infused solids such as brownies, or 72 ounces of infused liquids such as soda.