This is ridiculous. Hash oil is dangerous both in production and concentration, but, a life sentence for a teenager is extreme government overreach.

ROUND ROCK, Texas (AP) — A Texas teenager (click here) accused of making and selling brownies laced with marijuana and hash oil is facing a punishment that could include anywhere from five years to life in prison.

Nineteen-year-old Jacob Lavoro was arrested in April when Round Rock police searched his apartment and found the 1.5 pounds of brownies. Police say they also found additional marijuana and hash oil, leading to a felony charge.

Authorities say hash oil is a controlled substance with much harsher state penalties than marijuana. The oil has higher concentrations of the psychoactive component of marijuana. It's in a penalty group with amphetamines and ecstasy....

Sometimes I think young people need to be given driver's education courses in substance abuse (including food abuse) and the road to a destroyed life, but, jail? The prison system will introduce him to the cartels. Why do that?

This is exactly why this needs to be legalized and taken off the street.  The potency of THC can be as much as 65% in concentration with some processes resulting in 99% pure THC. This type of product has to be monitored for quantity of ingredient content, yet the answer the government wants is 'make it illegal.' Obviously, that isn't the answer.

Mobile home explosion may have been caused by hash oil manufacturing
 
...But as its popularity grows, (click here) so do the number of hash oil enthusiasts eager to attempt their own homebrew BHO, a process that usually involves the highly flammable solvent butane. The result in a number of cases, as the FEMA bulletin notes, has been “fires and explosions [that] have blown out windows, walls, and caused numerous burn injuries.”

Local media reports often describe hash oil explosions as the result of “cooking hash” or “cooking hash oil,” but that isn’t strictly accurate. There are no Breaking Bad Bunsen burners or chemistry sets involved, and the process of producing hash oil is a relatively simple one, albeit one that ill-informed stoners can still manage to screw up.

Hash oil is typically produced by filling a cylindrical glass or stainless steel canister with pot (Bed Bath and Beyond’s metal turkey basters are a popular choice), and flooding the canister with a solvent — usually butane — that strips the plant matter of its cannabinoid-containing oils. The resulting mixture of psychotropic plant oil and chemicals is then purified to remove traces of the solvent. One common method of butane removal includes boiling it off in a hot water bath, while another involves the use of a vacuum pump and vacuum chamber to lower butane’s boiling point, pulling butane from the oil....