Years ago, I spoke to a different chemist in Oregon who was in BOEL back in the day.
He said he was one of the ones to try out different teks and solvents to extract hash oil in the Middle East to then ship around the world as it was easier, cheaper, and more reliable to traffic hash oil than buds or kief.
Ether was one of the best, but regulated. So then they tried the flurocarbobs and hydrocarbons, finally using butane in the labs in Afghanistan. He said unfortunately many got sick testing those early products and became a big advocate against shitty teks like ISO wash that slowly kills people.
Not long after, the government would use teks designed by BOEL to extract opiates from poppy stalk, so farmers didnt even need to score and collect from the pods - they could get higher biomass yield of alkaloids by simply threshing and extracting the poppy plants.
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