I’m thinking no. There’s not actually any marijuana in there, just butter that has absorbed some THC. And the marijuana is the illegal part, right? Sure it was illegal to make them in the first place, but unless some state has made some sort of crazy law specifically referring to food products made from marijuana, I would think the brownies themselves would be legal.
Plus it would be hard to prove. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is exhibit A: a tray of brownies seized from the defendant. Take one each and if you are stoned off your ass in a couple hours, the defendant is guilty!”
Moderators, this is simply a theoretical question, asked mostly out of curiosity about our laws.
Think again. The active ingredient Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is what’s illegal. In most states the laws read to the effect “possession of THC”. So anything that tests positive for it is evidence of possession of THC, whether it be residue in a pipe or brownies. There need not be any leaf present, only the THC.
And contrary to what some may think, it is illegal to possess even minute’ amounts of it. If theres enough to turn the chem-test positive your busted.
There was a lady who got away with selling primo brownies at one of my favorite Chicago bars, for years. Yes, I was one of her best customers.
I heard it through the grapevine she finally got busted last year, right after I moved down here.
It was a big mess, and IIRC the bar also was forced to close for a few weeks.
Funniest thing about it, when I first entered that bar, this chick was always stationed at the illegal “Cherry Master” gambling machine… basically a slot machine that didn’t pay o.ut… when you’re ready you go the bartender.
Chicago cracked down on cherry masters only maybe three years ago.
Years ago, (statute of limitations-type years ago,) I used to make baked goods for a weekly reggae jam and weed cuisine bash that had a huge and ever-changing variety of goodies to nosh on, ranging from classic brownies and cookies to more elaborate desserts to green-buttered popcorn, creamy lasagna and other hot meals, and hash lassi. (Gotta love Vancouver.)
It was cool at first, but it had to be shut down because there was a small element that kept showing up with underage (and even very small) children and feeding them drugged food, couldn’t be persuaded to knock it off, and kept trying to blackmail the organizers to allow it on the grounds that there was a hall full of contraband subtances that the authorities would just love to hear about. What the hell do you do about that?
Every time somebody asks about one of these obvious loopholes, I have to wonder how stupid they think lawmakers are, not to mention the rest of the public. Have you heard about the entire pot-using population of the United States enjoying legal marijuana brownies all these years? No? If they were legal, then why wouldn’t everybody use them? Why would cancer patients who baked them for relief of their symptoms be arrested?
One thing the government learned from Prohibition is that if something is illegal to make it also needs to make it illegal to use.
And there was another silly thread in which someone asked why laws were written in legal language. If you look at the quote from the Controlled Substances act, you’ll see why. It’s to ensure that the law says what it’s intended to mean in language that courts can apply, so that simple obvious loopholes are properly excluded.
A side effect of the way the law is written (also in Canada) is that penalties can be dependant on the total weight of the product – there is no consideration of how much psychoactive goodies we’re talking about.
So when they bust a grow-op, they weigh the bud, leaves, stalk, and rootballs – and that’s how much “marijuana” the culprits are in possession of.
If the marijuana is manicured (and dried,) then there’s less “marijuana” to consider.
If it’s been processed into brownies – there’s more. Say you start with a cup-and-a-half of sacred ghee, and then bake it up with a couple of cups of flour, three eggs, two cups of sugar, some dark chocolate, vanilla beans, vegetable oil, etc… Effectively you’ve just magically transformed all those pantry items into contraband. It’s possible that you could start with an amount of marijuana that’s below a certain sentencing threshold and cut your own throat by deciding to have a hipster’s bake sale and processing it into product that’s on the other side of that threshold.
Which can lead to some wacky illegal substances.
Because hydrochloric gas is used in the production of methamphetamines, Alaska Code Section 11.71.200 makes it illegal to posess any salts of it. One of these salts is sodium chloride, otherwise known as common table salt.
Think about it for a second. It would still be illegal to buy or possess marijuana. You think Little Debbie is going to buy kilos of weed to start making Happy Cakes just because said Happy Cakes would be legal? I somehow doubt it. I just thought it would be possible that an end stage of the marijuana process, which no longer involves any marijuana itself, might be legal.
If the possession of THC itself is a crime, is having it in your fat cells considered illegal? I’ve heard that actually being high is a crime in some jurisdictions, how common is that? What if you’ve just eaten a brownie and have a little bit stuck in your teeth, is that illegal?
As others have said, the notion that marijuana brownies don’t contain marijuana is wrong. Not just wrong, but hysterically wrong. If there’s no pot left, then what makes you high? Are you saying that marijuana brownies are like homeopathic medicines where the magic memory of the molecules imprints itself without any of the substance being present? Ludicrous.
And what’s with the Little Debbie nonsense? If pot is illegal to sell, then you’d still get the brownies through the same informal distribution system as today. The only difference is that if it’s legal to possess, your Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination comes into play and large legal cans of worms are opened. Which is why no laws are written this way.
The definition of possession is actually written into the laws of each jurisdiction, just as I said before. And if you don’t think having THC is your fat cells or other body parts is a problem, let me know what happens the next time you fail a drug test.
Think about this for a second: In less time that it takes to cure marijuana, you could make a bunch of purified ghee with it (or extract it into olive oil,) rendering it, to your way of thinking, legal to possess.
It’s not marijuana; it’s just a quantity of psychoactive animal/vegetable fat. You could quickly process it into any number of things (including many products that can be stored for extended periods of time) that would actually be more profitable to sell than cured weed.
If this were legal, it sure would take a lot of stress out of things. I’ll tell ya, when I was a bad boy, if I could have taken my goodies out the front door in the form of buzzy butterscotch candies without worring about them being heaty, I would never have driven around with a hockey-bag full of weed. I’d have cut my girls down and made them into “legal” products before I ever considered moving them.
The same thing that makes you high when you smoke marijuana: THC. The process of making brownies, by my understanding, extracts THC from the plant, and the plant is then discarded. I now understand that the THC itself is illegal, but there is a distinction between THC and marijuana.
I am not, in fact, saying anything like that. I have no idea what that means or how you came to think it would be reasonable interpretation of anything I’ve said.
The Little Debbie comment means that even if brownies were legal, there wouldn’t suddenly be an open market for them as you seemed to suggest earlier. It would still be illegal to make them.
In Alaska, it is currently legal to possess less than 4 ounces of marijuana in your home. So clearly SOME laws are written that way. I don’t claim to be a constitutional law scholar, but I am completely missing what the Fifth Amendment has to do with any of this. What large legal can of worms has been opened by Alaska’s law?
What happens when someone fails a drug test is generally that they don’t get the job they had applied for. Obviously sometimes passing drug tests is a requirement of probation, and failing one can get you arrested, but those are special circumstances. I’m asking if it’s illegal to be carrying around THC in your fat cells.
Exapno Mapcase, I would like to thank you for your insults and condescending attitude towards someone asking a simple question. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.
On another note, how come you didn’t do that anyway? A hockey bag full of butterscotch candies at least looks legal. Even though it is illegal, wouldn’t it be almost impossible to get caught that way?
I was curious about this, so I went looking for more information. The law in question does prohibit hydrochloric gas (item 22), but it doesn’t say anything about its salts, or even the more commonly-found aqueous solution (what most folks would consider “hydrochloric acid”). Given that several of the other substances on that list do explicitly include salts (and esters and isomers and other related chemical compounds), I think it’s safe to say that table salt is still legal in Alaska. Or at least, if it’s illegal, it’s due to some other statute.
I suppose an honest answer would be that, while doing so would probably increase the actual value of the yield, the demand for orally-administered cannabis products isn’t great enough to make it feasible. You’d have to create a new market – and that poses a problem when your product is illegal; you can’t really promote it in the usual ways. If it wasn’t illegal, it would be a snap to convert into cash – practically every coffee shop down on Commercial Drive would be all over those.
That being said, I did make batches in limited volume (though explicitly with “bullet-y” bud and sweetleaf left over from manicuring – not the top buds,) which was apparently popular with club kids and Phish-heads because it wasn’t obviously contraband.
I also made oil capsules that would knock you on your ass if you took more than one or two, and keep you buzzed for hours. Those that liked them, really liked them – but I think it was just too unfamiliar for your garden-variety head, for whom rolling vegetable matter into a tube, burning it, and drawing the smoke into their lungs seems more “natural” than swallowing an extract in capsule form. Consumer resistance to the idea of an alternative delivery method made it more profitable to deliver cured, manicured herb than to process it in any way.
Of course, I don’t do anything like that now. Had a minor brush with the law which was a pretty strong reminder of why it ain’t worth it. For a first offense, the penalty was basically nothing – but screw up again and they’re not so tolerant, even up here. I don’t think I’d fair well in a prison environment. No thanks.
