MONTICELLO, NY — The opioid crisis gets a lot of attention here and around the country, but what doesn’t get talked about as much is the various ways students and others now ingest the active in ingredient in marijuana, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).

At a forum about drug use in Monticello on April 25, New York State Trooper Craig Vedder gave a presentation that gave information on the ingestion of THC through substances called “dabs” through JUUL (vaping) devices and so-called “oil rigs.”

He said, “It’s nothing that’s going to change. If you look back to when we were kids, you know there was marijuana in our schools; you know that people bought things.” Vedder said kids are often introduced to this form through social media. “Our kids get on social media, they accidentally put in ‘dab’ as a hashtag, and the next thing you know, they’re learning about marijuana.”

Dab has quite a few different definitions, but one involves ingesting a substance through a JUUL device or an oil rig. It’s used for vaping, or smoking various kinds of substances, but it looks like a flash drive and thus can be hidden in plain sight. The JUUL device has surged ahead of all other vape pipes and can be used to provide a powerful dose of THC.

Vedder said, “THC is on the rise… what happened in the ‘60s and ‘70s, we were dealing with 3%, then we got to the ‘90s when I was in school, we double it to 5%; but now we’re dealing with our children who are going to school, and they’re going into the bathroom and seeing a JUUL device, and their friend says smoke it, and they may get 90% THC in their bodies.”

What they are inhaling is a substance that has been produced using butane. Vedder said that, in the process or producing it, uncut, green marijuana “that we all grew up with every single day,” is infused with butane in a container. What seeps out of the container through a coffee filter or something similar is a mixture of THC oil and butane oil. The butane oil must then be baked out of the mixture or it will explode when it’s lit. The end result is a gooey plastic-like residue, which may be smoked in any number of styles of oil rigs or JUUL devices.

Vedder warned that the substance is not legally considered marijuana because it’s concentrated THC. He said that if a person is caught with 7.5 grams of the material, which is the weight of about three pennies, the person could be charged with a D-level felony.