When a case involving marijuana wax first landed on Dakota County, Minn., Sheriff Tim Leslie's desk, he called upon Google to assist in the investigation. “I had never heard of it,” Leslie said. That was two weeks ago. On Wednesday, state law enforcement officials and St. Cloud and Duluth police chiefs gathered to warn about what they're calling a dangerous new trend in drug use. A highly concentrated form of marijuana, wax contains two to six times more THC, marijuana's active ingredient, than the drug in its original form.
Authorities have tied marijuana wax to the death of a St. Cloud woman and a pair of nonfatal overdoses in Duluth. Advocates of marijuana legalization said such incidents could be curbed by legalization and regulation. Similar in consistency to honey, marijuana wax is made by cooking ground marijuana leaves in a cylinder soaked with butane to yield a substance that can be smoked using water pipes or vaporizer pens or added to food. A more intense physical and psychological high results.