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Butane, Drugs, Energy News, Hash oil explosion, Marijuana, Oil and gas, RDS, royal dutch shell, Shell
As marijuana becomes more and more legal, I’m extremely excited for coming contributory negligence lawsuits, and you should be too.
Contributory negligence is just the law’s way of assigning blame when the victim shares part of the blame in his or her own pain and sadness. “Yeah, I ran the red light, but you shouldn’t have been laying down in the middle of the road, humping a manhole cover.” Those lawsuits get really fun when the victim does something incredibly stupid… yet probably would have escaped unharmed if not for the actions of the person they are suing.
Pot is a drug almost designed by God to make those situations happen.
Take this Shell suit. Kevin Tveisme, a medical marijuana user, walks into a store looking for butane to make hash oil. Hash oil is, like, a wax that gets you high. Apparently you need butane to make it. Tyeisme says the odorless butane he bought from a Shell gas station was marketed as “safe” to be used as a solvent for “residential purposes.”
Tveisme and a friend blew themselves up. The friend died, and Tveisme suffered third-degree burns. Sadness all around. Tveisme is suing PacWest Energy, Shell Oil, Hai’s Shell Station, and 10 others.
Before medical marijuana was legalized, Tveisme wouldn’t have had much of a case. Sudafed doesn’t get sued when a meth lab blows up. Luckily for Tveisme, he had a medical marijuana card.
It’s also lucky that he lives in California. In some states, “pure contributory negligence” statutes dictate that the victim cannot recover if he is even minimally at fault. California is at the opposite end of the spectrum. In California, even if the victim is mainly at fault, he can still recover damages (though, reduced for the amount of fault).
Still, PacWest and Shell are certainly going to argue that Tveisme used their butane inappropriately, or that he made the hash oil wrong and that was the primary cause of the accident.
But these are the kinds of lawsuits that are going to happen more and more. The decriminalization of marijuana means that the travails of pot smokers will show up in court. Hang onto your butts.