On November 5, 2013, an explosion from a hash-oil operation ripped through a Bellevue apartment building, severely injuring several residents—including 87-year-old Nan Campbell, the first female mayor of Bellevue, who broke her pelvis while fleeing the fire. Campbell later died in the hospital.

The US Attorney's Office has announced that one of the men involved, 33-year-old David Richard Schultz II, has been sentenced to nine years in prison. The other two defendants will be sentenced in July.

When Dominic Holden originally wrote about the Bellevue explosion, he noted that the US Attorney's press conference tilted slightly away from the typical "rah-rah drug-war" tone, with then-US Attorney Jenny Durkan saying that we're not facing an "either-or" choice between prohibition and regulation, but that "it will be up to the state to make regulations” about hash-oil production.

Which is to say: The public might be safer if we legalize and regulate this market rather than continuing to chase it more deeply underground.

That shift in tone from the feds was echoed at Schultz's sentencing hearing, as US District Judge James L. Robart said:

“We need to educate the public that the legalization of marijuana in the state of Washington is not unlimited and it does not include the manufacturing of homemade hash oil.”

Which is to say: The public should be safer now that we've legalized and regulated a drug market—note the emphasis on "education" rather than "prosecution"—rather than chasing it more deeply underground.

These are tiny rhetorical moves, but in the slow unknitting of the century-long catastrophe known as prohibition, every loosened knot counts.