What's the deal with synthetic cannabis?

At the beginning of June I attended a one day conference dedicated to the subject of New Psychoactive Substances (erroneously AKA “legal highs”). Now, I have to admit here that I really didn’t know very much about these, being more of a traditionalist when it comes to the ways people find to get themselves into an altered state. The little I did know about them was either anecdotal or came from media scare stories.

At the beginning of June I attended a one day conference dedicated to the subject of New Psychoactive Substances (erroneously AKA “legal highs”). Now, I have to admit here that I really didn’t know very much about these, being more of a traditionalist when it comes to the ways people find to get themselves into an altered state. The little I did know about them was either anecdotal or came from media scare stories. 

The day went the usual way of these things: a lot of different speakers representing a lot of different interests all bleating on about how bad the situation is and how something must be done. A number of different substances were described in detail, and a number of horror stories regarding their use were related. The biggie for the day, however, was synthetic cannabis.

The overriding theme was “how do we stop people taking this?” To which, in my view at least, the obvious answer is “we can’t, and we should spend our time on the more profitable pursuit of looking at minimising the chances of these sorts of event occurring in the first place”.  

It became clear quite quickly to me that nearly all of the substances discussed were copies, if you like, of existing substances. However, there are a couple of crucial differences between the originals and the copies. Firstly, they’re not the same, chemically speaking, as what they’re copying and therefore the effects won’t necessarily be the same as what they’re copying. Secondly, the majority of the problems reported with these substances seem to stem mainly from the fact that their potency and effects are not known until actually used. 

With synthetic cannabis, imagine the most potent weed you’ve ever smoked and then try to imagine that effect doubled or tripled. 

To be honest, I left the conference with two thoughts, neither of which was the intended “take home” message of the day: “these things sound great”, and “once everyone using them gets to grips with the rules around use, it’ll all be fine”. 

Here’s the thing: these substances don’t come with any sort of instruction regarding how much to use. This isn’t the fault of the producers or vendors: they’re forbidden by law to provide this information. So what happens is that users – these can be complete novices or seasoned dope smokers – rather than starting with a small amount and working up, go straight for broke and use the same amount as they would of “regular” weed. Now, as I say, for the most part, these are considerably more potent than even the top end weeds, so you’ll see where the problems are going to start. 

And there’s nothing actually that new about any of this. 

At this point, I’m going to ask you to indulge me on another history lesson. I won’t keep you too long, but this stuff is both interesting in itself and very relevant to the subject in hand.

In America in the early 1950’s, dope was regarded as something “deviant”. It’s difficult to know with any great authority what sort of numbers of people used dope, but it’s been fairly well documented as to what “types” of people used it, which is to say, predominantly ethnic minority groups. So for example, we have migrant workers from Mexico and Central/South America, Black people (particularly jazz musicians), Native Americans and so forth. But then in the 1940’s this began to change somewhat, and Caucasian/white users started to appear on the map (note: I’d say there were almost certainly white dope smokers a lot earlier than this, but they really were a hidden population). To begin with, white dope smokers were jazz musicians, “Beatniks” and other assorted bohemian arty types, but as is the way with these things, some of the trappings of the subculture were assimilated by “big culture” leading to an upsurge in the curious wanting to try it for themselves. 

This, in turn, led to a sharp upsurge in what we’d call “adverse reactions” or even “psychotic episodes” as people with absolutely no experience of weed started battering into it (as we say in Scotland).

So in 1953, an American sociologist called Howard Becker published an article called “Becoming a Marihuana User” based on some research he’d conducted. You can find and read this for yourself online, but the essence of it was that there are a set of “rules” to be followed in order to get pleasure from dope, and that pleasurable effects are not a given outcome. In later decades, novice users would be – so to speak – initiated into and shown the rules of dope smoking by their more experienced peers. However, in a situation where there were no experienced peers, the novice user had to work out the rules for themselves. And this was Becker’s point: once the rules are established, the number adverse reactions will begin to fall.

Just to reinforce the point, in 1967 Becker predicted pretty much the same thing about LSD. I don’t want to spend much time on this, but in a nutshell, acid hit “big culture” in a big way and as with dope, was accompanied by a wave of “adverse effects”, “psychotic reactions”, hospitalisations and all the rest of it. Becker’s case was that this was a relatively new substance and nobody really knew what the rules around use were, therefore once the rules had been established, the number of bad trips would fall. And so it was. 

And so it is with synthetic cannabis. Just as the rule book (how to use, when to use, where to use, and crucially, how much to use) for old school dope had to be “rewritten” for high potency weed strains, so the rule book for dope as we know it will need to be rewritten to accommodate the synthetic materials. Things will ultimately calm down.

One final point here: one of the speakers at the conference said that synthetic cannabis is a “huge” problem in the U.S. at which point yours truly asked if this was the case in Colorado. After some evasion and obfuscation, I got the answer that no, it’s not a problem in Colorado. Similarly, it’s not an issue in Holland either. So I’m going to leave you with a question: “what might this tell us?”