The War on Drugs .2b

Synthetic Cannabis, also known as K2 or Spice. It's smoked in the same way ordinary cannabis is, but the effects can vary wildly.

Producing synthetic weed is relatively easy. You don't need to have land, you don't need to have a very large space if you're doing it in the city, you don't need to have a very expensive lighting infrastructure & all the things that you need to do to produce weed. All you need is to secure certain chemicals & then you get whatever herb you want from the supermarket & just spray it with it.

There's a kind of specialised niche market for it, that haven't been well-served by regular weed. The trade-off is that, there is no mechanism for quality control. There's actually no accountability. It's very easy for one of these smaller, decentralized producers to make a mistake in one of the batches that they're making, & it translate to situations where you have these network of overdoses that happen in the cities. If you multiply natural cannabis like, a thousandfold, this huge hit on the brain.

The Spice gives a much bigger high because it's really tightly bound to our cannabinoid receptor. THC actually doesn't bind so fully to our cannabinoid receptors. Natural cannabis does not produce the toxicity in the body that the synthetics do. These synthetics, they're very potent, very powerful & they last a long time. So they can induce liver damage. You hear cases like heart damage. Also, they induce seizures & rarely will you see seizures with natural weed.

Initially, there was this idea that there will be no market for cannabinoids because the cannabis market already existed. It was very well-established. So, you ask yourself, why mess with something that already works? Now, the enormous portion of the 800 new psychoactive substances are synthetic cannabinoids.
The flood of new products has spawned a network of chemists who are working to identify emerging synthetic analogs & stay a step ahead of tragedy.

That there are so many analogs today is no coincidence. They circle back, as most things with synthetics do, to Alexander & Ann Shulgin, who in 1991, published a road map of modern psychoactives. Today PiHKAL & it's 1997 counterpart, TiHKAL are considered gospel.
There are very few scientific documents that are like PiHKAL & TiHKAL that tell the story of the development of the scientist, of the development of their ideas, but also give a very detailed understanding of the science itself. So detailed that you can actually replicate the experiment he conducted, create the chemicals that he synthesized yourself, if you follow the instructions that are presented.

The Shulgin's books demonstrated a new path to sharing chemical knowledge & understanding. That path led inevitably to a superhighway. The internet produced a globalization of information & globalized the chemical supply trade & democratised it in a way that had never existed previously. So, now, somebody can get pretty much everything human beings have ever written about a certain chemical in a few moments on their phone, if they want to.

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