What's the buzz?: Synthetic marijuana, K2, Spice, JWH-018.

Thank you for taking the time to read our K2 Spice introduction piece and welcome readers from Maia Szalavitz's TIME Healthland site. Scroll to the bottom of the post to see the comments she's referring to.

If you're interested in our other K2 Spice, JWH 018, Herbal Incense, or other legal highs, click here.

Finally, if you're interested in our thoughts on David Nichols (Dr. Dave), a chemist and pharmacologist at Purdue University, please go here. click here.

My area of expertise is natural goods. Indigenous societies realized that plants and fungus contain substances that cause altered states of consciousness, which led to their most widespread usage in religious rites. While we frequently identify these naturally occurring substances with hallucinogens, marijuana, or Cannabis sativa, is undoubtedly the most widely used natural product today. Cannabis, which is native to India and China, is increasingly being decriminalized across the world, owing to its therapeutic and medical effects on multiple sclerosis, cancer, and AIDS.

I've seen reports of so-called "synthetic marijuana" being sold on the internet in the previous several months, with claims mostly originating from England and Germany, as well as Kansas, Missouri, and Arizona in the United States. Indeed, according to today's St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a measure has been introduced in the Missouri House Public Safety Committee to add this substance to the state's list of illicit narcotics.

I was curious as to why someone would go to the bother of creating synthetic marijuana since the genuine thing is so easily grown all over the world, albeit illegally in most places.

So what is it?

"Fake weed"

Synthetic marijuana, often known as K2 or Spice, is a herbal drug sold as incense or smoking material in the United States that is still legal. The goods include one or more synthetic chemicals that operate similarly to & Delta9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the principal psychoactive ingredient of marijuana.

The most prevalent component identified in these items is the eponymous JWH-018, which was initially synthesized by Prof John W Huffman, a well-known Clemson University organic chemist. An analog of CP-47,497, a cannabinoid produced by Pfizer over 20 years ago, is discovered in Spice products sold in Germany.

JWH-018, also known as (1-pentyl-3-(1-naphthoyl)indole) or Naphthalen-1-yl-(1-pentylindol-3-yl)methanone, is one of more than 100 indoles, pyrroles, and indenes created by the Huffman laboratory to develop cannabimimetic, or medications that imitate the action of cannabinoids like T The fundamental purpose of these investigations was to develop pharmacological probes to 1) discover the structure-activity connections of these compounds and 2) elucidate the physiological function of the two subtypes of cannabinoid receptors that humans have: CB1 and CB2.

What does it do?

Professor Billy R. Martin's laboratory at the Medical College of Virginia handled a lot of the biological testing of Dr. Huffman's chemicals. Dr. Martin, a North Carolina native, was a titan in the industry who regrettably passed away two summers ago at the far too early age of 65. (obituary).

JWH-018 binds to the psychoactive CB1 receptor with roughly 4 times the potency of naturally occurring THC, according to a report published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence in 2000 by the Huffman and Martin groups. Unlike THC, which binds to CB1 and CB2 receptors with about equal affinity, JWH-018 has a 3-fold selectivity for CB1 receptors.

What exactly does this imply? Well, cannabis' psychotropic effects are mostly mediated through the CB1 receptor. The CB2 receptor, on the other hand, appears to be more engaged in pain and inflammation, making it a hotbed of novel pharmaceutical development.

So, while JWH-018 has four times the potency of THC for CB1 receptors in an isolated receptor binding research, how it compares to regular marijuana relies on other aspects like the relative amount in the product, its combustion stability, and how it's metabolized in the body, among others.

"We don't know much about it, but it's going to murder someone," says the narrator.

I'm not going out on a limb to suggest that Missouri Rep. Ward Frantz's comment is a little insane right now, but I may be wrong. There have been no human toxicological investigations, and the indole moiety of the medication dosage raises the likelihood of serotonin syndrome, a potentially lethal but somewhat uncommon condition. Otherwise, when compared to other drug problems in America's heartland, such as methamphetamine, this fear is greatly exaggerated.