In Quest for a 'Legal High,' Chemists Outfox the Law
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
We've made the safest drugs illegal, only to open up a vast market in utter unknowns. Better the devil you know.
This is the problem.. They've also made alcohol, which is supposedly more dangerous than, for example, cannabis or MDMA, legal. Nicotine is also dangerous and legal.
Also women who use nicotine gum and patches during the early stages of pregnancy face an increased risk of having babies with birth defects, according to a study of around 77,000 pregnant women in Denmark. The study found that women who use nicotine-replacement therapy in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy have a 60 percent greater risk of having babies with birth defects, compared to women who are non-smokers.
Nicotine is a very powerful constrictor and decreases the flow of blood to the periphery of the body. It has been measured and found that there is a 29 percent blood-flow decrease to the thumb after smoking two cigarettes.
Interestingly, THC seems to have the exact opposite effect promoting programmed cell death rather than inhibiting it [2]. This may lead to a low risk of lung cancer when smoking marijuana as compared to a high risk of lung cancer when smoking cigarettes [3].
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Toxicology
[1] http://toxsci.oxfordjournals.org/content/79/1/1.full
[2] http://www.jci.org/articles/view/37948#ABS
[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05...
Many people roll tobacco and marijuana into joints. So this probably isn't true in many cases. It would be true if marijuana were to be smoked on it's own in a joint.
(also, pot burning still produces tar)
While not itself carcinogenic, it is incredibly hard to separate nicotine from cancer, unfortunately.
[1]: http://www.homebrewtalk.com/wiki/index.php/Tej
Also, alcohol generally isn't that dangerous, unless people are driving and/or concentrating it via distillation.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/nov/01/alcohol-more-h...
"The maximum possible harm score was 100 and the minimum zero. Overall, alcohol scored 72 – against 55 for heroin and 54 for crack. The most dangerous drugs to their individual users were ranked as heroin, crack and then crystal meth. The most harmful to others were alcohol, heroin and crack in that order."
Although, I feel these scores are somewhat dependent on the relative prevalences of these substances. If we had as many meth addicts as alcoholics in the UK the picture could be somewhat different. Yet there's no denying that alcohol is a relatively evil drug.
"When drunk in excess, alcohol damages nearly all organ systems. It is also connected to higher death rates and is involved in a greater percentage of crime than most other drugs, including heroin."
And, have you seen what a lifetime abuser of alcohol looks like around 50 (if they, or their liver, survive that long).
Seriously - anyone who argues for legalization of alcohol because it's "safer" than something like marijuana doesn't have much of a leg to stand on.
Here are some therapeutic indexes for common drugs [0]:
Heroin - 6
Alcohol - 10
Cocaine - 15
MDMA - 16
LSD - ~1000
THC - > 1000
Alcohol has very dangerous acute effects and it's very possible to overdose on alcohol. Compare to THC where a toxic dose is on the level of 15g. Assuming that THC is approximately 5% of the content of the cannabis [1] this would mean smoking 300 grams of cannabis (with 100% absorption by the body). That would make for ~600 joints (with a joint having about half a gram of cannabis) to get to a level of toxicity.
So relatively speaking, Alcohol (at least in the short term) is quite dangerous.
[0] PDF - http://web.cgu.edu/faculty/gabler/toxicity%20Addiction%20off...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_%28drug%29#Potency
If you want to evaluate danger there are other factors that need to be considered -- i.e. people "safely" high on MDMA may dehydrate, and people "safely" high on LSD may jump off of a bridge.
Sober people may jump off a bridge too. Should we outlaw sobriety? The "man on LSD thinks he can fly and jumps out of window" myth is largely that: a myth. If I recall, it was inspired by a real story of LSD experimentation on some kind of federal agent, who was given a good dose of LSD without his knowledge, thought he was going mad, and threw himself out of a window to make it end.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/10/24/b...
Long story short, a student took LSD on a class trip, which involved a visit to the Capilano Suspension Bridge. The student didn't jump off the bridge, but climbed a railing on an observation deck and fell.
More than once I have been convinced (even though I knew I had put a little piece of paper on my tongue) that what was happening to me was outside of the context of 'tripping.'
One time I would have committed suicide had I been convinced that it would have worked. I was completely under the impression that it would only be painful and not really do anything but sort of hit a 'reset' button into what was at the time essentially hell.
In the case of alcohol, besides what others have said, it also causes (IMHO) much more severe social problems than cannabis and mdma do: a lot of people die from alcohol related causes every year (accidents, overdose, etc), a lot of people are injured every year because of alcohol (street fights, domestic violence, accidents, etc), a lot of property damage is caused by drunk people.. Alcohol is, in my opinion, much more damaging than at least cannabis and E.
I personally know one person who died because of long-term alcohol abuse. A friend of my brothers died of alcohol poisoning not that long ago. An old school friend almost died of pneumonia a few years ago because he passed out on the street after drinking. Countless people I or my family knew have died in alcohol-related car accidents over the years. I've seen more than a handful of peoples family or work lives be destroyed because of alcohol. I'm sorry, but I cannot agree that alcohol generally isn't that dangerous. For the record, I also know or have known people who regularly abuse or did abuse both cannabis and mdma and not one of them or their families have suffered any lasting negative effects due to it. In my opinion (and I won't hold it against you if you disagree, but theres no way I'll change my mind), alcohol is much worse than thc and mdma. (I don't mean to say that they're not bad, just that alcohol, which is legal, is much worse).
I encountered a lot of drunk street people while working at a public library for several years, including a guy who had to have his stomach pumped because he (initially, discreetly) drank way too much vodka on a bench outside. I know that hard liquor can be very destructive, both in the short and long term.
(My main point was how difficult it is to control alcohol production, that was just an aside.)
That's what I get for posting just before bed, I guess - too much ambiguous phrasing.
The distillation is also where organized crime comes in, whether it's the mob or moonshiners and rum-runners. Making hard cider is easy, but running a still and distribution ring is probably beyond most people, and cider, beer, and wine aren't concentrated enough for smuggling.
This is how it was explained to me during my "Drugs and Human Behavior" class 5 years ago at Drexel.
But that's not good enough for some people. They want to incarcerate those who produce or use anything that might be harmful when used irresponsibly. Either that or they want a piece of the action.
It's quite possible to use ordinary food and vitamins irresponsibly, with great physical and psychological harm. So naturally some people want to play the "give me a cut or go to jail" game with those substances as well.
It seems that these people won't be happy until every human activity is either prohibited or mandatory. Freedom is not an option with them.
So now you have the insane situation of bureaucrats racing to ban new things, and "meta-chemists" racing to devise new things that haven't been banned yet. What a waste.
Read the forum posts about this stuff online; it's funny, there's a backlash of enthusiasts calling vendors like this guy "slash and burn" outfits for popularizing chemicals and getting them banned.
Drug legislation that I am familiar with (all of them Western European) is designed to cope with this process. There is usually a 'drug act' which prohibits all materials on a secondary list, and this list is then to be adjust by 'the minister' or similar, which in practice means that there is a ministry that can fairly easily (within a few weeks) add substances that are banned. It's cat and mouse, true, but the 'war' (between chemists and the government) had largely calmed down by the late 1990's. I guess when new forms of drugs come into vogue, that variations pop up, but these too will be driven into the margins in a few years. (typically after a while the processes for manufacturing become so difficult or dependent on expensive/hard to get precursors that it get out of reach for amateur chemists, at which the police call it 'good enough'.)
For those interested, the Uncle Fester books (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Preisler) are readily available online and very interesting from a 'chemistry hacker' point of view (I don't know anything about chemistry but I still enjoyed reading them very much, for the 'underground glamour' aspect and the inventiveness. Don't take any of the legal advice in the books though, the guy may be a great chemist but on other things he has some strange ideas.).
As a side note, is this 'meow meow' really popular across Europe? I don't know much about it but it seems to me that it's only widely spread in the UK (then again I get all my information on 'the scene' from journal articles and government reports so I may just be lagging in information).
However, the Federal Analog Act has been notably tested twice in court to criminalize new substances and the Act was not upheld the first time and was upheld the second time. So it is not of yet well established and it is suppliers that are at risk of prosecution, not consumers.
Quote from the pharma crime director of Israel's Ministry of Health: "Israel, to my sad dismay, is a major leader in designer drugs for this reason."
Except, at least in the case of the two teenagers who died in the UK, it was in the news a few months ago that autopsies later showed that they didn't actually have any mephedrone in their systems.
By the way, I know a few people who have taken mephedrone and the general consensus is that its bad: side-effects appear to include not being able to sleep for the next few days, depression, agitation and loss of concentration. I would very strongly advize people to NOT take mephedrone.
On the other hand, I suspect that over regulation by the US FDA has killed a large number of people by making it too difficult for new medicines to get to market.
Any choice in the prohibition/regulation debate is going result in some dead people. The goal is to find the point on the spectrum with the least number of deaths. I don't know exactly where that is, but I do feel over regulation is destroying Mexico and other parts of South America and we should move towards less regulation.
No lives will be saved by this policy, which isn't surprising since the goal is not harm mitigation (despite the rhetoric of government officials) but keeping people from consuming psychoactive substances that make them feel good.
Are far as FDA regulation vs. liability is concerned - you cannot outlaw the production of drugs which will kill some people. All you can do is provide incentives for drug makers to research the risks of their products as thoroughly as possible. Drugs are still approved by the FDA that kill people despite the fact that the FDA approval process is stupidly expensive.
There is no perfect world. The goal of policy should be to reduce risk in a cost-effective way. Harm reduction should be balanced with the corresponding damage regulation does to life-saving medical research. After we weigh various policies we may find that the status quo is suboptimal.
As rational people we should keep our minds on the right trade-offs and the right metrics. Many people are comfortable with the idea of a regulatory state regardless of its effectiveness - it makes them feel safe. We should not let these emotions of safety influence our thinking overmuch.
" ....the goal is not harm mitigation (despite the rhetoric of government officials) but keeping people from consuming psychoactive substances that make them feel good."
Supporting evidence? Those are some dramatic claims you are making.
I felt good with morphine in my system after an operation, and felt a lot worse without it once the effects wore off. Also, a nice cold beer is just the ticket after a long week. No danger of those being banned anytime soon.
Meanwhile, some kids at Georgetown University face 20 years in prison for making an illegal but less intense version of a drug which is legal in 47 states: http://reason.com/blog/2010/10/26/the-georgetown-drug-lab-bu....
A huge short-term risk from most recreational drugs is simply not knowing what is in them, especially if they come in a pill, powder, or liquid form. And that is an effect of prohibition, not the drugs themselves. Of course government officials will pontificate on the horrors of drugs every time prohibition kills another kid that doesn't know what is in his ecstasy.
This seems like the kind of "illegal" that mostly matters if you hang a sign out your window and start doing business.
It's worth noting though that there's really no intellectually valid argument in support of mephedrone or MDAI or whatever-the-hell-else they're selling --- if you're going to make meth, cocaine, and LSD illegal, this stuff clearly should be too.
Needless to say, this is quite an interesting game of cat and mouse and just goes further to illustrate the futility of prohibition.
Cool! How did you set up the double-blind study?
A common experience is one in which people say "I forgot that I was something, then I realized I was something but I wasn't sure what that was." They then had to figure out the world again as the drug wore off. I think it's foolish to group something this psychologically powerful within the same group as something that "just gets you high" like alcohol or pot.
This has been speculated to have happened as a result of international co-operation to make sassafras oil, the main precursor of MDMA less available, and generally crack down on the production of one of the worlds most popular synthetic narcotic drugs. This almost certainly had a lot to do with the 2008 summer olympics in china, where a lot of production of precursors and final products occurs.
The law of unintended consequences rears its head again. Prevent the supply of one drug and the demand switches to a newer more dangerous drug, whose supply you have no ability to control.
[1] http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/drugs/acmd1/acmd-c...