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Comment by berndi | Hacker News Reader

You would be lucky if any actual THC is involved, nowadays its mostly synthetic semi-legal cannabinoids in the black market, at least in Germany (apparently even in some coffee shops in the Netherlands). The market desperately needs to be regulated.

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At least in the USA. It will involve thc, just not the thc molecule your expecting. The thc everyone knows and loves is thc 9, this is the psychoactive thc that most gets us "high". The hack occurs from converting CBD (derived from legal hemp plants) to thc. Thc derived from CBD comes as a mixture primarily of thc 8 (call it diet thc gives you a very light buzz or high without the paranoid ) and a minority of this mixture is thc 9 (the thc component that gets you high). Prior to the introduction of converted CBD to thc8/thc9 a kilo of thc9 oil was around $6 to 9 thousand. The converted CBD THC d8/d9 kilos have plummeted the price down to $2-4 thousand

I can anecdotally confirm this, in the US there is a lot of CBD distillate/isolate being turned into delta-8 and delta-9 THC distillate which is then used in edibles, carts, and (speculating here based on the recent price) shatter/concentrates. I’m unsure about the concentrates, but it continues to get cheaper, nearly approaching the price per gram of weed (which shouldn’t be possible?)

A friend of mine has a CBD processing lab and CBD distillate crashed to about $1,000/L in 2019-2020, and hasn’t recovered afaik but I haven’t asked him in a while.

This is utter nonsense scaremongering.

Synthetic cannabinoid products exist, but they’re not commonly sold as anything but synthetic cannabinoids.

This isn’t scaremongering where synthetic drugs are commonly sold in shops where they’re competing with non-synthetic drugs sold on the street, and constantly dodging regulation by reformulating every time a formula is classified.

It is scaremongering. Synthetic cannabinoids are commonly sold, but they are not commonly sold as cannabis as berndi suggests.

Where I live in Germany it may not be the norm but I also came across it several times. Nasty stuff if you suspect something different

Here in the UK years back, unscrupulous growers sprayed the silicate-based additive used in road paintmarkings for reflectivity, as when applied to the buds it made it look like they were of incredibly high quality.

This was not scaremongering, I bought some myself. Twice.

I have connections with people in the old synthetic cannabinoid industry and know how cheap that shit is to buy and how easy it is to order from China, so I don't see in any way it being a stretch of the imagination to envisage people growing poor quality weed and adding to it.

Sounds like a dispute over facts. Bring URLs to defend your case.

Hard to prove a negative. It’s not like this is prevalent enough that there’d be large scale testing of weed going on.

I’m not sure the distinction matters to lots of customers. “Synthetic cannabinoids” as a term suggests to customers that they’re buying something like synthetic cannabis, even if it has significantly different effects, and even if it’s chemically nothing like actual cannabinoids. The only regulation (at least in parts of the US where I’ve looked into it) is banning them where possible, but like whack-a-mole new ones spring up, with new compounds and the same implication that it’s ~weed.

I'm sad to say its anything but scaremongering.

I don't know about the US, but in Germany its common practice to spray either legal CBD weed or regular weed with synthetic cannabinoids and sell it as "Haze". The same goes for hash.

This practice has been widely publicized and is regularly confirmed through tests (see drug checking websites). A quick Google search will demonstrate the abundant availability of the raw materials (fake hash, legal CBD weed, synthetic cannabinoids, fake packaging). Besides this objective evidence, it is both my personal experience and common knowledge on Germany's streets that laced weed is the norm at this point.

Its obvious that this would happen when there is no regulation but strong financial incentives to produce this crap. Many customers don't care or explicitly look for the much stronger high that these laced products provide.

Is this synthetic stuff what is called "spice" in the UK? I read horror stories about the effects of spice and saw it first hand while volunteering at the homeless shelter

Actually, Spice proper used a fairly benign synthetic cannabinoid. It was only after the market showed promise and after they were banned that slew of cheaper knock-offs that became commonly known as 'Spice' (despite having different brand names) came onto the illicit market, using other synthetics that were cheaper/easier to produce, but far-less tested, and deployed and sold in higher strengths by people who were far more cynical.

Germans gotta stand up for rational drug policy, yo. It's insane.

All it takes is one state: Berlin, Bremen, Hamburg — come on people!

----- Edit: Bremen has a famous digital debt clock showing how much money the state owes. Perhaps there should be a similar clock showing how much money the state loses due to the illegality of cannabis (combination of criminal justice costs and expected tax receipts). That might spur the conservative rationalists.

There’s so much weed in the US due to legal states providing cover for black market grow ops that it just isn’t worth it to adulterate weed.

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