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Comment by wjnc | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to the world of designer drugs [1]. If its molecular structure is changed, you can't really call it synthetic marijuana anymore.

The 'solution' is simple, but politically unfeasible. (Ok, if it's unfeasible, it's not a solution.) Legalize several well-tested drugs (cannabis with max. THC, MDMA, ...) where the side effects to public health and safety are acceptable. Outlaw the rest. So strange that alcohol and smoking are legal, while many lesser evils are illegal.

It should tunnel the masses into the legalized produce (they are looking for, and getting, the thrill anyway), while bringing markets back to normal. As a added benifit, normal markets bring less criminal attention and need less government intervention. (For the Europeans: VAT as a bonus.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designer_drug

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There's no need to ban the rest.

Prohibition is what is causing this problem in the first place.

If you legalize marijuana, would be no profit to be made in coming up with new synthetics and without a profit motive, only researchers would do it.

For example, since the end of alcohol prohibition, how many cases are there of people being blinded by methyl alcohol from bathtub gin?

True. And a natural (economic) consequence as well. Although 'legalize everything and advertise what works' seems even more politically unfeasible, than 'only unban what's safe'.

It came from an argument (in my head ;) based on the proposition that you would ideally internalize adverse effects in the price of a good. So alcohol-users would pay for alcohol related mischief, LSD for LSD, etc. You would need a product specific VAT for the larger categories. Can't really implement that for N designer drugs, so I thought 'ban the rest for easy of acceptance'. Your effect is more beautiful though.

the synthetic cannabinoids are popular in part because because smoking marijuana will cause a failed UA. when it hit the shelves my friends on probation were smoking it to 'beat' the system.

The first person that I ever saw smoke synthetic was someone who was recently released from prison and had to worry about urinalysis.

> Outlaw the rest.

Study the rest. The ban has brought many bad things, but it's also brought good alternatives. The 2C family, for example, arose because of the ban on LSD/mescaline/mushrooms, and is considered to have similar safety profile as the originals. Certain benzofurans (5/6-APB, APDB, MAPB, EAPB, etc) receive bigger love than MDMA because of fewer side effects and because they "bring back the magic" that prolonged MDMA use tends to dull out.

imo, the 2C family is old enough to not be considered a designer drug anymore.

Legalise/Regulate all the drugs. Given the choice between a 'traditional' drug like Coke, MDMA and LSD and some new alphabet soup drug with no history of human use, very few people will choose the thing they haven't heard about. If there is one thing we have learned since the war on drugs it is that prohibition does not work.

The 2C-x drugs certainly did not arise from the prohibition of older psychedelics. The man who invented them (along with MDMA earlier) was Alexander Shulgin. It was his life's work to discover and test these new drugs. I seriously doubt it was in reaction to prohibition.

2C-x as far as we know does not have a similar safety profile to the drugs you have mentioned in general. LSD is known to be safe in at least 1000x the normal dose. The highest dose in the literature for 2C-B is 5x the normal dose. Certain drugs in the series such as 2C-P have a very low safety margin[1].

[1] https://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal036...

I'm not sure that Shulgin actually invented MDMA did he?

Certainly he dedicated his life to discovery and testing of all sorts of interesting things, and his legacy is enormous, but I didn't think that one was his invention.

No, he rediscovered it and I believe he was the first one to try it.

>LSD is known to be safe in at least 1000x the normal dose

I'd love to see a citation for that

Erowid's got a MSDS for LSD that puts the LD50 at 50mg/kg, so for a 150 pound person, that works out to 3.4 grams.

A normal dose of LSD is measured in micrograms, so the 1000x statement is at least very conservative.

http://www.lycaeum.org/research/researchpdfs/1977_griggs_1.p...

https://www.erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_death.shtml

Ok, well maybe not 'safe', but people have taken that amount and survived. It is certainly not something I would recommend.

Thank you, I saw the erowid page before I posted and only read up to "more than 100 times a normal moderate dose of LSD" before I asked for a citation. Well, at least we know one shouldn't take 3200x the normal dose ;)

if the ld50 is anywhere near that of mice or rats, even a 10000x dose could be non lethal.

They gave an elephant a very large dose, and it died, but they don't know if it was the LSD or the activity or the medical treatment that killed it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tusko#The_elephant_on_LSD

> "Tusko" was also the name of a male Indian elephant at the Oklahoma City Zoo. On August 3, 1962,[4] researchers from the University of Oklahoma injected (human use involves oral ingestion) 297 mg of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) to him, which is over 1,000 times the dose typical of human recreational use. Within five minutes he collapsed to the ground and one hour and forty minutes later he died. It is believed that the LSD was the cause of his death, although some speculate that the drugs the researchers used in an attempt to revive him may have contributed to his death.

But at the same time we have things like nbomes which kill people and we don't know why.

And then the other big issue with safety is when you get a white powder it's impossible to tell what it is without testing. People snort something they think is one drug, turns out they just took a massive of another.

We do indeed.

I don't reckon many people would bother with them if they could buy LSD though.

I find some novel psychedelics interesting, specifically anything that might not last quite so long.

> The 2C family, for example, arose because of the ban on LSD/mescaline/mushrooms, and is considered to have similar safety profile as the originals.

For what's it's worth many people think they have a higher risk of causing HPPD.

FYI - the APBs are generally thought to have a lot higher affinity for the 5HT2b receptor than MDMA has. Activity at this receptor has been associated with heart-valve problems in the past, so it's probably even more important not to use them regularly than with MDMA.

That said, when they were legal here, they were rather excellent...

That's misleading, MDMA itself has very little affinity for 5HT2b, but its action on the SERT dumps loads of serotonin which displays, by definition, pretty high affinity for it (Ki < 10, according to this https://www.acnp.org/g4/GN401000039/Ch039.html). So even if the chemical doesn't show significant activity on 5HT2b in vitro, in vivo it actually does.

Fair enough! You're likely more informed than I am in these matters.

So here's a question - I had assumed that the SERT-dumping action of MDMA took place in the brain and did not spread masses of serotonin to the rest of the body, is this correct? Or does MDMA trigger serotonin floods that do get out to the system in general?

The drug (be it MDMA or xAPB) is swimming around the whole system and is therefore free to act on the 5HT2b receptors present in the heart itself, which could promote valve mutation. Is this true for the serotonin as well?

The substance reaches wherever blood gets to, with exceptions when crossing the brain barrier. Most of the 5-HT receptors are in the brain though.

It's not true for serotonin. Serotonin is to be released, taken back and metabolized locally, in and around the synapse. It doesn't travel around the body, at least in significant amounts, as hormones do.

I think you can call it synthetic marijuana - that's what it's mimicking. The synthetic cannabinoids target the same receptors, the products are targeted at the same market and used in the same way as the real thing.

But I agree, legalise a few relatively well understood drugs and this whole problem mostly goes away. There are a small number of people genuinely interested in experimenting with new compounds, most simply want to use a few of the popular drugs without getting in trouble, losing their job etc, or don't have a way of getting what they se as the 'real' stuff.

And the experimenters aren't usually interested in cannabinoids.

Synthetic Marijuana would be synthesizing THC in a lab. They are synthesizing something similar to THC in a lab, something that doesn't exist in marijuana.

Marinol is Syntheic Marijuana, these designer drugs like "Spice" and "K2" are not.

>> Synthetic Marijuana would be synthesizing THC in a lab.

That would be synthetically produced THC, not synthetic marijuana. We're talking about a product designed to mimic cannabis, using synthetic cannabinoids. I don't think it's unreasonable to call it synthetic cannabis.

If you want to call it "fake cannabis" that's fine, but then we need to distinguish it from the people just selling oregano and calling it weed...

-- edit --

Incidentally, on the UK RC scene these things are referred to as 'Blends', as they are often blends of multiple cannabinoids infused into plant material, which is often a blend of different plants (marshmallow and damiana are popular). Further, 'reputable' vendors of these blends publish what substances they've used and how much by weight. This is very unlikely to be the case with a bag of "Atomic Fallout" or whatever the f*ck it is from your local gas station or head shop though.

Some people buy the cannabinoids pure and make their own blends, or vapourise them directly, which is a very dodgy and OD-prone business, but at least then you know roughly hat you're getting and how much.

the proper terminology is "synthetic cannabinoid." semantics are very important here. synthetic marijuana is an oxymoron IMO.

>> the proper terminology is "synthetic cannabinoid."

For the cannabinoids themselves, certainly. Now, what's a good way to refer to the products that are sold in head shops and all sorts of other places? They are a blend of plant materials laced with a one or more synthetic cannabinoids.

Synthetic cannabis does not seem wrong here.

They aren't using the word in the medical sense. "Devised, arranged, or fabricated for special situations to imitate or replace usual realities." The product is made to look like ganja and to be used as an alternative to ganja. s_baby points out the correct term is analog.

It boggles the mind how we have outlawed plants and fungi whose safety and effects have been known and proven over and over again for thousands of years. Plenty of highly poisonous plants that can (and do) kill people are not illegal to grow in your garden.

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