The story is about how the Chinese apparently took six years to get round corrupt members of the communist party who were protecting the drugs manufacturing operation. … Probably coincidence
The synthetic cannaboids and/or ‘bath salts’ have been so destructive to the health of their users, I can’t help but feel they’re really the product of a conspiracy to prove to American society drugs are bad, by flooding the streets and convenience store counters with substances that destroy people, and aren’t even all that much fun for their users.
Comparing fake pot, meth, and mystery NBOMes with the safer classics like weed and shrooms/LSD is like comparing drinking rubbing alcohol and huffing paint with enjoying a fine scotch and cigar…
I prefer Strawberry Cough.
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This seems relevant to your interests: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/27/raver-drug-ketamine-control-plan-at-un-condemned-as-potential-disaster
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Looks at all of the marijuana cards his friends here in California have…
Looks at all the pot dispensaries in the East Bay who deliver…
Haven’t we in many places?
As someone who has suffered from bouts of anxiety and panic attacks acutely at various stressful points in his life (and done more than a year of therapy when younger to learn to control it), I’ve found meditation works pretty well as a de-stresser as well.
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Meditation. It’s better than sitting around doing nothing.
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Please stop calling this crap 'synthetic marijuana."
It’s not.
None of these chemicals occur in marijuana. They are similar to various natural cannabinoids that occur in marijuana, and might thus be fairly dubbed “synthetic cannabinoids.”
But even that is misleading, since ‘cannabinoids’ are not all one class of chemical; they’re a bunch of different chemicals, many structurally unrelated to one another.
What they have in common with each other (and with the endogenous cannabinoids in humans) is that they all affect the same class of neural receptors (but often in very different ways).
These synthetics are usually ‘similar-but-not-identical’ to natural cannabinoids, and they affect the same class of receptors, but they’re not the same chemicals, and they are not any sense “synthetic marijuana”.
[Prescription Marinol is synthetic THC, exactly the same chemical as in natural cannabis, but manufactured synthetically — so it’s tempting to call Marinol “synthetic marijuana”, but it’s still incomplete, as its single-ingredient formula cannot match the effects of the full cohort of cannabinoids found in the herb.]
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Many people use the term “synthetic” mistakenly when they mean something more like “ersatz”.
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This is a feature, not a bug, for the drug warriors. Without horrible stories of ODs, how are they going to convince people that drugs are evil? It’s not an accident, or even just ignorance or stupidity, that every article about these designer drug ODs has a picture of actual marijuana accompanying it.
Sure, but why would the average person be persuaded of anything by this? There are many legal things some people do which can be fatal. I cannot imagine, for instance, people generating hype and forcing water cooler discussions about basejumping. These poor attempts at legislating common sense and protecting people from their own decisions have never demonstrated any impressive results with regards to public or personal safety. Your average user of even hard addictive drugs is probably at more of a risk of being killed by police than by their vice of choice.
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Wouldn’t exotic genetic engineering be both more trouble and greater risk(once you deploy something in a suitable virus, horizontal gene transfer into the wild and/or legal crops is more or less just a matter of time), as well as more costly; than just doing some ‘catch and release’?
Doctor some amount of the product you seize(one of the more dangerous organophosphate pesticides might be a good choice, reasonably plausible to find in plant material produced under dodgy quality standards; but also quite likely to give the user some nasty neurological sequelae.) and re-introduce it to the market rather than destroying it. No need to overthink the problem.
I prefer quietus. Have you ever tasted that stuff, amazing!
Politicians are still living off the massive, banked profits of reefer-madness 60 years after the fact. It’s easy pickin’s and they will do and say anything to perpetuate those myths which allow them to belch a few trigger-words for easy applause.
And you know what? I almost don’t blame them. When the populace is so easily enraptured and ready to use drugs as a method of signifying their well-adjusted and totally-all-grown-up-now-can’t-you-see adulthood amongst one another, why the fuck wouldn’t a bunch of corrupt and manipulative pied pipers jump at every easy opportunity to lead that particular conga-line?
Because, like most things political, there is no objective reason for it?
They’re still controlled substances being distributed thru non-legal channels. The disclaimers are meaningless.
Here’s an article on Ttokkyo Labs - it likely contains a lot of bullshit, but it’s a decent read on the assumption there’s some truth in it:
https://thinksteroids.com/articles/ttokkyo-laboratories/
Thankfully the Canadians stepped in.
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This is a tautology. The DEA had them made controlled substances under the pretext that they were being sold as drugs for human consumption. With the sale of drugs vs supplements vs food vs cleaning supplies etc, legally, what they are marketed for is entirely relevant. For example, if one buys butane as an inhalant, they might be confronted with a label stating that it is unlawful to use the product in a manner inconsistent with its labelling. So if they get into trouble for doing something stupid, the user gets punished, not the manufacturer, distributor, or store where they bought it. They don’t close Home Depot for selling drugs if you decide to use them as such, because that is not the claimed use they are being offered for.
The personal responsibility angle here is that when something is sold as not being for human consumption, it is the individual buyers practical and legal responsibility to act accordingly. That is why such disclaimers exist, and are still used. My point was that the DEA seems to enforce this selectively. Does anybody honestly think that humans who use marked veterinary drugs (such as from Ttokkyo) on themselves are victims of some kind?
Not to mention the eternal prohibition elephant-in-the-room - if people are not personally responsible enough to decide for themselves to take the drugs, then how are they, after the fact, sufficiently personally responsible to be punished for having done so?
I have spent some time on the DEA website over the years, reading their press releases, following what little research they cite. Here’s how their logic tends to work:
Here’s a handy molecule which some people might find useful in certain situations.
It is A Drug. Since drugs are illegal, one cannot, by definition, use them responsibly. All use is abuse.
Ah, but this is not a controlled substance, and not a drug, per se.
You are skirting legality because you are offering a substance which should be controlled, even though it isn’t. You are really doing something unlawful, because the fact this isn’t controlled is merely a formality.
Please do inform us if you know of anything unsafe about these substances.
They are not unsafe because of what they are, but because people are becoming interested in them. This is your fault. Now we will confiscate this stuff and harass people for dealing with substances that we have decided should be controlled.
So then they push for legislation to be passed with the excuse that they have had no choice but to use their resources to confront “this problem” which only ever was a problem because they decided that it was. They do this! It’s also all very paternalistic and authoritarian, with their insinuations that even if what you are doing is legal, that they know that you know that you are “getting away with something”. But their responsibility is to enforce laws relating to controlled substances - not to complain about substances which aren’t controlled in order to make them so,
That’s because the material at Home Depot has been lawfully distributed from licensed manufacturers and distributors. If per your example HD was illegally importing solvents from China (of questionable content & purity), slapping a “not for human consumption” label on them, and selling them with a wink and a nod at to what the purchaser really intended to use them for, HD would be held to account to.
I have no love for the DEA, I understand their m.o., that’s all beside the point. Putting “not for human consumption” on any material sold does not get one a free pass from whatever regulatory structure one must normally abide.
Dammit, there goes my idea for a “Not intended for use in the commission of crimes” label company.
