The line at The Last Place on Earth, a head shop in Duluth, Minnesota, stretched so far out the door it took a half-hour to reach the counter. The product for sale was so popular, buyers sold their own blood plasma to get some \u2014 despite side effects including hallucinations, paranoia, and outbursts of uncontrollable, inexplicable violence.<\/p>\n
And despite all that, the product in question<\/a>, synthetic \u201cmarijuana,\u201d was \u2014 at least arguably \u2014 legal to sell.<\/p>\n \u201cArguably,\u201d because it\u2019s not. Synthetic cannabinoids are banned substances under federal drug-control laws, and both the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and local police have the ability to arrest anyone selling it.<\/p>\n \u201cArguably,\u201d because despite all that, in 2018, synthetic \u201cmarijuana\u201d<\/a> is still sold openly at gas stations, convenience stores, and head shops, despite killing four people in the Chicago area since February, and killing two U.S. Marines and delivering another soldier brain damage.<\/p>\n As Minneapolis City Pages reported, The Last Place on Earth\u2019s owner raked in \u201ctens of thousands of dollars a day\u201d off of the sale of the synthetic product \u2014 sold in shiny packages as K2, Spice, or other fancy names \u2014 before he was eventually arrested, tried, and convicted in 2014.<\/p>\n Yet somehow, the country\u2019s Spice problem has only worsened since then.<\/p>\n On Wednesday, authorities in Chicago confirmed that a 22-year-old man died March 28 after consuming a particularly nasty batch of synthetic marijuana tainted with rat poison \u2014 the fourth death since last month from the stuff, which is \u201ccommonly sold\u201d at convenience stores around the state, according to the Chicago Tribune<\/a>.<\/p>\n So far this year, 155 people in Illinois have been sickened from using the drug. Last fall in Minnesota, 177 people went to hospitals after using synthetic \u201cmarijuana\u201d during a three-week span, according to City Pages. And all this follows the ghastly scene in New York City in the summer of 2016, when first responders encountered users in a \u201czombie-like\u201d state.<\/a><\/p>\n What\u2019s going on here, and what\u2019s the solution? America\u2019s blinkered drug laws still treat synthetic \u201cmarijuana\u201d too much like the real thing. At the same time, American institutions, like courts, employers, and the military, still screen for THC metabolites. They don\u2019t test for synthetic substitutes, which means synthetic \u201cmarijuana\u201d is not punished as stridently, despite being literally deadly.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, merchants are evidently emboldened enough to continue selling Spice, and enough people are happy to use it to keep them in business.<\/p>\n Imagine, for just a second, a gas station or liquor store selling real marijuana \u2014 and imagine how quickly police would swoop in. It would not last an afternoon.<\/p>\n The solution, without compounding the country\u2019s prison problem, must be a combination of state and societal encouragement and discouragement.<\/p>\n Merchants must be discouraged from selling the stuff, and potential users in search of chemical alteration must be encouraged to use the much safer real thing.<\/p>\n Broadly speaking, synthetic cannabinoids are any lab-made chemical designed to mimic real plant-based cannabinoids\u2019 ability to bind to the human body and brain\u2019s endocannabinoid receptors, which regulate core functions including mood, appetite and sleep.<\/p>\n Created during the 1980s by pharmaceutical companies looking to create drugs with cannabis\u2019s unique combination of efficiency and effectiveness, synthetic cannabis\u2019s formulas were published in medical journals. This made the information available to underground chemists and to unscrupulous merchants, who spray them onto plant material and package them for sale.<\/p>\n In Illinois, where synthetic marijuana is currently killing people, both synthetic \u201cmarijuana\u201d and real cannabis are punished under the same criminal statute<\/a>. This must be changed, as the risk posed by synthetic marijuana is deadly. If nothing else, in the near future, real cannabis should be decriminalized, with Spice kept in the same statute.<\/p>\n No advocate of marijuana legalization or opponent of the prison-industrial complex could honestly argue for more people in jail, but surely there is some level of punishment appropriate for someone who knowingly sells potentially deadly fake marijuana. In addition, they certainly should be punished more severely than someone selling real marijuana.<\/p>\n Probation departments and employers must do their part by ceasing to test for THC metabolites. Failing that, they could at least raise the threshold. To fail to address the problem by doing some combination of the above is to sentence people an excruciating and altogether predictable death.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>, are you concerned about synthetic marijuana?<\/p>\n The post America\u2019s Rotten Drug Laws Encourage \u2018Synthetic Marijuana\u2019 Use<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
The line at The Last Place on Earth, a head shop in Duluth, Minnesota, stretched so far out the door it took a half-hour to reach the counter. The product for sale was so popular, buyers sold their own blood plasma to get some \u2014 despite side effects including hallucinations,Continue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,2544,4099,1051,4100,90,884,4101,4102],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25816"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25816"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25817,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25816\/revisions\/25817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nRead More: America\u2019s Rotten Drug Laws Encourage \u2018Synthetic Marijuana\u2019 Use<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"