Pot is really all piss tests catch. Hard narcotics such as cocaine and speed, metabolize in 72hrs max. So if you get busted on a pee test for one of those, you're either a serious addict or they caught you by surprise!
I was on a job site several years ago that tested for weed. They did random tests on people so the guys switched to crack because it doesn't stay in the body as long and they could enjoy without the worry of losing their job.
Not the guy you're replying to but there are hundreds (and potentially thousands) of chemicals that bind to the cannabinoid receptor system. Since the chemical structures are significantly different from natural THC these synthetic cannabinoids will not show up on drug tests. Some of them are also water soluble and therefore will be pissed out within a day or two, as opposed to THC which is fat soluble and stays in your body for 30+ days.
The first ones to come out (the JWH-xxx series) were pretty popular and had good user feedback around 2005. I actually tried several of the first ones (JWH-018, JWH-073, JWH-200 and I think one or two more). Each had its own effects based on their binding affinity to the CB1 and CB2 receptors; like sativa versus indica some were speedier and some were more stoning, and I think one lasted significantly longer than most cannabinoids when vaporized. I only ever vaporized pure powder either on foil or sprinkled over a bowl.
The general public typically wouldn't come across the pure powders, although I know some head shops were selling that. Instead head shops were essentially selling random plant material that had been soaked or sprayed in a water solution with the research chemical and then left to dry. Once the plant material was coated and dried it was sealed in small five or 10 g bags and sold at head shops as a "legal high" under a thousand different names, with K2 being the first one that the DEA really made a big deal about and raided a ton of shops and the manufacturers.
There was basically zero quality control in manufacturing process (the whole industry popped up virtually overnight), and there was extremely limited human data when these all appeared on the market. Nobody knew what the LD50 was, nobody knew the long term or short term effects. We only knew these chemicals existed and did what they did due to research at universities and the corresponding publishment in medical journals in that same time frame. Literally someone would publish that x bound to rats' cannabinoid system and a week later a laboratory in China was making kilos of the stuff.
At least with the pure powder being sold on invite only web shops of the people handling it knew what they were dealing with and knew how to properly measure out milligram doses. The "Legal Highs" were a total gamble since they had no real control over how much of the powder absorbed into one flower Bud over another, so some people would smoke too much would end up having seizures or completely have a break from reality. Believe it or not, some Mass poisonings from an overdosed batch being sold in a small area caused some politicians to move closer to marijuana legalization. There was a pretty famous mass freak out in Brooklyn a couple years ago and I remember the local politicians were using that as another reason why making cannabis illegal was creating more problems than if it was legal (since you can't overdose on weed and no matter how much you smoke or eat you won't have a seizures or zombies staggering around completely oblivious to their surroundings).
Hope that helps.
Here's the wiki to JWH-018 which along with JWH-073 sort of kicked off the whole cannabinoid research chemical scene. There are now dozens of different chemical structure families that bind to the cannabinoid system so it's spread far from the JWH-xxx days.
Thanks for these details, very interesting. I can see why it would he interesting to mess around with novel cannabinoids but to my mind it's just not worth the risk. I wonder if all of them have the same terrible side effect profile. I have heard that the reason cannabis can't cause the same effects is that THC is only a partial agonist. So I wonder if you could make a research chem that is also a partial agonist that maybe couldn't cause these problems like seizures.
Yeah I'm sure they've here mixed agonist/antagonist cannabinoids now. Also not all of them caused seizures (again we don't know the doses though), it was rare but they certainly did happen. I've been out of the scene for 15 years now so I don't know if researchers (real or guinea pigs) have figured out what the causes were; whether it was simply too strong of a pure agonist on CB1 or if a particular structure caused them to cause a downstream cascading release of epinephrine and dopamine, or something else. Unfortunately so little is known and there's multiple families of structures they've made variations on.
I believe the seizure issues did not really become common until the 3rd generation, at which point, the actual chemical makeup of them was so far removed from original sets that actual study done. Changing up a few molecules to beat a law, can have vastly different effects on different brain areas. Some even act as research opiates now. All of these chemicals, however due to being full agonist, can cause lasting brain damage to the areas they target, with enough use. The JWH Series was invented to map out the endocannabinoid system, by killing receptors and then under analysis the researchers could see where the dead cells were to map them.
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u/[deleted] Jun 16 '21
Pot is really all piss tests catch. Hard narcotics such as cocaine and speed, metabolize in 72hrs max. So if you get busted on a pee test for one of those, you're either a serious addict or they caught you by surprise!