Category: K2 Incense News Archive June

Synthetic cannabis is the latest target in the war on drugs being fought in Australia, but experts say a ban could send it underground and onto the black market.

The drug has been legally sold in tobacconists and adult stores for four years under names like Kronic, K2 incense and Spice.

Synthetic cannabis is made from medicinal herbs like dimiana, sprayed with psychoactive chemicals. On some packaging it is “fragrance oil” and some products are marked as incense and “not for human consumption”.

Governments became concerned when it began turning up among workers on Australian mine sites, but was undetectable in drug tests.

One after the other states are outlawing the drug, but Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation president Alex Wodak says more evidence is needed to prove drugs like Kronic are harmful.

“It is very low levels of evidence. It is really nothing more than anecdotal… and when parliaments are passing legislation you want something more than anecdote,” he said.

One potentially dangerous side effect to banning Kronic is that users have already begun panic-buying and stockpiling the drug.

The legal market is drying up, and Robbie Swan from the national adult retail and entertainment association – or EROS – says it will go underground.

“All of those places who were selling it legally, making sure that miners weren’t getting it and paying taxes and all that sort of stuff, those people will give it away,” she said.

“What will happen is that people who don’t care how old people are when they buy it will sell it.

“People who don’t pay taxes will get hold of it and Australia will be the poorer. I mean it is a no-brainer. It is an absolute no-brainer.”

Under the radar

In Western Australia the penalties for supplying the drug range to 25 years in jail, and in New South Wales it is being treated the same way as heroin.

New South Wales Mental Health Minister Kevin Humphries is an opponent of synthetic cannabis and he says it arrived in Australia under the radar.

“We don’t really know in detail what the effects and what the side effects of these drugs are,” he said.

The known effects and strengths vary from euphoria and relaxation, while paranoia, nausea, high blood pressure and hallucinations are also possible.

full story

The recent meeting of the College on Problems of Drug Dependence featured a very well attended session on the emerging recreational drugs that are best described generically as synthetic cannabis. Popularly these are frequently referred to as K2 incense or Spice as these seem to be the best known of the initial market branding. One of the first identified and most frequently observed active compounds in these products was JWH-018, so you may see this term as well.

The past year or two has seen an explosion in the use and supply of synthetic cannabinoid k2 incense products in the US and worldwide. The basic nature of the product is well established- Small three gram packets of dried plant material marketed as incense . In the range of $60 at my local fine inhalation glassware establishments, last I checked. Upon analysis, these products are typically found to have a variety of plant materials, but be adulturated with a host of drug compounds that have agonist effects at the CB1 receptor.

As you are aware the most-active psychotropic compound to be found in cannabis, Δ⁹-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) confers the majority of its effects through partial agonist activity at CB1 receptors.

In short, these ” k2 incense” products are a constructed, synthetic mimic of cannabis. Since the active ingredients are, in many cases, full agonists this means that the maximum CB1 activation can potentially be higher than you could achieve with any dose of the partial agonist THC.

As my readers are aware, these products are capable of producing dependence with a profile, including withdrawal effects, that are typical of cannabis dependence.

The symposium was organized and chaired by a rising star in drug abuse research, William Fantegrossi, and a legend of cannabinoid behavioral pharmacology, Jenny Wiley. The latter had been involved with much of the characterization of the JWH- compounds when they were originally created.

The DEA reported continued surveillance of products and their scheduling action that placed 5 of the more-common cannabimimetic compunds on Schedule I in early 2011. Interesting tidbit was that the delay from the intended scheduling in late Dec 2010 (30 days after their initial notice of intent to schedule) was entirely due to putting out brushfire lawsuits from convenience store / head shop interests that were making serious bank from these products. He reported that a consortium of just four shops were reporting profits (might have been sales) in the neighborhood of $5M.

One of the more interesting parts of the symposium was the participation of three members of a four institution/agency consortium or task force that has been established in the state of Arkansas. It includes people from the state’s forensic crime laboratory, the poison control service, the University of Arkansas Medical Sciences campus and the state Children’s Health service (or Children’s Hospital, I’m not remembering precisely). It seems like an ideal response to an emerging health situation of this nature- involve the two areas of front line interface (poison control and law enforcement forensics) with scientists who have experience with the health condition in question.

What I learned that was of interest to me:

-Phone calls to all US poison hotlines for marijuana or cannabis amount to about 1,000 per year. Calls for synthetic cannabinoids were 2,800-2,900 in the past two years. Given that all available epidemiology suggests that marijuana use dwarfs use of synthetic products, we can tentatively infer a greater risk.

-40 of 48 calls to the Arkansas Poison Control Hotline were from/regarding individuals already in contact with Emergency Departments / Emergency Medical Services. (1 of 48 calls was from an individual calling to report the effects were just what he wanted and to tell the agency to stop denigrating these fine products.)

Full report at scienceblogs

For as much as they help bring people closer together, social network websites such as Facebook and MySpace can also expose children to many kinds of trouble, including sex, and new designer drugs such as K2 incense — even when they aren’t looking for it.

A need for parental Internet savvy and vigilance was the message of “Sex, Drugs and Social Networking,” a public forum held Tuesday at Verdugo Hills Hospital’s Community Room by the Crescenta Valley Drug & Alcohol Prevention Coalition.

“Sex and drugs are not something that kids need to go and search for. It’s what our kids get bombarded with. It comes to them,” Glendale Police Sgt. Tom Lorenz, the event’s featured speaker, told an audience of more than 30 local parents and coalition members.

Internet traffic is dominated by search engines such as Google, children had to know what to search for in order to find it online. In the age of social network sites, kids are confronted with information that’s posted or shared by others in their network — “not by design, but by accident,” said Lorenz, a father of six.

These chance negative influences often include detailed information about the use of over-the-counter or designer drugs that are unfamiliar to parents but within easy reach of young people. Sharing of sexual content, whether generated by peers or reposted from other sources, also is a frequent problem, according to the group.

La Crescenta resident Bedig Jabourian, a father of two, said he became interested in the forum after intervening to stop a daughter’s elementary school classmate from posting sexually explicit content to Facebook.

“We’re trying to find a balance between [prohibiting online use] and letting them have a Facebook page but keeping an eye on it,” he said.

Lorenz recommends that parents monitor their children’s activity by monitoring social network accounts, regulating Internet access on mobile devices and setting Google alerts for their kids’ names and nicknames.

Parents also should visit sites such as www.urbandictionary.com to familiarize themselves with youth slang — especially drug-related terms such as “Skittles” (narcotic pills), “Triple C” (Coriciden Cold and Cough medicine, which contains the disassociative drug dextromethorphan), “K2 incense” (an herbal smoking mix of herbs and spices with synthetic THC sprayed onto it) and “Purple Drank” (codeine/promethazine cough syrup mixed with a soft drink).

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