Throwing NI's under the bus

Look folks, the NIH made it pretty clear when they created the ESI designation that the NI designation absent ESI qualification was going to disappear. Borrowed time, IMO. So it is a little silly to parse individual IC policy statements and claim that if you weren’t warned specifically that this is some kind of underhanded throwing under the bus or changing rules in midstream.

I mean, if the latter is the principle, I’m sure you were on the barricades when they started extending the extra payline cutoff points to the ESI and/or NI applications, right?

An update on K2/Spice, JWH-018 and synthetic cannabis

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 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 “incense” products in the US and worldwide. The basic nature of the product is well established- Small packets (typically 3g in the US) of dried plant material marketed as “incense” and marked “not for human consumption” that are priced well above what you might expect. 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 also to 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 “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.