DO YOU like zombies? Based on the ratings of all the TV shows that feature flesh-eating former humans having their rotting domes blasted off by sweaty survivors with 12-gauge shotguns, I’m guessing the answer is yes. Did you know there’s a drug on the market that’s causing people to actually act like zombies? Today we are going to look at something called “synthetic cannabis,” which has less in common with actual cannabis than it does with the Walking Dead.
It started in the late 1980s with the discovery of the “cannabinoid receptor,” which, as you might be able to guess, is the receptor in the brain that’s stimulated by THC. A Clemson University researcher named John W. Huffman—or JWH, as he is known, along with his legacy of products—used funds from the National Institute of Drug Abuse to develop hundreds of “synthetic cannabinoids”— named solely because they bind to the cannabinoid receptor, not because they get you stoned. Until then, THC from cannabis was the only thing researchers knew of that could bind to these receptors, so the discovery that you could synthesize compounds that would behave in a similar way was a breakthrough.
In 1993, JWH created a synthetic compound called JWH-018. He published his formulas through the standard scientific-information-sharing channels and released a book called The Cannabinoid Receptors. Fifteen years later, in 2008, some very creative Germans with rather dark and disturbing intentions (no, one of them wasn’t Werner Herzog) sprayed some synthetic cannabinoids, including JWH-018, onto some leaves, and sold it under the innocuous name Spice.
This is where it gets bad.
As Spice spread, calls to poison control centers grew. In 2009, 112 calls were made due to synthetic cannabinoids. By 2011, it was 6,549. That year the DEA banned five of the substances, three of which were the work of JWH, who never intended his work to be used this way, and calls synthetic drug users “idiots.” In 2015, emergency rooms in New York City reported 6,000 Spice-related visits—and two deaths.
The formulas evolved and grew more sophisticated, which brings us up to the summer of 2016 (such an innocent time that was), when the zombies finally arrived.
This time the culprit was K2, the zanier cousin of Spice. In July 2016, a group of regular users of the drug in Brooklyn had a very bad reaction to a new batch—33 regular users, to be exact, who exhibited “altered mental states” and other effects serious enough that they had to be taken to area hospitals. They were recorded by a passerby named Brian Arthur, who told the New York Times, “It’s like a scene out of a zombie movie, a horrible scene. This drug truly paralyzed people.” His Facebook Live footage showed a real-life hellscape of the unconscious and the soon-to-be-unconscious—stumbling, empty eyed, moaning, and exhibiting other classic zombie behaviors.
This batch was sold under the very Trump-like name AK-47 24 Karat Gold, and had a synthetic cannabinoid as its active ingredient known as AMB-FUBINACA. (Don’t blame our buddy JWH—this one was made by the good people at Pfizer Pharmaceuticals.) AMB is 50 times stronger than its predecessor, K2. The Brooklyn batch tested at 85 times the potency of THC, and had 16 milligrams of AMB per gram of product.
What twisted soul-sucker of a pusher is slinging this poison? Until recently, it was convenience stores, which openly sold products labeled with ambiguous labels such as “Dank Potpourri.” Yup, a quart of milk, chips, and some Zombie Powder please. It’s been banned from store shelves recently, but enforcement can be spotty, and it’s readily available via street dealers.
This is yet another reason why your friendly neighborhood cannabis-industry participant spends most days in tears. They’re being choked into extinction by regulatory agencies treating them as a far greater threat to the community than stores that sell this garbage. It’s hard to understand why the restrictions placed upon them are far more stringent than for other products that can turn you into a zombie.
So, in short, fuck synthetics. Stick with organic, locally sourced, craft cannabis, and avoid powders from foreign labs. These times are scary enough without having to worry about real-life zombies.
