Spice, a variety of legal high

Watch out for synthetic cannabis! Cannabis substitutes, marketed perfectly legally on the Web for at least five years now under the brand name of Spice, have been found to contain substances more powerful than THC, the active ingredient in cannabis. So now potheads are taking – and toking – designer drugs too. A new game of cat and mouse has begun between the authorities and a handful of small laboratories – in which the mouse seems to have a good head start.

One by one since the beginning of the year, European countries have been adding substances with fairly esoteric names to their lists of (illegal) narcotics: JWH-018, CP 47497, HU-210, and the list is bound to keep growing. Austria and Germany were the first to open fire in January, followed by France in February, Poland and Luxembourg in May and Sweden on 15 September, as well as various other non-EU countries. The UK is due to follow suit at year’s end.

Herbs that had a rapturous reception

The cause of all this “action stations!” is a blend of various and sundry legal herbs generally sold in three-gram sachets bearing the warning “Not for human consumption”. Officially, it is burned incense. In practice, it is smoked weed. Spice is one of dozens of hashish ersatz products sold freely on the Internet, as well as in certain speciality shops. Precious few of these products, which are touted as “legal highs”, are actually effective. But Spice is one of them.

In 2006, narcotics agents spotted some rapturous remarks about the product on Web forums for stoners. Spice apparently made its first appearance around 2004, but only really gained currency two years later, at €20 to €30 for a 3-gram sachet. According to the first users, its effects are akin to those of cannabis, though longer-lasting (for up to six hours), and it can be had without any hassles. Product analyses carried out at the time, however, did not reveal the presence of any illicit substances.

Several hundred legal highs

But last December the story suddenly took a different turn. At the behest of the Frankfurt police, the German pharmaceutical lab THC Pharm ran its own probes and discovered the presence of a synthetic cannabinoid, JWH-018. So it emerged that Spice was not a harmless blend of herbs: its producers had added at least one synthetic component for psychoactive effect. It was at that point that the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) sounded the alarm.

Since then, other research teams have kept at it and found other cannabinoids, including CP 47497 – CP as in Charles Pfizer, the name of the pharmaceutical laboratory that synthesised the substance in the 1970s. This past summer, a German team at the University of Braunschweig confirmed the presence of a new compound and, in an article coming out in the journal Forensic Science International, the researchers cannot help wondering whether the hunt for synthetic cannabinoids will ever end, given the sheer number (several hundred) of these “legal highs”. And seeing as a substance cannot be banned until it has been identified, their days are not numbered either.

The crackdown begins

Most of these substances were initially developed to gain some insight into our endocannabinoid system: the human body produces its own cannabinoids. They were subsequently abandoned as being devoid of any apparent therapeutic utility (save a few exceptions, e.g. cannabigerol, which can be effective in treating hypertension and has an anti-inflammatory effect).

In late February, Spice was outlawed in France and three of the cannabinoids it usually contains were put on the black list of proscribed narcotics. Even though a few cases of overdose have supposedly been observed in Germany, on the face of it these cannabinoids should not pose any more or less of a problem than THC if used in “reasonable” quantities. Nevertheless, various analyses have shown that the concentration of active ingredients may vary on a scale of 1 to 10 depending on the sachet – which could cause some nasty surprises. “As certain compounds can act in very small doses, the possibility of accidental overdose with a risk of severe psychiatric complications cannot be ruled out,” reads a European report distributed this summer to national monitoring centres.

What is more, no clinical or toxicological studies are available yet. The only recent finding came from a team of psychiatrists in Dresden, Germany, who have just put out a detailed report in the journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt on the first case of addiction to Spice Gold (one variety of the product): one 20-year-old subject was smoking large quantities (three grams a day) for eight months. Most of the sites that used to sell the product have stopped doing so. But other blends, marketed under other names [Sence, Gorillaz, Solar Flare, Yucatan Fire, Smoke, ChillX, Earth Impact, Moon Rocks, Galaxy Gold, Genie, Blue Lotus, Aroma, Scope etc.], and for the time being still off the lawgivers’ radar, are bound to be in the test tube already.