This anecdote is indeed amusing, but the phenomenon of new psychoactives being discovered and becoming popular as a side effect of legitimate scientific activity isn’t as rare as one might initially assume. The most illuminating example I know of in this context is a series of substances that are categorized as ‘synthetic cannabinoids’. This story is so absurd that I'll give you a spoiler - so TL;DR, thanks to the US Federal Drug Policy and Nancy Reagan, the “Spice” drug was born.
And so the story went…
*We are in 1980, Ronald Reagan is elected President of the United States and the First Lady, Nancy Reagan, decides to dedicate her entire public lecture to preventing people from smoking weed. Personally, I am not a big fan of weed (a completely personal opinion) but it is difficult to exaggerate the importance of cannabis and the social role it plays. In the early 1980s, Nancy Reagan thought that cannabis was the devil. She came up with the slogan: “Just say no” and launched every possible lobby to eliminate the scourge. Unfortunately for her, it was precisely in those years that Prof. Raphael Meshulam from Israel discovered anandamide and characterized the endocannabinoid system - which immediately turned the focus of the pharmaceutical industry to the cannabis plant. Nancy Reagan was stressed and feared that if pharmaceutical companies showed an interest in cannabis, her advocacy efforts would go down the drain. The solution devised by the smart people around her was to develop synthetic substitutes for cannabis that will be available for scientific research without having to deal with the natural devil. Hmmm..
*This part of the narrative is the uncorroborated rendering of historical events as told by the Director and film maker Uri Marantz (see IMDB https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0544884/).
Here the story takes an even stranger turn because this idea was adopted by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA for short - a federal agency that has dedicated itself to the war on drugs). The good people of NIDA made generous development budgets available to researchers who would develop synthetic versions of natural cannabinoids such as THC or CBD. The most diligent and prolific researcher who used NIDA money to this end was an American professor of organic chemistry named John William Huffman, who developed over 400 such analogs. Like any proud and diligent scientist, Huffman published his molecules in scientific and professional journals, and some of the syntheses of this family of substances, called JWH, for John William Huffman, were publicly and freely available.
In 2002, around the time I began popularizing synthetic cathinone, something completely different appeared in Europe, marketed under the name “Spice”. It was a legal 'synthetic cannabis'. Analysis of the product revealed that it was a tobacco substitute (Damiana) sprayed with a substance called JWH-018 that Huffman developed. Once this genie was out of the bottle, it was impossible to put it back in. JWH-018 is a synthetic functional analogue of THC, but it is ten times stronger. I am not in favour of restricting psychoactive substances and think that everyone deserves the cognitive freedom to experiment with whatever they want - and that includes JWH-018.
That being said, I do not recommend JWH-018, as well as other derivatives developed by Huffman, that have been passed on to the world of legal highs. There are enough verified reports of people experiencing psychiatric and neurological damage from these substances. Despite the functional similarity to cannabinoids like THC, there is a fundamental difference in these compounds’ pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics that significantly increases the potential for danger in a way that is much more rarely encountered with cannabis. When you smoke cannabis, you are actually consuming a blend of dozens of different compounds that produce something that can be likened to musical harmony; on the other hand, when you smoke Spice (JWH-018) you get a single super-potent cannabinoid - translate that into our musical image, and instead of harmony, you get one note played at a deafening intensity. So thank you, Nancy Reagan, for Spice, but if you ask me, I “Just Say No” to Nancy.
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