Lee Van Cleef and the magic ashes

When I think round an unexpected corner, be it ever the most picayune corner and unexpected only to me, the world is new and fresh again, and tho’ bounded in an eggshell I can count myself king of infinite space. Sober language doesn’t capture it.

I might as well say, “When it happens I feel as cool as Lee Van Cleef.“

And if the journey has to do with me being initially wrong about something, well, then, it’s a corkscrew path to beauty.

I just had myself some fun in the sciences. Well. In what you might call the “inductive sciences.” Well. In what you might call the “inductive science of nonsense,” when you consider what is happening… (Or would it be “deductive”? Well, let’s see…) –This is too much lead-in for the story. Like I said, picayune, but fun.

So I was passing the palaver on the Facebook page, commenting on a friend’s post that had to do with marijuana.

He’d posted a news link. A sitting judge had publicly spoken up to admit that, with his cancer and chemotherapy, nothing helped the pain and nausea as much as marijuana, which he had to use illegally. There was a string of comments hemming and hawing over how peculiar our society is about pot. We were none of us of a prohibitionist frame of mind.

And over the past week, as it happened, I had been reading a few anxious websites, and had been moodily mulling them over… and I was moved to hold forth – probably overextensively for a Facebook comment, but that’s how it happens. I typed the following:

By the way, I wanted to say… in the last week or so I’ve been reading some things by concerned citizens who fear pot and are considering what to do in the event that it’s legalized.

(One locus is the lovely-named site http://www.butwhataboutthechildren.org .)

Ironically, all of them seem to be taking developments in Amsterdam and the Netherlands as their playbook – the eentsy-weensy-spider of the clever “anti”s.

One of the things I’ve seen most is talk about limiting allowed potency – quoting the minister in the Netherlands who proposed that pot with 15% or higher THC concentrations be listed as a hard drug.

This is going to be idiotic.

People titrate their dose with pot – they smoke until they’re where they want to be, and then they stop. So users’ THC intake with strong pot is *the same as* their THC intake with less-strong pot. If nothing else is different, there *can be* no clinical differences.

(For sanity comparison: I would not support, but I could see and would look at evidence on, banning higher-than-X ratios of CBD to THC, or content differences like that – banning indica strains, say. With that there *would be* chemical differences in what’s taken in, there are certainly different subjective effects, there could be different clinical effects, etc.)

But just banning higher-than-X concentrations of THC does exactly nothing to users’ intake.

Or, excuse me, I misspoke. It does nothing to users’ intake *except* that smokers would have to *inhale more smoke from burning plant material* in order to get the amount of effect they want! Which is exactly the *opposite* of what concern for the lungs would suggest. (Or are we done pretending we have lung-health concerns now?)

It’s senseless. But, I’ll bet we’re going to have to rassle with it.

Because none of the people who are sure that we must protect us all from dangerous pot, or who are sure it mustn’t be tolerated, is going to say “we’re wrong” or “we’re obsolete” or “oops, our bad” because it’s legalized.

They’ll simply shift their feet to try to fend off “the *really* dangerous pot.”

While *themselves* taking opportunities to announce that there’s *zero chemical difference* between weaker pot and the pot that’s “too strong to be safe.” “Legalization *is* folly.”

(And reaping any propaganda windfalls that fall out of the senselessness. “Despite the claims of proponents, even X years after legalization it’s surprisingly difficult to find any pot that falls within safety parameters!” Because oddly enough few breeders have been breeding for low potency. And of course “the gateway effect is confirmed: pot smokers do seek out ‘hard drug’ pot…”)

And all the people who will be uneasy about legalization will tend to latch right on to this. Comfort-zone preservation.

We’d best be ready to shift our feet as well. Or (partial, reluctant) legalization will stabilize, for decades, around yet another asserted difference that’s almost too unfounded to contest, with people being legally interfered with and punished for no reason.

As you can see, I had been most exercised by this point.

Well, I should have been. The “dangerously strong pot, not like the old pot” thing really is utter nonsense… and very long-standing utter nonsense by now. And, irritating me, I had seen people making vague references to research – which I did not track down – which purported to indeed link heightened risks to the psyche to very-potent marijuana. Confound it! The titration-of-dose point is solid. If a user takes in his or her preferred amount of THC whatever happens – and he or she does – then the concentration of THC in the source cannot matter! It’s not magic. Any clinical difference found in a study, if there really was one, would have to come from something else or from some other difference than just the more-THC that users are not actually getting!

I thought well of my rant, so I actually copied it into an email to two other good friends to amuse them with the view of Flugendorf absurdly spouting off again. :o)

In the email, I prefaced it as follows:

Upshot 1: It would probably be filed under “Cultural Persistence – Manifestations Of.”

Upshot 2: Just, the basic point: Whatever the significant differences between kinds of marijuana, in regard to health, just plain relative strength CAN’T be one of them. Can’t.

So I hit Send and then dismissed the matter from my mind.

…No, I didn’t. I kept thinking about it.

Because I had said the magic word “CAN’T.”

“CAN’T” is a short word but an awfully big one, even for sure things. It echoes. Was it really true?

One of my friends is a pharmacy student, and I wondered how our conversation about it might go. I went back over it…

… and then, most amused, I emailed my friend the pharmacy student about the rant and what I had figured out, and then re-emailed my two friends with an admission and showing them what I’d written to the pharm student. I’ll just paste it in here too.

I have this bad habit of continuing to think about my rants after I do them. After I forwarded that Facebook post to you, I thought some more about the absolute statement in it… with eyes narrowed… cursed, laughed, and emailed a pharmacy-student friend of mine about the matter, as follows below.

What I said about high-THC pot in itself compared to lower-THC pot in itself – I stand by that. And it’s the way to bet. With a vengeance.

But sedulousness forces me to admit that <i>there is one remote possibility… :o)

_____________________________________

Sarah, pharm student:

I’m amused. I was showing my friend Christy the enclosed rant I wrote in Facebook, in which I made a statement that something is impossible. (Maybe go down and read it first and then come back up.)

But then I thought, “what if I were showing this to Sarah, who is closer to pharmacological questions?”, and I looked at it more carefully…

Dammit.

Okay. :o) Very small caveat.

If marijuana users do titrate their dose, so that they only smoke until they get the amount of THC they want and then they stop, then there is no difference in THC intake between users who smoke high-THC-content pot and users who smoke lower-THC pot. And marijuana users do in fact titrate their dose. So.

This is sound so far. However:

There is one condition that would allow for the possibility of high-THC marijuana having worse effects on a person than lower-THC marijuana would have, even if the amount of THC the person takes in is the same, and even if there are no CBD/other-cannabinoid differences in the pot.

The condition is if THC in itself is indeed crazy-making (or bad for you in some way), more than is usually observed as a result of pot usage, but, when you smoke it, there are other unknown things in the smoke from the burning plant material that countervail that effect.

So, high-THC-pot smokers would not be breathing in enough of the @#$&*%@ soot and smoke crap.

*grins*

How to check for this: Well, assuming that you can isolate and confirm distinct bad pot effects of some sort, once you have done so, see if there is a higher incidence of them among users of bongs and waterpipes — or, much more indicatively, a higher incidence among users of vaporizers, in which the THC is vaporized and inhaled without the actual pot even being burned. That would nail it one way or the other.

In any case, I think that is the one and only way it could be possible.

Completeness is a bitch, man.

:o)

Heh heh heh. Happy, happy, happy!

(If this seems odd, I’m even worse in the shower.)