australian study now recruiting: synthetic cannabis and the law

[faustus]

http://kronicstudy.net

thoroughly recommend it

online survey is open to australian residents who are users and non-users of synthetic cannabinoids.

takes ~20mins to complete and is being conducted by monica barratt, who presented a lecture at EGA last weekend. i've chatted with her a few times about it, seems like it'll be a very interesting study.

see description below

* * * * *

You're invited to participate in a study investigating the use of synthetic cannabis, otherwise known as Kronic, K2, Spice, Kaos, Northern Lights, Aussie Gold, Puff, Zeus, and many other brands...

You DO NOT need to be a past or current user of synthetic cannabis to be eligible for this study, and we are especially interested in hearing from people with no prior use of these drugs. However, you DO need to be at least 18 years of age and an Australian resident in order to be eligible.

Participation in this study involves completing an online survey lasting 20 minutes. It is entirely voluntary, completely anonymous and no identifying information will be collected.

Visit the following URL to participate:

http://kronicstudy.net

For further information, contact Monica via email [email protected], twitter @monicabarratt, phone +61 407 778 938

[tronica]

For record, I'm Monica Barratt

So feel free to ask me any questions on the study too.

Really appreciate Shaman Australis's support for the study as well as the support of the EGA organisers.

[myco]

i say they need to just legalize pot and get rid of all this dodgy synthetic crap

pot is a million times safer than any synthetic canabinoid out there

[indigo264nm]

Whoaly shit hadn't seen your new avatar before Faustus. Sick one.

Just about to start the survey... fucking kicking myself I missed your speech at EGA Monica, look forward to seeing the recordings.

[Marcel]

Yeah, I really wanted to see your talk too, tronika. I just found your blog the other day; interesting stuff. I don't know if you're cool with it being put up here, so I won't link to it, but maybe you could. A lot of peeps here would appreciate it.

By the way, at EGA I was your weird and awkward camp neighbour. I apologise in advance for any transgressions.

[C_T]

done, thanks monica for putting this together, was also good to have a chat at ega

[Foo]

i say they need to just legalize pot and get rid of all this dodgy synthetic crap

pot is a million times safer than any synthetic canabinoid out there

 

Do you have anything to back this up with.

A very blatent statement to make.

[myco]

Do you have anything to back this up with.

A very blatent statement to make.

 

well honestly i dont think i need anything to bak that statement up with

how can pot not be safer its been used for thousands of years with no attributed deaths

and is completely natural

verses a man made synthetic compound produced in a lab by god knows who

fuck synthetics

produces a bad high

and why synthesise something thats already availiable naturally already and is known to be safe

[Foo]

JWH ect is not the same as THC ect. No one is trying to "synthesise something thats already availiable naturally"

There are many many compunds that occur in nature that are very dangerous and there are many sythetic compunds that do not pose any risk.

To say that because its man made it is de-facto 'ONE MILLLIONZZEZ TIMES WORSE" is less then an inteligent viewpoint.

Have you tried every synthetic product out there? Good old fasion marry jayne is not 100% harmless. Im not an advocate for synthetics nor am i anti green's. I just dont dig baseless comments when were talking about decent research being done.

[DarkSpark]

Do you have anything to back this up with.

A very blatent statement to make.

 

The years and years of governments trying to make studies show that cannabis is dangerous but never quite being able to do it beyond a reasonable doubt are one whay to back this up. Followed by the numerous accounts of extreme anxiety, chest pains, death and other forms of discomfort/ilnesses to have stemmed from the synthetics.

Don't get me wrong i think they are great substances, well the ones i tried anyways but i think that the real deal is definitely safer and more useful/practical. Especially amongst a community of gardeners i would expect this to be of key importance (air and soil cleansing etc) use as food, clothing, building materials etc.

well honestly i dont think i need anything to bak that statement up with

how can pot not be safer its been used for thousands of years with no attributed deaths

and is completely natural

 

This is the key part of your post, thousands of years of use as medicine, produce and for recreational purposes has shown us just how safe it is in relation to directly causing illness and death.

verses a man made synthetic compound produced in a lab by god knows who

fuck synthetics

produces a bad high

and why synthesise something thats already availiable naturally already and is known to be safe

 

i kind of agree, although to lump ALL synthetic compounds into the one boat is a bit excessive. Many are great and i reckon have a better effect than a lot of cannabis strains.

JWH ect is not the same as THC ect. No one is trying to "synthesise something thats already availiable naturally"

There are many many compunds that occur in nature that are very dangerous and there are many sythetic compunds that do not pose any risk.

To say that because its man made it is de-facto 'ONE MILLLIONZZEZ TIMES WORSE" is less then an inteligent viewpoint.

Have you tried every synthetic product out there? Good old fasion marry jayne is not 100% harmless. Im not an advocate for synthetics nor am i anti green's. I just dont dig baseless comments when were talking about decent research being done.

I should point out he was referring to synthetic cannabinoids here not synthetics on the whole.

and lets be honest do you REALLY think JWH was made for any other reason than to bind to the same receptor as weed and thus give the same effects / be monitored in studies etc to see how THC works? seriously JWH was made for that exact purpose. to act in the same way as THC and thus it is the same as THC< even though it is a completely different structure.

final edit: although i do get the alst bit eatfoo, with the banning and shunning of cannabis we can see what baseless comments and dodgy research can do.

Edited December 9, 2011 by DarkSpark

[LikeAshesWeFade]

definitely would love to fill in the survey. still I find it hard to see that our useless government is going to regulate these products.. back in the days where Kronic was legal in WA you could choose your strength.. most of todays brands your taking a wild guess as to whether its gonna do fuck all or kick your ass into another world! It's hit or miss thesedays.. shocking to see! The strong blends are also highly mind-altering and addictive for anyone who found plain old ganja a hard one to stop.

[Foo]

The years and years of governments trying to make studies show that cannabis is dangerous but never quite being able to do it beyond a reasonable doubt are one whay to back this up. Followed by the numerous accounts of extreme anxiety, chest pains, death and other forms of discomfort/ilnesses to have stemmed from the synthetics.

 

"extreme anxiety, chest pains, death and other forms of discomfort/ilnesses" sounds exactly like the "accounts" that our governments have produced over the years.

Dont get me wrong, im not claiming anything as "safe" but to say that "pot is a million times safer than any synthetic canabinoid out there" is 1. far from the truth and 2. completely baseless.

In my lifetime ive had negative experiences with both el'natural and its sythetic cousins. The toughest time i had was not with the product youd expect. But im not here telling you that synthetics are better for you then pot. Give an idiot some cardboard to smoke and they could tell you they saw angles ... Does that make the cardboard magic.

Bottem line i have a gripe with "pot is a million times safer". Its not presented as opinion but as fact, wich it surely is not. Even to claim that pot is safer then ALL synthetics by 1% seems an odd statement to me, there are so many ... with so many different effects and most are fairly new.

and lets be honest do you REALLY think JWH was made for any other reason than to bind to the same receptor as weed and thus give the same effects / be monitored in studies etc to see how THC works? seriously JWH was made for that exact purpose. to act in the same way as THC and thus it is the same as THC< even though it is a completely different structure.

I actualy thought that most JWH product were created in an effort to harness the medicle side of zee reefer and was later used in products that we see today

Edit: its late

Edit 2: DarkSpark and myco, hope im not comming across like too much of an asshole, i respect you both.

Edited December 9, 2011 by eatfoo

[myco]

thankyou darkspark

and fuck you eatfoo for calling me less than inteligent

i think you should look at your own posts before making a statement like that

my comment was not at all baseless

like darkspark said i am reffering to synthetic canabinoids not synthetics as a whole

and also as darkspark said

and lets be honest do you REALLY think JWH was made for any other reason than to bind to the same receptor as weed and thus give the same effects / be monitored in studies etc to see how THC works? seriously JWH was made for that exact purpose. to act in the same way as THC and thus it is the same as THC< even though it is a completely different structure.

so how can you say they are not trying to synthesise something that already occurs naturally

that is the whole point of synthetic canabinoids to mimic the effects of thc

[Foo]

Your comment was pot is a million times safer than any synthetic canabinoid out there

Surely not EVERY single sythetic canabinoid is ONE MILLION TIMES less safe or more.

That statement was completely baseless.

that is the whole point of synthetic canabinoids to mimic the effects of thc

Wrong THC is one of MANY canabinoids that play on the CB (?) recptors. Im no expert on these things, but i think what ive said so far is at least fairly correct. Pretty much everything you have said is very incorect. I cant be bothered to look right now, but im sure a short trip to wiki-fucking-pedia would expand your knowledge on the subject.

Typo

Edited December 9, 2011 by eatfoo

[myco]

c'mon when i say a million times safer

do you really think i mean IT IS ACTUALLY 1 MILLION TIMES SAFER FUKIN HELL DUDE

i think everything you've said is incorrect

there is no doubt that pot is safer than synthetic canabinoids and thats all there is to it

pot has been used for thousands of yrs with no deaths

synthetic canabinoids have already been attributed to deaths in just a few yrs

how is pot not safer???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

[C_T]

well thats not entirely true...

people die from a heart attack and they find kronic or something at their house and they say the person died from kronic.

people die from a heart attack and they find weed in their house, they say they died from a heart attack.

nobody has actually died from synthetic cb's, they have died from being unhealthy people who happen to also smoke synthetic cb's... if you classed this the same with weed then you would have many deaths linked to natural weed.

but this is way off topic and turning into a shit fight, lets keep it on track for the sake of the original post and research being conducted in a professional manner.

[gogogadget]

imo when theirs enough cheaper alternatives why bother with crap, simple.

[SunChaser]

Do you have anything to back this up with.

A very blatent statement to make.

 

I’ve passed out on JWH a few times and one time came so close to what felt like a lethal overdose, that I was convinced my day had finally come. Never passed out on cannabis, nor have I ever been of any danger of over dose. I can honestly also say I’ve never actually thought I was going to die from any other drug except JWH.

So I’ll happily make the claim that cannabis is a million times safer than these synthetics. Since any bad reaction from cannabis is either just in the users head, or completely harmless.

One can kill you and the other can’t. Dying is obviously one million times worse than not dying.

Peace

[tronica]

Thanks heaps to all of you who have completed the survey. Great to see some responses! We appreciate the time you've put into it

fucking kicking myself I missed your speech at EGA Monica, look forward to seeing the recordings.

 

The speech was heavily based on the EGA journal article, which you can check out - the main difference being that I did a tour of Silk Road in the EGA talk. I'm not an expert with SR but have been playing about with it to get a sense of what is happening there. The main point being that anything in the hidden web can't be affected by the internet filtering, if we didn't already know that such a thing would be a waste of time...

Hey I'm also planning on doing up a Vimeo of the EGA talk (EGA has video to the original they will have on their DVD, but I'll do up a version from my desktop and post online).

My other three talks from 2011 are available at http://vimeo.com/tronica

Yeah, I really wanted to see your talk too, tronika. I just found your blog the other day; interesting stuff. I don't know if you're cool with it being put up here, so I won't link to it, but maybe you could. A lot of peeps here would appreciate it.

By the way, at EGA I was your weird and awkward camp neighbour. I apologise in advance for any transgressions.

 

Sure - my blog is public, happy for anyone to read and comment on it: see http:/monicabarratt.net

Well there was a dude camped behind us who was out to the world when we were packing up... that might have been you? No harm done... just don't know how you (or whomever it was) was able to sleep through that morning sun on the Monday! ;)

done, thanks monica for putting this together, was also good to have a chat at ega

 

You are welcome!

i say they need to just legalize pot and get rid of all this dodgy synthetic crappot is a million times safer than any synthetic canabinoid out there

 

Do you have anything to back this up with.A very blatent statement to make.

 

These views are one of the reasons we wanted to do this study. In the survey, we ask you to compare your experiences of proper cannabis with synthetic cannabis. We also look at the relationship between proper cannabis consumption and the prohibition of synthetic cannabis.

I think what we can say is that synthetic cannabinoid agonists are much less studied than cannabis. Both products can cause harm, but one is less well-known and less well-understood by science. I think the other thing we can say is that the trend towards synthetic cannabis use is driven by cannabis prohibition - if not for prohibition, would we even be having these discussions? I doubt it. So the study comes from this position.

but this is way off topic and turning into a shit fight, lets keep it on track for the sake of the original post and research being conducted in a professional manner.

 

Not entirely off topic but it is probably best to accept that we can have multiple viewpoints on this issue and to ensure you get your viewpoint represented in the survey

[Alice]

Done.

Good luck with the research Monica, hopefully you get a paper or two out of this.

[tronica]

Thanks Alice. Our plan for the moment is one paper, to be written and submitted as quickly as possible after data collection. Hopefully timeline for publishing won't be too long, and then I'll be able to get it out to everyone who participated as well as to the research world.

We did have a second instrument in the survey earlier in the piece - which would have increased survey length by 7-8 minutes and definitely secured a second paper. In the end we let go of that - unfortunate in a way, but then again, maybe if the survey was more like 30 minutes, there would be a lower response rate. Even at 20 minutes, there are still many people who start but are not completing.

Ideally I reckon surveys should be 10 mins or less but it's so hard to design a survey that short answering these complex questions!

[Marcel]

Well there was a dude camped behind us who was out to the world when we were packing up... that might have been you? No harm done... just don't know how you (or whomever it was) was able to sleep through that morning sun on the Monday! ;)

 

Ha, ha, ha. No that wasn't me. That was Incognito!

[Distracted]

"I'M LEARNING!"

I did your study... hope you can skew the results into something that benefits us. Although really I just see it as a study on the public perception of how 'bad' these drugs are, i'm unsure of where you're going to go from this information.

[SunChaser]

Well, personally I’m hoping it will show that these synthetics are used primarily as a cannabis alternative, because the law makes organic cannabis hard to obtain. Since organic cannabis has far less side effects, once again it would prove that prohibition creates more harm than the drug its actually trying to prohibit.

Peace

[myco]

Well, personally I’m hoping it will show that these synthetics are used primarily as a cannabis alternative, because the law makes organic cannabis hard to obtain. Since organic cannabis has far less side effects, once again it would prove that prohibition creates more harm than the drug its actually trying to prohibit.

Peace

 

this is exactly right

i couldnt agree with you more