By Elisabeth Van Bockstaele, CERI Board Member / NJ.com
You can purchase what’s called delta 8 THC in gas stations and smoke shops in New Jersey and around the nation. Hundreds of online purveyors with snazzy websites sell Delta 8 in gummies, candies, brownies, and cigarettes. The sellers make a promise: You will feel relaxed. You can forget about your problems — take a break from your fast-paced life.
Delta 8 is legal in New Jersey and in most states. But legal does not mean safe. And the repercussions of these unregulated substances cooked up in underground laboratories are showing up in hospitals and emergency departments around the nation, where people who have ingested these drugs are experiencing everything from vomiting, hallucinations, and loss of consciousness. In just six months of this year, national poison control centers received more than 600 cases of delta-8 THC exposure.
Delta-8 is the latest craze that points to an ongoing problem. To bypass laws to protect the public, profiteers with chemistry backgrounds create compounds that slightly alter the chemical structure of the illegal drugs they try to mimic. They tweak the chemical composition to produce a drug that is technically not illegal. The rogue and unethical chemists keep changing the chemical structures to stay ahead of the law. Regulators can’t keep up.
Another way manufacturers get around the law is by claiming, on their packages, that their drugs are not intended for human consumption. Some of these drugs are packaged as “herbal remedies” and “wellness” products.
The history of synthetic drugs should scare us all about what the future holds. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a synthetic drug known as MPTP caused Parkinson’s disease symptoms in users, some permanently. In the 2010s, psychoactive manufactured drugs of synthetic cathinones, a substance found in the khat plant, were called bath salts. These compounds created a series of frightening cases of acute paranoia and psychosis that led to violence and self-harm.
Delta-8 THC is just the latest drug to make regulations look like a game of whack-a-mole. Delta-8 THC is one of more than 100 cannabinoids produced naturally by the cannabis plant. The source product used to create Delta-8 THC comes from hemp, which is legal in most states. The drug is then manufactured and synthesized in a laboratory. Manufacturers add ingredients such as solvents and other impurities — and the truth is that users who purchase these products outside a regulated environment have no way of knowing exactly what’s in the products they are ingesting.
No one knows what dosage to take. And a dose that gives one person a mild euphoria might give another person anxiety and heart palpitations, or worse. Some people who may not feel an immediate effect may decide to take more and then overdose. There is no reputable research into these drugs and the cardiac, neurologic or respiratory complications they can cause.
As a board member of the Cannabis Education and Research Institute (CERI), based in Pennington, we support patients who find medicinal cannabis valuable to their health and wellbeing — and we work to advance unbiased medical research and credible information about medicinal cannabis. Patients who use medicinal cannabis under the care of their physician, and from a certified Alternative Treatment Center, often find benefits from cannabis that is produced under strict guidelines.
We believe that education about cannabis includes educating the public about potentially dangerous unregulated cannabinoids. That’s part of our mission, too.
As a society, we need better ways to prevent these unethical chemists and drug manufacturers from bypassing regulations to sell dangerous substances to the American public. Purveyors must take more responsibility of what they sell to consumers. No Alternative Treatment Center should sell substances if they can’t identify and vouch for all the ingredients. Moreover, the scientific community must do more to police those who use their scientific education to create substances that mimic illegal drugs. And, finally, the last line of defense is the consumer. Please, research any unknown substance you ingest. And beware of illegal drugs in disguise.
Elisabeth Van Bockstaele, Ph.D., is on the board of trustees of the Cannabis Education and Research Institute (CERI), based in Pennington. She is a professor of pharmacology and physiology and founding dean of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and Professional Studies at Drexel University College of Medicine.