Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Marsha for Radio I, and today I
Speaker 1: will be reading National Geographic magazine dated September twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: which is donated by the publisher as a reminder. RADIOI
Speaker 1: is a reading service intended for people who are blind
Speaker 1: or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
Speaker 1: printed material. Please join me now for the first article
Speaker 1: titled the Potent, Promises and Perils of Modern Cannabis. These days,
Speaker 1: pot is more popular and more powerful than ever before,
Speaker 1: and it's being used and studied in ways that are
Speaker 1: prompting fresh and surprising discoveries. Here we tackle some of
Speaker 1: the most critical questions being raised by today's stronger, stranger,
Speaker 1: ever more accessible weed. How cannabis chemists engineer a superior
Speaker 1: high by Rosecrans Baldwin, Enterprising weed scientists are remixing marijuana
Speaker 1: into startlingly the powerful concentrates, leading consumers into heady new
Speaker 1: realms where buds can't take them. In a white walled
Speaker 1: lab inside the vast manufacturing facility of California cannabis company
Speaker 1: Raw Garden, the bouquet of marijuana is unmistakable even without
Speaker 1: a plant or bud in sight. Technicians in lab coats
Speaker 1: monitor armoire sized machines that rattle as they refine flask
Speaker 1: after a multi liter flask of amber colored cannabis scented
Speaker 1: oil in a room around the corner near a row
Speaker 1: of vacuum ovens, the same extracted oil has been used
Speaker 1: to make an array of concoctions set out on still tables,
Speaker 1: in trays, jars, and pyrux dishes. They range from viscous
Speaker 1: semi liquids that ooze like tree sap to creamy paste
Speaker 1: resembling peanut butter. A few trays contain glass like golden shards,
Speaker 1: and there's a crystallizing substance akin to aging honey. Together,
Speaker 1: the products represent a substance antil shift in how Americans
Speaker 1: consume pot. Year after year, they are smoking proportionally less
Speaker 1: of it and instead embracing more products made with its
Speaker 1: extracted oil. These include edibles like gummies and beverages, but
Speaker 1: also new types of high potency concentrates that are consumed
Speaker 1: not by smoking but by vaping or what's known as
Speaker 1: dabbing flash vaporizing dabs of thick extract, and these concentrates
Speaker 1: are radically altering the experience of getting high. Like other
Speaker 1: modern cannabis companies. Raw gardens still grows weed, but it
Speaker 1: is primarily a raw material, something to be processed into
Speaker 1: goop for an arguably heightened experience. If you think the
Speaker 1: heart of the United States roughly thirty two billion dollar
Speaker 1: cannabis industry looks like a farm or a grow room,
Speaker 1: think again. It increasingly looks like these industrial cam labs
Speaker 1: full of scientists imagining new frontiers of mind blowing offerings.
Speaker 1: Such cannabis concentrates are often named for their textures sauce, wax, shatter, diamonds,
Speaker 1: and more. They are dizzingly more potent potent than the
Speaker 1: joint you might have smoked twenty or forty years ago,
Speaker 1: and of course, they are now legal in many states
Speaker 1: as policy shifts have helped launch a space race in
Speaker 1: the cannabis industry, with entrepreneurs developing more sophisticated techniques to
Speaker 1: alchemize plant matter into a kaleidoscope of forms and flavors.
Speaker 1: The rise of the high potency concentrates market comes at
Speaker 1: a time when marijuana flower traditional smokable cannabis, is already
Speaker 1: pretty darn powerful. Thanks to advances in crop science, pot
Speaker 1: grown in the US has been bred to be substantially
Speaker 1: stronger than it was a few decades back. Potency in
Speaker 1: cannabis products is typically expressed as a concentration of delta
Speaker 1: nine tetra hydro cannabinol or th HC, the comp compound
Speaker 1: in marijuana that is primarily, though not exclusively, responsible for
Speaker 1: its psychoactive effects. While precise numbers are tricky to combine,
Speaker 1: studies suggest the THHC levels in marijuana sold in the
Speaker 1: US thirty years ago averaged somewhere in the single digits. Today,
Speaker 1: at a time when many states require lab verified potency
Speaker 1: labels on legal products, the average is somewhere between fifteen
Speaker 1: and twenty percent. Cannabis concentrates, however, results from an extraction
Speaker 1: process that isolates only the desired compounds, prominently including THHC
Speaker 1: from pesky plant matter. Raw Garden advertises a product called
Speaker 1: Live Sauce, a golden goo described as having an apple
Speaker 1: sauce consistency at around seventy percent THHC potency depending on
Speaker 1: the strain used to make it. The company's refined live
Speaker 1: resin diamonds, which look like something you'd find at a
Speaker 1: gem show, can tap out above eighty five percent for
Speaker 1: some The THHC content and hence the rapidity and intensity
Speaker 1: of the buzz is the point. High potency vapes and
Speaker 1: dabs get users high with smaller amounts than other means
Speaker 1: of ingesting cannabis, but the draw also has to do
Speaker 1: with the subtlety of flavors and precision of one's intake,
Speaker 1: says Rawgarden Chief brand officer Dmitri Siegel. It's a purity thing,
Speaker 1: he says, where you're either getting a really distilled high
Speaker 1: or you're getting a really distilled flavor. You're not burning
Speaker 1: a whole lot of organic matter. Handheld vaporizers are also
Speaker 1: less conspicuous, notes cannabis industry analyst and consultant Tom Adams,
Speaker 1: president of Adam's Research. Some concentrate users are enticed by
Speaker 1: the discreetness of taking a quick toque off a small
Speaker 1: amount of oil or apple sauce like gel. It just
Speaker 1: seems odd as an adult to be taking weed out
Speaker 1: of a bag, crushing it up and rolling it, he says.
Speaker 1: What am I a cowboy Atoms, who has analyzed the
Speaker 1: legal cannabis market since twenty fifteen, says demand for legal
Speaker 1: concentrates originated in the first medical dispensaries smoking can be
Speaker 1: impractical for those looking to consume hundreds of milligrams of
Speaker 1: THHC each day, a substantial amount, but which may nonetheless
Speaker 1: be what brings relief to chemotherapy patients or sufferers of
Speaker 1: chronic pain. Edibles can pose problems for patients with appetite
Speaker 1: or gastro intestinal issues, and concentrates, whether for medical or
Speaker 1: recreational use, arguably make it easier to regulate dosage sure
Speaker 1: Atoms allows pre rolled joints with measured amounts of flour
Speaker 1: offer some consistency, but even that is less predictable than
Speaker 1: the cleaned up scientifically produced to concentrate that you know
Speaker 1: exactly what the impact is going to be, he says.
Speaker 1: Rolling your own stuffing erratic hunks of vegetable matter into
Speaker 1: a pipe, it's a hard cell, says Atoms. Consumers are
Speaker 1: just not used to the primitiveness. The quest to concentrate
Speaker 1: the psychoactive components of cannabis goes back to at least
Speaker 1: the eleventh century, when hashish caught on recreationally in the
Speaker 1: Arab world. Hasheesh is made from plant glands now known
Speaker 1: as tricombs, which early hashmakers rubbed or sieved off the
Speaker 1: surface of cannabis leaves and buds, then pressed into a
Speaker 1: sort of cake. Tricombs are rich in bioactive compounds called cannabinoids,
Speaker 1: the most well known of which are THHC and cannabidial
Speaker 1: or CBD. They also contain other specialized compounds, such as chirpenes,
Speaker 1: the hydrocarbons responsible for plants, aromas, and flavors. Today, cannabis
Speaker 1: processors have built on medieval methods, finding new efficient ways
Speaker 1: to isolate those prized compounds. Among the most common is
Speaker 1: hydrocarbon extraction, in which a solvent separates desired chemicals from
Speaker 1: raw plant material. Butane and propane are the industry standard solvents, and,
Speaker 1: prior to widespread legalization, back when extraction was an underground hobby,
Speaker 1: use of these combustible materials occasionally resulted in hotel rooms
Speaker 1: and apartments blowing up. FEMA went so far as to
Speaker 1: issue a bulletin in twenty thirteen warning hash oil explosions
Speaker 1: increasing across US, but during the wave of state legislation
Speaker 1: that has swept the country since, cannabis extraction has gone mainstream,
Speaker 1: and today companies like raw Garden are subject to licensure
Speaker 1: regulations and inspections. The basis of nearly all raw garden
Speaker 1: products is the oily substance known as live resin a
Speaker 1: cannabis extract that aims to capture a wide array of
Speaker 1: those cannabinoids and terpen terpenes. Some extraction processes, by contrast,
Speaker 1: isolate only a single compon pound, usually THHC or CBD,
Speaker 1: but before they become oil. All of the company's offerings
Speaker 1: start out as plants on fifty four acres of farmland
Speaker 1: in the Santa Barbara wine country. At harvest time, the
Speaker 1: plants are cut, then the buds are removed and immediately
Speaker 1: flash frozen with liquid nitrogen in a cryogenic tunnel, preserving
Speaker 1: all those volatile organic compounds from the farm. The pot
Speaker 1: is trucked to a cold storage warehouse in nearby Lombach,
Speaker 1: where it's placed in a deep freeze. When any given
Speaker 1: strain is up for extraction, the frozen buds are moved
Speaker 1: to a manufacturing facility up the road, where they're loaded
Speaker 1: into six foot tall stainless steel columns, each of which
Speaker 1: can hold about eighteen pounds of pot. Inside, they're saturated
Speaker 1: with pressurized solvent that dissolves the desired chemicals and leaves
Speaker 1: behind unwanted biomass. Later stages for some project products include
Speaker 1: one in which the crude extract is purified with fats, waxes, lipids,
Speaker 1: and other solids filtered out other products, cooked for twenty
Speaker 1: four to thirty six hours in a vacuum oven to
Speaker 1: purge away residual solvent. The pressure inside the oven lowered
Speaker 1: so that the solvent evaporates without any of the good
Speaker 1: stuff boiling off. Using solvents isn't the only way to
Speaker 1: make an extract. Raw Garden sends a small amount of
Speaker 1: its harvest to a partner facility where it's turned into
Speaker 1: a hashish like product called rosin via a similar process
Speaker 1: using only ice, water, heat, and pressure. But hydrocarbon extraction
Speaker 1: is scalable and highly efficient. Raw Gardens facility process processes
Speaker 1: around twenty twelve hundred pounds of cannabis a day and
Speaker 1: has plans to expand. This isn't to say there's no
Speaker 1: art to it. A concentrates consistency, That is, whether the
Speaker 1: live resin turns into something creamier crispier oily results from
Speaker 1: the strain one starts with, as well as small inspired
Speaker 1: interventions during extraction. What if we whipped the extract before
Speaker 1: purging it. What if we cured it so that crystal's
Speaker 1: form extract bound for vape cartridges sometimes involves an additional
Speaker 1: step in which terpenes are evaporated and collecting in a
Speaker 1: distillation column, then selectively reinserted to achieve specific scent and
Speaker 1: flavor profiles in raw gardens vape lab A colorful aroma
Speaker 1: wheel shows one hundred plus fragrances one might allegedly encounter
Speaker 1: in cannabis, like apricot, sage, pine tyran, espresso. We're taking
Speaker 1: aromatic compounds from plants. As vice President of Agricultural Operations
Speaker 1: Casey Birthisle, there's a lot here that's parallel to the
Speaker 1: perfume industry. Some medical professionals see more alarming parallels, however,
Speaker 1: to drugs ostensibly harder than cannabis. The sky high potency
Speaker 1: of concentrates has raised red flags, as multiple epidemiological studies
Speaker 1: have found correlations between their frequent use and increased risks
Speaker 1: of psychoses and cannabis use disorder, a form of dependence.
Speaker 1: Those risks seem particularly acute for teenagers. Colorado and Washington,
Speaker 1: the first states to legalize recreational pot are among the
Speaker 1: states where bills to limit THHC potency have been introduced,
Speaker 1: then rejected or withdrawn amid industry pushback. Meanwhile, according to
Speaker 1: analyst Atoms, sales of marijuana flour made up about seventy
Speaker 1: percent of the recreational market when the first legal retailers
Speaker 1: opened in Colorado in twenty fourteen. Today, according to point
Speaker 1: of sale data from Atoms and market research firm BDSA,
Speaker 1: that number has dropped to forty percent. In the same span,
Speaker 1: sales of vaping and dada being products have climbed from
Speaker 1: around fifteen percent of the legal market to thirty two percent,
Speaker 1: though the pace of that growth now seems to be slowing.
Speaker 1: It's all a function, Adam says, of a reunion of
Speaker 1: technology in cannabis brought about by legalization. Ironically, what excites
Speaker 1: him most about the future of extraction has nothing to
Speaker 1: do with t h C. The next big things in cannabis,
Speaker 1: Adams suggests, might derive from the industry's ability to efficiently
Speaker 1: isolate all those other compounds. What new effects are there
Speaker 1: to discover from the terpenes or from the more then
Speaker 1: a hundred other little researched cannabinoids that aren't t h
Speaker 1: C or CBD. We are totally revolutionizing the view of
Speaker 1: what the compounds in the plant can do through the
Speaker 1: concentrates side of the market. He says that opens up
Speaker 1: the uses to all sorts of things other than sitting
Speaker 1: on the couch watching Netflix. Modern cannabis, explained, consuming pot
Speaker 1: mostly used to means smoking it, rolling a joint, or
Speaker 1: packing a pipe owl. How is vaping it any different?
Speaker 1: Like smoking? Vaping cannabis involves heating up some manner of
Speaker 1: marijuana and inhaling the results, but without setting anything on fire.
Speaker 1: Some vaping devices can be loaded with dry herb or
Speaker 1: cannabis flour, while others are used for high potency concentrates
Speaker 1: like oil or live resin. At the touch of a button,
Speaker 1: a battery powered element heats the bud or oil just
Speaker 1: enough to release compounds like THHC and other cannabinoids in
Speaker 1: an aerosol or vapor without any burning plant material. The
Speaker 1: experience may seem less harsh than smoking. It's also arguably
Speaker 1: more convenient. Hand Held devices like vappens are portable and discrete,
Speaker 1: leaving less odor than smoking. Many pens are disposable, and
Speaker 1: for those seeking to reduce electronic waste. Other styles can
Speaker 1: be reloaded with prefilled cartridges of cannabis oil, known as
Speaker 1: vape carts. Studies suggest that vaping flour rather than smoking
Speaker 1: it can reduce your exposure to toxins and carbon monoxide,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't mean it's entirely safe. Vaping, especially with concentrates,
Speaker 1: comes with its own lung disease risks. For people interested
Speaker 1: in more of a THHC jolt, there's the form of
Speaker 1: vaporization called dabbing, which involves heating up thicker cannabis concentrates
Speaker 1: like wax, a gooey form of hash oil, or shatter
Speaker 1: a solid glass like version. This takes a different tool,
Speaker 1: known as a dab rig, a kind of water pipe
Speaker 1: that's more elaborate and less portable than most vapes. Users
Speaker 1: typically apply a small hand held torch to a heating
Speaker 1: element called a nail, then use a wand like tool
Speaker 1: to touch a dollop of concentrate to it, inhaling its
Speaker 1: vapor through a chamber of cooling water. Hand Held dab
Speaker 1: pens are a simpler alternative, but some dab fans suggest
Speaker 1: dab pens can sacrifice flavor, making such devices smaller, simpler
Speaker 1: and cheaper is a major focus of the increasingly innovation
Speaker 1: driven industry. A new tool in the Fight against chronic
Speaker 1: pain by Devon Powell. For decades, scientists have sought a
Speaker 1: non addictive means of treating people in ongoing agony. Now
Speaker 1: cannabis is inspiring a safer way forward. They call it
Speaker 1: the holy Grail of pain relief research, a medicine that
Speaker 1: is comparable to the strongest opioids but lacks their potentially
Speaker 1: devastating side effects. When biophysicist and structural biologist Kavya Krishna
Speaker 1: Kumar set out looking for a novel way to develop one,
Speaker 1: she knew she needed to start with a substance that
Speaker 1: hit the body incredibly hard. So she took to the
Speaker 1: seatier corners of the online forum read It, where she
Speaker 1: learned about an illicit street drug with a reputation for
Speaker 1: making people both very high and very sick. It's out
Speaker 1: of this world potent, read one recreational user's poach post.
Speaker 1: A very very small, almost invisible amount of powder sky
Speaker 1: rockets you into stoned euphoria. The drug is called fubinacca,
Speaker 1: and it's what's known as a synthetic cannabinoid A molecule
Speaker 1: designed in a lab to target the same parts of
Speaker 1: the nervous system affected by tetra hydro cannabinol or THHC,
Speaker 1: the main psychoactive compound in cannabis. Underground chemists have been
Speaker 1: making drugs like it since the early two thousands, when
Speaker 1: recreational marijuana was still criminalized in the United States and
Speaker 1: synthetic cannabinoids began catching on as a cheap quasi legal alternatives.
Speaker 1: From their powdered form, they're typically dissolved into solvents, which
Speaker 1: are then sprayed on two plant shreds to be sold
Speaker 1: with a wink as incense or pot poiri. Not for
Speaker 1: human consumption. The label may read a dodge against regulation.
Speaker 1: Sold under monikers like spice or K two, these gray
Speaker 1: market synthetics have raised public health alarms for both their
Speaker 1: toxicity and their contamination risks. The extract the exact chemicals,
Speaker 1: and their concentrations can vary from product to product, with
Speaker 1: side effects ranging from mania to heart attacks. But Krishna Kumar,
Speaker 1: then at Stanford Medicine, now at wild Cornell Medicine, now
Speaker 1: in fubinaka a tool for better understanding how our pain
Speaker 1: management system works, and after some clever molecular modeling. She
Speaker 1: and a team led by researchers from Stanford and Washington
Speaker 1: University School of Medicine in Saint Louis devised an innovative
Speaker 1: way of modifying it. Earlier this year, the team published
Speaker 1: a study showing a fubinaca derived drug providing a sustained
Speaker 1: pain relief in mice, seemingly without psychoactive or tolerance building
Speaker 1: side effects. Such side effects have stymied progress on other
Speaker 1: would be cannabinoid pain relievers, dampening enthusiasm for what once
Speaker 1: seemed like a promising opioid alternative. Now, some scientists hope
Speaker 1: the research can breathe new life into that work and
Speaker 1: perhaps open up even wider therapeutic frontiers. Fubinaca wasn't always
Speaker 1: a street drug. It was developed by Phizer and patented
Speaker 1: in two thousand nine, part of an effort to create
Speaker 1: a superpowered aspirin with no side effects. According to former
Speaker 1: physer chemist Darren Jones, like THHC, synthetic cannabinoids activate a
Speaker 1: powerful chemical receptor known as CB one in humans and
Speaker 1: other mammals. CB one is found on nerve cells in
Speaker 1: the brain and crucially on cells elsewhere in the body.
Speaker 1: It's known to influence not only the perception of pain,
Speaker 1: but also sleep, metabolism, and memory, making it a promising
Speaker 1: target for pharmaceutical research. A second cannabinoid receptor, c B two,
Speaker 1: seems mostly to regulate the functions of immune cells. Of course,
Speaker 1: the path to market for any new drug it must
Speaker 1: take into account future profitability, and while it's unclear just
Speaker 1: what scuttled Pfiser's research, Jones theorizes it had to do
Speaker 1: with the increasing legality of medical marijuana, which was suddenly
Speaker 1: pennies a pound at pro proliferating dispensaries. But when the
Speaker 1: company published its patent, that became a blueprint for so
Speaker 1: called garage chemists to replicate the formula and create analogs.
Speaker 1: The US Drug Enforcement Administration reports that law enforcement has
Speaker 1: encountered hundreds of different synthetic cannabinoids, most of them manufactured
Speaker 1: in Asia. Variants of Pfiser's fubinaca, the first of which
Speaker 1: was detected in Japan in twenty twelve, are known as
Speaker 1: most of the most toxic. In twenty fourteen, dozens of
Speaker 1: deaths in Russia were linked to an analog called MDMB fubinaca.
Speaker 1: Two years later, another variant was behind a mass overdose
Speaker 1: in Brooklyn, New York that the media characterized as a
Speaker 1: zombie outbreak. But Krishna Kumar hoped to pick up where
Speaker 1: Pfizer left off harnessing that potency. First, she examined how
Speaker 1: MDMB fubinaca attached to human CB I receptors in the
Speaker 1: dish compared to other synthetic cabin cannabinoids. She found it
Speaker 1: held tighter and activated effects more powerfully. Then, using a
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize winning technology called cryoelectron microscopy cryo e M,
Speaker 1: she flashes that she flash froze that fubinaca molecule while
Speaker 1: it was affixed to CB one and scanned the conjoined
Speaker 1: pair with a beam of electrons. The result was a
Speaker 1: three D picture, down to individual atoms, of how the
Speaker 1: drug fits so well into a pocket or binding sight
Speaker 1: on the receptor's surface like a key in a lock.
Speaker 1: That image provided a starting point for designing new versions
Speaker 1: of fubinaca that might, by stimulating the receptor in new ways,
Speaker 1: keep the original's potency while limiting side effects. For that,
Speaker 1: Krishna Kumar turned to Sasruta Majumdar, a Washington university chemist
Speaker 1: and pharmacologist whose lab had previously shown that activating a
Speaker 1: particular site on an opioid receptor could inhibit chemical reactions
Speaker 1: that led to tolerance. Might this be possible for CEB one.
Speaker 1: The researchers knew that CEB one, a cousin to that
Speaker 1: opioid receptor, had a potential binding site with similar qualities,
Speaker 1: but it was deep inside the receptor and in Krishna
Speaker 1: Kumar's cryo em snapshot, blocked by clusters of atoms. It
Speaker 1: was also the wrong shape to fit Fubinaka, So Majumdar's
Speaker 1: team started sketching bespoke attachments for the cannabinoid chains of
Speaker 1: atoms that might help the molecule worm its way in. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: Truford scientists took another approach, animating the statics napshot using
Speaker 1: computer simulations showing how atoms in the drug and the
Speaker 1: receptor moved around each other. The simulations revealed something surprising.
Speaker 1: The atom clusters blocking blocking the tantalizing sight sporadically moved aside,
Speaker 1: opening what biochemists call a cryptic pocket, allowing researchers a
Speaker 1: glimpse in tweaking their designs to fit Majumdar's team made
Speaker 1: one other crucial adjustment in the hope of nixing fubinacca's
Speaker 1: psychoactive side effects. The newly accessible site, it turned out,
Speaker 1: could accept a compound with a positive electric charge, which
Speaker 1: hinders a molecule from crossing the membrane separating blood from
Speaker 1: the brain. By tacking a charged group of atoms onto fubinaca,
Speaker 1: researchers confined its activity to CEB one receptors outside the brain,
Speaker 1: where it can't get anyone high or act on the
Speaker 1: brain's reward circuitry, limiting risks of misuse and abuse. New
Speaker 1: versions of fubinaca were injected into rodents experiencing various kinds
Speaker 1: of pain, and one variant, which the researchers called VIP
Speaker 1: thirty six, showed indicators of relieving chronic pain from three
Speaker 1: different sources inflammation, nerve damage, and headaches, even after days
Speaker 1: of repeated injections. True, says Washington University neurobiologist Robert Giroux,
Speaker 1: all that molecular tinkering had reduced the drug's potency and
Speaker 1: thus its pain relieving effects, but where that might have
Speaker 1: left other cannabinoids toothless GIAU says VIP thirty six remained
Speaker 1: effective in a range that is useful clinically, precisely because
Speaker 1: fubinaca packed such a wallop to begin with. VIP thirty
Speaker 1: six is still in its baby steps phase. It has
Speaker 1: yet to be tested in humans who have fewer c
Speaker 1: B one receptors outside of their brains than rodents do,
Speaker 1: and for now the new compound can't be taken orally,
Speaker 1: only injected. But even if the drug never reaches your
Speaker 1: medicine cabinet, the research could still chart new pharmaceutical paths
Speaker 1: for when it might occasion a reassessment from those skeptical
Speaker 1: of cannabinoid's potential as medicine, a constituency that includes the
Speaker 1: world's largest pain research organization, the International Association for the
Speaker 1: Study of Pain, whose official position is that science has
Speaker 1: so far failed to prove cannabinoids either safe or effective.
Speaker 1: This is the perfect paper to help reput steam into
Speaker 1: the cannabinoid field, says Michael Burton, a neuroscientist and cannabinoid
Speaker 1: researcher at the University of Dallas at Texas. What's more,
Speaker 1: Majumdar says there may be other cryptic pockets in other
Speaker 1: receptors related to CB one, many of which have nothing
Speaker 1: to do with pain. Some have been linked to heart disease,
Speaker 1: for instance, or substance abuse disorders. This opens an enticing possibility.
Speaker 1: What the researchers have learned about changing a receptor's behavior
Speaker 1: could help them tinker with a whole range of drugs.
Speaker 1: Majumdar is already planning to revisit a previous study that
Speaker 1: unsuccessfully targeted a hard to reach opioid receptor. He imagines
Speaker 1: redesigning antidepressants, maybe cancer drugs targeting diseases beyond pain is
Speaker 1: expected in the near future. He says, we are just
Speaker 1: scratching the surface. Compared to what law enforcement seized in
Speaker 1: the nineteen nineties, cannabis grown in the United States today contains,
Speaker 1: on average, far more THHC, the plant's main psychoactive compound.
Speaker 1: What are the differences between actual cannabis and synthetic products
Speaker 1: like K two spice and Delta eight? Are these legal
Speaker 1: really legal? Some of these lab made cannabis substitutes may
Speaker 1: indeed be legally sold, but legal isn't the same thing
Speaker 1: as SAYE, and synthetic cannabinoids come with risks. What makes
Speaker 1: things murky and dangerous? Is that what you might hear
Speaker 1: called fake or synthetic pot isn't a single drug, but
Speaker 1: whole classes of chemicals. To create synthetic cannabinoids for recreational use,
Speaker 1: underground chemists formulate compounds that are chemically distinct from THHC
Speaker 1: but act on nerve receptors in similar ways. Since some
Speaker 1: of those substances marketed with names like K two and
Speaker 1: spice aren't technically illegal, they can be sold at gas stations,
Speaker 1: smoke shops, and online stores, as for example, herbal incense,
Speaker 1: but many have suggestive branding that alerts consumers to a
Speaker 1: potential secondary usage for the chemical laced blends. This concludes
Speaker 1: readings from National Geographic Magazine for today. Your reader has
Speaker 1: been Marcia. Thank you for listening, Keep on listening, and
Speaker 1: have a great day.