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The "Fake Marijuana" Situation is Getting Confusing

Submitted by smorgan on
As efforts to ban fake marijuana products continue to escalate, I predict we'll be seeing a lot of this sort of thing:
 
My understanding is that JWH-018 is the active ingredient in question here, but is that the end of the story? Maybe there are 9 other similar compounds that will work as well. Maybe there are 100. I'm not a scientist, but I'm starting to get the impression that the whole synthetic marijuana substitution phenomenon is just getting started. Banning a single ingredient will not only fail for all the reasons that prohibition always fails, but it might not even succeed in making fake pot illegal. Don't be surprised to see the DEA intervene at some point wielding the broad Federal Analogue Act, but you can't possibly ban every random concoction someone might stuff in a bong.

Science is smarter than prohibition, so the longer we have stupid rules about what people are and are not allowed to ingest for their own amusement, the more loopholes will emerge to circumvent and trivialize those rules.

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