Comments on That’s Some Heavy Shit

Wow. That...wow.

my first thought was that it was grown in lead-contaminated soil. plants will take up lead instead of iron AS IF it were iron (something the plant needs in small amounts). but this is some evil shit, here.

fyi, if you're lead poisoned, start taking safe doses of iron, which will gradually replace the lead in your system. now that i think of it, it's a good side effect of the drug being illegal that people are forced to grow it in indoors in clean media or out in remote countryside--lead contamination is largely an urban soil problem.

Correction: No known cases of this in the US yet. I'll bet you $10 that some nitwit out there sees this story and says "Wow, man, what a great idea."

@2) The researchers considered that the plant may have been contaminated through the soi, but concluded it was added to the package.

We recovered either half-used packages or aliquots of “home supplies” of marijuana from three patients, and we identified elemental lead by means of atomic absorptiometry and Δ 9-tetrahydrocan of atomic absorptiometry and Δ 9-tetrahydrocantography. One package contained obvious lead particles (Fig. 1); this strongly indicated that the lead was deliberately added to the package rather than inadvertently incorporated into the marijuana plants from contaminated soil.

It would be cool if weed was regulated so this wouldn't happen.

Not just weed - adulteration is a major problem with all illegal drugs.

this is classic, just like the anecdotes about unintended consequences involving glass manufacture.

Buy buds not shake.

thank god i dont smoke pot
just alcholl,cigeretes,speed and black-tar heroin thank you vey much

Another reason you probably won't see local dealers suddenly spiking their wares like this, is that frankly, weed is so ubiquitous around here, what would be the point? It's not like they need to "put their thumb on the scale" like the old-time butcher, because the product is so scarce they need to squeeze a little extra margin out of it.

Plus, most people locally probably buy from someone they already know, and most end-of-the-chain dealers aren't about to piss off or POISON their clientele/friends, just for the sake of eking out a little more cash on their transactions, which they're probably not doing as a major source of their income anyway.

Anonymous street dealers might try to pull a stunt like this, but who in their right mind would purchase weed from someone they didn't know anyway?

COMTE,

Some of us don't have any friends who can sell to us, and are very bad at making new friends. So I would be forced to buy from someone I don't know, just because I know no one.

It's not drug use that is the problem here. It's sloth. Clean your weed!

I think they were trying to make the point that, being illegal street drugs have no regulatory structure to ensure purity. That's why I buy chinese toys instead! The FDA makes sure only the finest GHB precursors make it into the paint.

oh wait...that's right, we can't even accidentally drug our children without giving them lead poisoning too...

#11 Ditto. I haven't had a friend with weed (or a connection) in almost two years.

elswinger, andrew
need one?
i promise not to poison you

linus,

I'd love it, but I think setting up that kind of deal on slog is probably illegal.

@17

Uh, come to Slog Happy tonight.

@17: Even better, if you live in different states, it's a federal crime.

That BBC reporter who went to Amsterdam and smoked a huge jay of wheelchair weed everyday despite having paranoid hallucinations and a near psychotic breakdown would probably be dead by now. Idiot.