Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Friday Music: Remembering Roi, in reply to Kumara Republic,
What about bulletin board services? Or was that more an early 1990s thing?
This was the early 80s, Matthew. The veritable dawn of time.
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Murray Cammick posted Roi's review of the Enemy's first ever gig. Amazing.
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Hard News: This is bad – very bad, in reply to Mikaere Curtis,
I’m not so sure, do we have any research around this ?
These chemicals are full agonists for the THC receptor and at that level something completely different starts going on. Extreme and unpredictable reactions, rapidly-developing dependence.
Because of the way it played out, the least harmful ones, first on the market, were banned early on. During the big media furore around the Psychoactive Substances Act, I recall seeing an interview with some girls in a regional town, high as kites, saying that plain old weed wasn't going to do any more and they didn't want it.
A regulated cannabis market might have stopped this situation ever arising, of course. But the effects you see in users now are not those of cannabis. This is different.
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A useful new Science Media Centre backgrounder, with comments from Dr Paul Quigley.
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I wrote two years ago about this.
The reports from ESR fly in the face of a recent assurance from Associate Health Minister Peter Dunne that police had told him there was only a “comparatively small” underground market, trading in products stockpiled from the old legal regime.
ESR’s results say different.
“There are significantly more,” ESR forensic analyst Hannah Partington told me. “And it’s not consistent, they change.”
“It’s new ones,” confirmed senior forensic scientist Jenny Sibley. “We had a very new one last week. It was in our data library, so we could identify that way. But we could not find any published data in scientific published papers. It takes ages for them to catch up.”
Both agreed that the large Customs seizure of JWH 018, one of the original “legal highs”, banned by the minister in November 2012, was an exception. Recent samples almost all contained cannabinomimetics never listed by the ministry.
It caused an internal shitstorm and I think I got the scientists in trouble, for telling the truth.
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Hard News: This is bad – very bad, in reply to tatjna,
Customs, police, ESR, I’m looking at you. You all have the technology to do this, and the power to say “Actually saving lives is more important that moralising about what we do and don’t condone.”
They absolutely do. I've talked to ESR scientists about it. Even if they don't have a reference profile – and in this crazy market that's not necessarily uncommon – they can make an educated guess as to whether it's a cannibimimetic or something else.
And yet we're hearing today that St John's, dealing with 20 cases a day, don't know much more than you and I do. It's just not acceptable.
Listening to the St John's guy on the radio just now, the most acute cases don't sound so much like an opioid overdose, but fentanyl could still be in the mix. Who fucking knows?
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Hard News: This is bad – very bad, in reply to Shaun Lott,
It would seem altogether simpler and safer for people be able to grow their own actual cannabis, no?
It would, although we’re long past the point of these drugs really being used as a cannabis substitute. They’re much stronger and weirder than that.
Someone who works with street people told me today he’d noticed that the people he had contact with have been much more wasted lately. This is a popular class of drugs for people living rough – they’re cheap and they take the day away. You see unconscious people on the street quite often in the inner city.
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Vice has a story up quoting Ross Bell.
Bell calls the New Zealand black market right now a “very, very dangerous place” and says drug users deserve all the information out there in order to make informed choices. “What you see when you give people factual information about what’s in the substances they’re about to consume [is that] they make really good decisions, and I think the same concept applies to whatever smokeable shit is out there at the moment.”
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Simon Ogston has just posted a trailer for his Bill Direen film (see last week's Friday Music) A Memory of Others:
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Hard News: Friday Music: Remembering Roi, in reply to Grant McDougall,
He was, of course, a font of knowledge about music – and often hilarious anecdotes about various NZ musicians – but also about sport, too.
Yep. He was a funny bastard on a whole panorama of topics.
