What are “Spice” and “K2”

Any “JWH” cannabinoid is dangerous, right?

No! JWH is simply an abbreviation of the chemist or organization who first synthesized those cannabinoids, with JWH standing for John W. Huffman.

The same is true with abbreviations like “AM” (Alexandros Makriyannis), “CP” (Charles Pfizer), and HU (Hebrew University). There are plenty of JWH cannabinoids that are fully classic cannabinoids, such as D8 THCp, whose original name is JWH-091, or D8 THC-B, whose original name was JWH-130.

Basically, it just so happens that John W. Huffman and the rest of these folks and organizations discovered a SHITLOAD of cannabinoids, both classical in nature and not.

What is “spice”?

Rather it’s called Spice, K2, or even just “herbal smoking blend”, the idea is that these are the cannabinoids that, despite being an entirely different class of drugs, still manage to hit your CB1 and CB2 receptors.

It is theorized that these cannabinoids (often indole in structure) cause issues not because of full agonism, but because of the cannabinoids structure. It has been proven that Indole and Indazole cannabinoids have toxicity within the human body.

You can read more about that in a journal by Oxford entitled “Human Toxicity Caused by Indole and Indazole Carboxylate Synthetic Cannabinoid Receptor Agonists: From Horizon Scanning to Notification”. I won’t get into it too deeply here, but that's a good place to start.