More on Medical Marijuana

Mike Dwyer

Mike Dwyer is a former writer and contributor at Ordinary Times.

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1 Response

  1. Ian M. says:

    I’m answering this because one of my degrees is in forensic science and I’ve taken some graduate courses on the the toxicology of “drugs of abuse”. The main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana is THC, which is a lipid soluble molecule. Cocaine,heroin, and the “speedy” drugs tend to be water soluble. In practical terms, this means THC can be detected much, much longer after use than the other drugs mentioned. In other words, Nick Diaz could have used medical marijuana a week before the fight and smoked crack four days before the fight and then tested positive for pot and negative for cocaine.

    You can make some educated guesses about the amount and frequency of usage based on the concentration of drug metabolites that show up in the urine test, but cannot say definitively when the last dose took place. You could set up a system similar to cycling wrt erythropoietin doping by monitoring the fighters regularly throughout the year and trying to get a personal baseline for the metabolites in their system. But there’s not really anything like a breathalyzer for anything but alcohol – a non-invasive test which definitively shows someone’s level of intoxication at that moment.

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