I’ve seen tons in the media, and even anecdotes on this board about the reaction people have to synthetic cannabinoids being extreme and very unlike marijuana.
Psychotic breaks, violence, freak outs, even negative physical reactions and death.
So why is this so different than THC? Synthetic opiates don’t cause much of a different reaction than morphine.
Is it just that people are dosing insane amounts, equivalent to smoking a ton of marijuana at once?
In addition to THC, marijuana contains cannabidiol, an antipsychotic which mellows the high. Also, I believe THC is only a partial agonist of the cannabinoid receptors, and some of these synthetics are total agonists.
Some of it most definitely comes down to dosage, as you’ve surmised. New synthetic cannibinoids are being invented too fast to rigorously study their characteristics, and the manufacturers straight up don’t care. If no one knows the correct dose to achieve the desired effects, and the producers aren’t carefully measuring the amount taken, then it would be shocking if there weren’t overdoses, especially as there is often a significant delay between when someone takes the drug and it actually starts to affect them. As we’ve seen with the development of synthetic opiates, it is entirely possible to engineer substances hundreds of times or even thousands of times more effective by weight- there are some opiates which aren’t used because they can’t be reliably measured before being given to the patient.
Unfortunately, the DEA is the boy who cried wolf with regards to how dangerous taking synthetic cannibinoids is, and most users I’ve known in the past thought that they were safe, because they’d heard worse about marijuana than about Spice and the rest.