Founder Of Synthetic Marijuana

John W. Huffman, now an 83-year-old recluse who lives deep in the Smoky Mountains, discovered the drug compounds that spawned the creation of mass-produced synthetic drugs.
 
The Harvard-educated, Clemson University scientist, who said that he didn’t think anyone would ever recreationally use the compounds. He tinkered with them to study how the human brain works, he said.

Claiming it gives users super-human strength and immunity to pain.

It wasn’t until a German blogger sent Huffman an article in 2008 describing an artificial drug called “Spice” — which uses the active compound JWH-018 — that he realized people were using the stuff recreationally, he said.

 
“I thought it was sort of hilarious at the time.”

Huffman, who earned his doctorate at Harvard University and then worked at Clemson, first started worked to work with synthetic pot in the late 1980s after scientists discovered that marijuana’s active component, THC, stimulates a specific brain receptor, termed cannabinoid receptor. The discovery demystified how pot interacted with the brain.

Chemists then set out to see how man-made compounds would interact with the receptor.
Huffman was fascinated, he said. The receptor was a “puzzle” and he wanted to figure out how it worked.

Backed by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, he made hundreds of synthetic cannabinoids named for their relationship with the receptor, not because they mimic the high of marijuana.