The New Cannabinoids

Army fears influx of synthetic marijuana

It’s a common rumor: Spice, as the new synthetic cannabis-like products are usually called, will get you high--but will allow you to pass a drug urinalysis. And for this reason, rumor has it, Spice is becoming very popular in exactly the places it might be least welcomed: Police stations, fire departments—and army bases.

What the hell is this stuff?

Little is known about spice and other synthetic twists on basic cannabinoid molecules. We do know that the near-cannabis compounds are hard to detect, and even harder to legislate against without closing down avenues of legitimate research. It appears evident that a number of cannabinoid compounds are in circulation, and the precise nature of any given dose is difficult to determine. Much like trying the brown acid, or the joint laced with PCP, the effects vary widely. There are numerous anecdotal reports that spice and its cousins are extremely dose dependent.

The best coverage of Spice, K2, and similar “legal highs” has been generated by science bloggers—especially David Kroll at Terra Sigillata, DrugMonkey at DrugMonkey blog,  and Dr. Leigh at Neurodynamics.  Readers are advised to consult these links for the most comprehensive coverage of this emerging drug issue.

David Kroll  aptly summarized what we know about the "fake weed."

"Synthetic marijuana, marketed as K2 or spice, is an herbal substance sold as an incense or smoking material that remains legal in much of the United States but is being increasingly banned at the state and local levels. The products contain one or more synthetic compounds that behave similarly to the primary psychoactive constituent of marijuana, delta nine tetrahydrocannabinol or THC.”

Kroll writes that JWH–018 is "one of over 100 indoles, pyrroles, and indenes synthesized by the Huffman laboratory to develop cannabimimetics, drugs that mimic the effect of cannabinoids such as THC.”

Furthermore: “The compound most commonly found in these products is a chemical first synthesized by the well-known Clemson University organic chemist, Prof. John W Huffman: the eponymous JW H–018. Another compound, found in spice products sold in Germany, is an analog of CP-47, 497, a cannabinoid developed by Pfizer over 20 years ago."

The cannabimimetics are back.

Unfortunately, the chemical compositions vary, as do the effects, all of which is unpleasantly reminiscent of PCP problems in the past. To gain a better perspective on the matter, I spoke with Joe Gould, a staff writer for the Army Times  who has been covering the issue of Spice use in the Armed Forces. Gould has written extensively on the case of Spc. Bryan Roudebush, who attacked his girlfriend in Hawaii while under the influence of Spice. Roudebush had been home from an Iraq deployment for a year when the incident occurred. Two earlier experiences with spice had produced marijuana-like effects. But for Roudebush, the third time was not the charm: He beat his girlfriend and tried to throw her out a window while experiencing what he described as a trance-like state.

“What we were told by the folks at the Army Criminal Investigation Lab is that it started showing up on bases,” said Gould, “and the investigators on the bases were baffled, and the crime lab wasn’t sure what it was at first.”

What investigators discovered was “all that really defines a synthetic cannabinoid is that it activates cannabinoid receptors. We know what THC does. But the chemical composition is not THC. There are all these different strains. Some of the state laws we’ve been seeing, they’re targeting specific varieties of this stuff, but there are other varieties that the law doesn’t know about yet. So I think what the Army has done, intentionally or not, it has sort of skirted this whole question by just calling it all Spice.”

As for the Roudebush case, Gould said: “The first two times he tried it, it was very much like pot. And then the third time, by his and his girlfriend’s description, he goes into a violent trance. They think it was just a different variety. It’s kind of a mystery. What was in that batch? Why did it affect him the way it did? It just goes to how little is known about the drug. You don’t know from one batch to another.”

The U.S. Army currently has no specific testing program in place for Spice. Can you pass a drug test on Spice? “That’s what we heard,” Gould told me. “A researcher from NIH told us exactly that—they believe that the reason it’s popular, the reason they’ve seen officials using it, is because it can’t be tested for.” Despite this, Gould said he knew of “at least nine Commands that have individually passed regulations to target Spice.”

Gould downplayed any talk of an epidemic of usage, and made clear that his research shows that Spice usage is not rampant. “It’s not entirely clear how many soldiers are using Spice. The Army’s not really tracking the use of Spice. Each of these commands passed these regulations either because they saw a problem, or because they were trying to get out in front of what could potentially be a problem.”

Too far out in front for Phillip Cave, a Virginia attorney who has represented military personnel in cases involving Spice. Gould quotes Cave calling the whole thing a “witch hunt,” noting that alcohol is freely available on base, and that researchers do not yet knew whether Spice and its analogs are unsafe or addictive—and they are illegal in only a handful of states at present. Cave also objects to the fact that most cases have been resolved by an Article 15 discharge from service.

“The European Union study says there is the potential for abuse,” said Gould. “How bad it gets, we won’t know until we see more studies.”

Hand-in-hand with restrictions on Spice have come crackdowns on the use of Salvia, a plant responsible for brief but intense bouts of hallucinogenic effects. “The state laws have tended to tackle the two at once,” according to Gould.  “Like the state legislatures, the Army has a patchwork of bans they’re putting out there, and there also hitting Salvia. But what I was told by the folks at the lab was that they’re not seeing it in the same kinds of numbers. It’s been sporadic at best.”

Marijuana and Memory

Do certain strains make you more forgetful?

Cannabis snobs have been known to argue endlessly about the quality of the highs produced by their favorite varietals: Northern Lights, Hawaiian Haze, White Widow, etc. Among dedicated potheads, debates about the effects of specific cannabis strains are often overheated, and, ultimately, kind of boring. It's a bit like listening to a discussion of whether the wine in question evinces a woody aftertaste or is, instead, redolent of elderberries. For most people, the true essence of wine drinking is pretty straightforward: a drug buzz, produced by a 12 to 15 % concentration of ethyl alcohol derived from grapes, which can be had in a spectrum of varietal flavors.

However, there is no doubting that, unlike the case of wine, different strains of marijuana can have markedly different psychoactive effects. With weed, it's not just a matter of taste.

Over the past couple of years, the cannabis debate has taken a nasty turn, after British scientists published several controversial studies suggesting that high-THC "skunk" cannabis was responsible for increased mental problems among young people--including an increased risk of developing the symptoms of schizophrenia. British drug policy makers have continued to lead the charge on this, with mixed results. See my earlier post.

Recently, a study published in the British Journal Of Psychiatry concluded that marijuana
high in THC--including so-called "skunk" cannabis--caused markedly more memory impairment than varieties of marijuana containing less THC.

In an article at Nature News, Arran Frood spelled out the details of the study:

"Curran and her colleagues traveled to the homes of 134 volunteers, where the subjects got high on their own supply before completing a battery of psychological tests designed to measure anxiety, memory recall and other factors such as verbal fluency when both sober and stoned. The researchers then took a portion of the stash back to the laboratory to test how much THC and cannabidiol it contained....  Analysis showed that participants who had smoked cannabis low in cannabidiol were significantly worse at recalling text than they were when not intoxicated. Those who smoked cannabis high in cannabidiol showed no such impairment."

The two main ingredients in cannabis are THC and cannabidiol (CBD). CBD shows less affinity for the two main types of cannabis receptors, CB1 and CB2, meaning that it attaches to receptors more weakly, and activates them less robustly, than THC.  The euphoric effects of marijuana are generally attributed to THC content, not CBD content. In fact, there appears to be an inverse ratio at work. According to a paper in Neuropsychopharmacology, "Delta-9-THC and CBD can have opposite effects on regional brain function, which may underlie their different symptomatic and behavioral effects, and CBD's ability to block the psychotogenic effects of delta-9-THC."

So, CBD specifically does not produce the usual marijuana high with accompanying euphoria and forgetfulness and munchies. What the researchers found was that pot smokers suffering memory impairment and those showing normal memory "did not differ in the THC content of the cannabis they smoked. Unlike the marked impairment in prose recall of individuals who smoked cannabis low in cannabidiol, participants smoking cannabis high in cannabidiol showed no memory impairment."

As far as memory goes, THC content didn't seem to matter. It was the percentage of CBD that controlled the degree of memory impairment, the authors concluded. "The antagonistic effects of cannabidiol at the CB1 receptor are probably responsible for its profile in smoked cannabis, attenuating the memory-impairing effects of THC. In terms of harm reduction, users should be made aware of the higher risk of memory impairment associated with smoking low-cannabidiol strains of cannabis like 'skunk' and encouraged to use strains containing higher levels of cannabidiol."

The idea that cannabidiol may protect against THC-induced memory loss is still quite speculative.  Other research has suggested that a paucity of CB1 receptors may be protective against memory impairment. Marijuana growers select for high-THC strains, not high-CBD strains, and thus there is little data available about the CBD levels of most marijuana.

An earlier study in Behavioural Pharmacology by Aaron Ilan and others at the San Francisco Brain Research Institute did not find any connection between memory and CBD content. However, Ilan speculated in the Nature News article that the difference might have been due to methodology: In Britain, the subjects were studied using marijuana of their own choosing.  In the U.S., National Institute of Health research policy has decreed that marijuana for official research must be supplied by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). And if there is one thing many researchers seem to agree on, it is that NIDA weed "is notorious for being low in THC and poor quality."

But CBD still does something, and that something just might be pain relief.  Lester Grinspoon, a long-time marijuana researcher at Harvard Medical School, thinks that if the study proves out, it could have an important impact on the medical use of marijuana. Also quoted in Nature News, Grinspoon said: "Cannabis with high cannabidiol levels will make a more appealing option for anti-pain, anti-anxiety and anti-spasm treatments, because they can be delivered without causing disconcerting euphoria."

Morgan, C., Schafer, G., Freeman, T., & Curran, H. (2010). Impact of cannabidiol on the acute memory and psychotomimetic effects of smoked cannabis: naturalistic study The British Journal of Psychiatry, 197 (4), 285-290 DOI: 10.1192/bjp.bp.110.077503

Graphics Credit: http://sites.google.com

Is Dexter an Addict?

Compulsion, addiction, and TV serial killers.

With the hit cable TV show “Dexter” set to begin a new season, it seems a fitting time to consider the matter in its essence: What the hell is the deal with this guy? There is, in fact, a book—“The Psychology of Dexter”—which takes exactly this task as its mission.

Edited by Bella Depaulo, PhD, the “completely unauthorized” collection features essays by assorted psychologists, science writers, grad students, professors, and other brainy Dexter fans. For TV watchers unfamiliar with the show, Wikipedia describes “Dexter” as “an American television drama series that centers on Dexter Morgan, a blood spatter-pattern analyst for the Miami Metro Police Department, who moonlights as a serial killer.”

Got that? Whether you find the show to be a dark comedy or an outrage, its popularity is undeniable. One of the show’s themes is that Dexter is the victim of impulses beyond his control, and at one point, he becomes enrolled in Narcotics Anonymous. Is he exactly where he is supposed to be? Let us speculate for a moment, and assume that certain behavioral obsessions—gambling, shoplifting, perhaps even compulsive sex behavior—turn out to be legitimate addictions—addictions to a behavior, rather than a substance. Might not serial killing fall into the same category as other addictions mediated by a disordered reward system in the brain?

Okay, probably not. But the informed speculation that makes up much of the book is both funny and thought-provoking. Moreover, Adi Jaffe, friend of Addiction Inbox, soon-to-be doctor of psychology at UCLA, and the guiding light behind the AllAboutAddiction treatment site, contributed to the collection of essays about Dexter. Here are some of his observations:

“Although the specifics of his story might divide professional opinion on whether he fits the clinical definition of an addict, for the purposes of this essay it is safe to say that Dexter displays both addictive behavior and a personality disorder.”
---
“Dexter’s misleading admission that he is, indeed, an addict, is not far from truth…. We find that addicts, like Dexter, often project an entirely false persona in the pursuit of disguising their true intentions and compulsions, as hiding behind a carefully constructed mask is essential to allow them to continue with the behavior that is often their biggest motivator. Indeed, addicts and their behavioral patterns tend to make us feel uneasy in much the same way that Dexter does.”
---
“Although a series of vivid flashbacks to horrific childhood trauma has given us a wider view of the origins of Dexter’s dark compulsions…. addiction, as we know, owes much to genetics and biology. The extent to which serial killers are governed by inheritance is not known.”
---
“However, we know a few things about addicts, beginning with the unshakably strong connection between addiction and personality disorders that brought Dexter Morgan to a narcotics anonymous meeting in the first place…. These two afflictions undoubtedly support one another, to the tune of a three times higher prevalence of personality disorders in addicts versus the general population.”
---
“There is one last thing that Dexter has in common with other addicts. While Dexter seems to have thus far kept his omnipresent mask in place, the show continues to push him toward a point beyond which maintaining the façade and giving in to his dark compulsions will prove mutually exclusive. He would not be the first addict to face such a choice.”

Photo Credit: http://www.aceshowbiz.com/

The Absolutely True Story of the LSD No-Hitter

Dock Ellis, in his own words.

Dock Ellis, former pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, speaking to inmates at Marantha Correctional Facility, Adelanto, California:

“When you get to the big leagues, you start getting big-league dope.

“So here’s what happened to me. I was functioning as a baseball player, but I was addicted to drugs and alcohol. I wanted you to understand that my life was no different than yours–my arena was just different. I was in baseball but I was in the streets too. Like I was saying, it’s all the same. We experience the same kind of stuff, some more than others, but it’s all the same.

 “I played baseball from 1964 to 1979. I was in two World Series…. After I got out of baseball, I ended up in treatment…. I went to school, the University of California, Irvine, to become a substance abuse counselor.

 “Yeah, I threw a no-hitter for the Pittsburgh Pirates against the San Diego Padres in 1970, under the influence of LSD. Want to hear the story? I was in Los Angeles, and the team was playing in San Diego, but I didn’t know it. I had taken LSD… I thought it was an off day, that’s how come I had it in me. I took the LSD at noon. At 1 PM, my girlfriend looked at the newspaper and said, “Doc, you are pitching today!”….

“I can only remember bits and pieces of the game. I was psyched. I had a feeling of euphoria. I was zeroed in on the catcher’s glove, but I didn’t hit the glove too much. I remember hitting a couple of batters, and the bases were loaded two or three times. The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes. Sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I tried to stare the hitter down and throw while I was looking at him. I chewed my gum until it turned to powder. They say I had about 3 to 4 fielding chances. I remember diving out of the way of a ball I thought was a line drive. I jumped, but the ball wasn’t hit hard and never reached me. The Pirates won the game 2-0, although I walked eight batters. It was the high point of my baseball career.”

[From “The Harder They Fall: Celebrities Tell Their Real-Life Stories of Addiction and Recovery,” by Gary Stromberg and Jane Merrill.]

Graphics credit: http://slanchreport.com/

NIH Turf Wars

Combining Addiction Agencies.

For nearly a decade, the idea of combining the federal government’s two primary addiction research institutes has made good sense. Recently, an independent panel officially recommended a merger—but alcohol researchers opposed the notion, as they have in the past.

The National Institutes of Health, the nation’s premier biological research institution, is composed of 27 separate medical institutes, each fighting for its share of funding and recognition under the larger umbrella of the parent organization. If this seems like an unwieldy arrangement, that’s because it is. Duplication and overlap is inevitable in as vast an enterprise as the NIH. Yet the arrangement has produced some of the best medical and biological research in the world.

Former NIH director Harold Varmus complained, according to ScienceInsider (Sub req) “that the sprawl hobbles NIH’s ability to respond to new science.” The most obvious case for streamlining and cost-savings has always been the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) on the one hand, and the clumsily named National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) on the other.

In 2006, Congress told the NIH to create the Scientific Management Review Board to recommend ways of overhauling the NIH structure. The obvious place to start was with the two overlapping addiction institutes.

It was not a new idea. In 2003, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recommended merging the agencies due to “overlapping missions.” Enoch Gordis, then director of the NIAAA, was adamantly opposed to the idea, and the undertaking fell away.

Recently, the Scientific Management Review Board of the NIH voted 12-3 in favor of the merger, and sent the proposal to the desk of NIH director Francis Collins. However, the board also recommended an outside search for a director, thereby eliminating current NIDA director Norah Volkow from consideration. Dr. Volkow has been an active and public advocate for addiction awareness. An obvious choice to head the combined institute, provisionally known as the National Institute on Addiction, she would be a significant loss to the NIH. A spokesperson for Dr. Volkow would only offer NIDA’s official stance on the matter: “NIDA’s position has always been that we should create an organizational structure that best serves the science of addiction. We appreciate the thoughtful process that preceded the Board’s recommendation, and we look forward to hearing about a final decision soon.”

For years, NIAAA supporters had a ready answer when asked what made their agency different from NIDA: the liver. NIAAA did research on the liver and other organs and metabolic processes involved in metabolizing alcohol. But over the past two decades, the meaningful research coming out of NIDA has been the primary focus for most addiction researchers. NIDA’s forceful and forward-thinking director, Norah Volkow, followed an equally outspoken director, Alan Leshner. At NIAAA, the most recent director, Dr. T.K. Li, came to the institute after a distinguished career as an alcohol researcher at the University of Indiana. Dr. Li recently retired and the position is being filled on an interim basis by acting director Kenneth Warren.

NIAAA has always been the weaker sister in the addiction research family. With only half of NIDA’s billion-dollar budget, NIAAA deals strictly with alcohol research, even if the NIAAA has at times seemed unsure of what constitutes its main area of study—alcohol the addictive drug, or alcohol the healthy beverage. The merger would represent a recognition that alcohol is just another drug, albeit a legal one.

However, in a Science (sub req) interview, Francis Collins, the current director of the NIH, noted that the advisory board was “not able to come to a consensus” on the NIDA-NIAAA merger. “I guess most people would have said, ‘Well yeah, of course.’ But when you look at the details…. and you consider that alcohol is after all a legal substance and 90% of us at some point in our lives are comfortable with taking it in while the drug abuse institute is largely focused on drugs that are not legal. So there's a personality of the institute issue here that people thought might be important to preserve, others thought would be good not to preserve.”

The director’s remarks reflect the turf protection responses that this seemingly straightforward move invokes. An article by Bob Curley at Join Together notes that last year, the advisory board “voted unanimously in favor of studying the merger despite the fact that every group and individual testifying live at the hearing opposed combining the two agencies.”

Every group and individual? Curley quotes Lawrence Tabak, former acting deputy director of NIH, who minimized the likelihood of significant cost savings, and said, “there are also some issues that NIAAA deals with that are not ‘addictive’ in nature, such as binge drinking.” Representatives from the Research Society on Alcoholism and the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases said that NIAAA’s harm reduction approach to alcohol use was “fundamentally at odds with NIDA’s focus on illegal drugs.” The National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers also opposed the merger, citing fears of a “loss of focus” on the problems unique to alcohol.

Beyond the official testimony, many prominent drug addiction experts feel differently. “The basic biology of drug abuse and addiction are highly overlapping for all drugs of abuse,” according to Eric Nestler of the department of neuroscience at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. “There’s a huge confusion—not only among the lay public but among some treatment providers too—that alcohol is ‘not a drug,’” he said in the Join Together article. “This is absurd, yet the current separation of alcohol into a separate institute provides credence to that notion.”

According to noted addiction researcher Charles O’Brien of the University of Pennsylvania’s department of psychiatry, “There’s no scientific rationale to have a separate institute for a single drug. Ethanol activates the reward system similar to opioids and other abused drugs using different mechanisms to act on the same structures.” In addition, O’Brien notes that most addicts use more than one drug, but that NIAAA funding limit researchers to projects for “pure alcoholics, despite the reality of the clinical populations.”

The dual agencies, by their very existence, imply that addiction to alcohol and addiction to other drugs are wholly separate spheres of inquiry and investigation—a notion damaging to scientific research and public health. The primary hurdle to the merger is political, not scientific.

On the face of it, the merger makes sense, and in fact is long overdue. To keep these agencies separate means continuing to perpetuate the myth that there is something crucial that separates alcoholism from drug addiction. And there isn’t. Treating alcoholism and alcohol abuse as a syndrome somehow apart from drug abuse and addiction is outdated and unwarranted. We know too much now about both conditions to maintain the pretense.

As DrugMonkey, a pseudonymous science blogger funded by the NIH, summed it up: “If Institutes are to be merged than NIDA/NIAAA is at the very top of the list. If these cannot be merged then I do not see how any other mergers can be accomplished.”

Graphics Credit: http://www.hbcprotocols.com/nihfunds.html

Exercise, Attention, Meditation

Drug treatment alternatives.

A prescription for aerobic exercise might seem trivial in the face of the life-or-death battle people wage against rampant addiction. But with or without anti-craving drugs, both diet and exercise—two non-pharmaceutical methods of altering neurotransmission—will have roles to play in recovery.

Exercise, attention to diet, and nutritional supplements are only three of the complementary avenues being explored as components of addiction treatment. Successes have been claimed for acupuncture as well.  The same can be said for hypnosis. It has its vociferous claimants, but it has not been widely tested and documented as an addiction therapy.

Meditation, in its many Eastern and Western derivations, is used by some recovering addicts as a means of dampening the panic and anxiety that often accompany detoxification. And again, there is a certain amount of good science behind the notion. Sources as disparate as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Harvard’s Dr. Herbert Benson have produced evidence that sitting meditation—in which the mind is either purposefully made blank, or else is focused on a mantra (the Maharishi’s mantras are Sanskrit, but Dr. Benson maintains that any soft-sounding set of syllables will do)—produces verifiable changes in blood pressure, heart rate, and oxygen exchange. Years ago, Dr. Benson named this phenomenon the “relaxation response.” Many addiction clinics use variations on this theme in an attempt to ease withdrawal symptoms.

All of these alternative modalities suffer from the same limitations: a lack of large scale clinical testing due to inadequate funding, and a lack of adequate insurance reimbursements. Nonetheless, almost anything goes in the sprawling treatment and recovery industry. There are, for example, numerous clinics and treatment centers based on the principles of naturopathic and homeopathic medicine. The 3HO SuperHealth program that bloomed in Tucson, Arizona, a “holistic substance abuse facility” inspired by the teachings of the Hindu Guru Yogi Bhajan, was accepted by Blue Cross/Blue Shield and other major insurance providers. (Gaining insurance accreditation is a major factor in the success or failure of many treatment providers and large-scale programs.) There are drug recovery programs based on the spiritual wisdom of American Indians, on the teachings of the German mystic Rudolf Steiner, on assorted holistic health practices such as yoga, guided imagery, lucid dreaming, biofeedback, massage, and other forms of “personal growth” work.

Alternative therapists maintain that recovery from addiction is as much a spiritual voyage of discovery as it is a path back to conventional health and sanity. Traditional psychotherapy in isolation is a frequently ineffective method of treatment, while anti-craving pills, congeners, and replacement therapies are still quite new.

 Any treatment that claims to work for all addicts all of the time, under all conditions, should be viewed with extreme skepticism. It is safe to say that any commercial treatment program advertising success rates of 50 per cent or more is very probably engaging in short-term follow-ups, and may be seriously misleading the buying public.

Photo Credit: http://steveroni.blogspot.com/

Put Down Your Cigarette Rag (Don't Smoke)

By Allen Ginsberg (1971)

Dont smoke dont smoke dont smoke

Dont smoke

It's a nine billion dollar

Capitalist Communist joke

Dont smoke dont smoke dont smoke dont smoke

Dont smoke

Smoking makes you cough,

You cant sing straight

You gargle on saliva

and vomit on your plate

Dont smoke dont smoke dont smoke dont smoke,

Dont smoke smoke smoke smoke

You smoke in bed

You smoke on the hill

Smoke till yr dead

You smoke in Hell

Dont smoke dont smoke in living Hell Dope Dope

Dont smoke dont smoke dont smoke

You puff your fag

You suck your butt

You choke and gag

Teeth full of crud

Smoke smoke smoke smoke Dont dont dont

Dont Dont Dope Dope Dope Dont Smoke Dont Dope

Pay your two bucks

for a deathly pack

Trust your bad luck

and smoke in the sack

Dont Smoke Dont Smoke Nicotine Nicotine No

No dont smoke the official Dope Smoke Dope Dope

Four Billion dollars in Green

'swat Madison Avenue gets

t' advertise nicotine

and; hook you radical brats

Dont Smoke Dont Smoke Dont Smoke

Nope Nope Dope Dope Hoax Hax Hoax Hoax

Dopey Dope Dopey Dope Dope Dope dope dope

Black magic pushes dope

Sexy chicks in cars

America loses hope

and smokes and drinks in bars

Don't smoke dont smoke dont smoke,

dont smoke dont dont dont dont dont

choke choke choke choke kaf kaf

Kaf Kaf Choke Choke

Choke Choke Dope Dope

Communism's flopped

Let's help the Soviet millions

Sell 'em our Coffin-Nails

and make a couple billions

Big Bucks Big Bucks bucks bucks

bucks bucks smoke smoke smoke smoke

smoke Bucks smoke bucks Dope bucks big

Dope Bucks Dig Big Dope Bucks Big Dope

Bucks dont smoke big dope bucks

Dig big Pig dope bucks

Nine billion bucks a year

a Southern Industry

Buys Senator Jesse Fear who pushes Tobacco subsidy

In the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

Dope smokes dope smokes dont smoke dont smoke

Cloak cloak cloak room cloak and; dagger

smoke room cloak room dope cloak

cloak room dope cloak room dope dont smoke

Nine billion bucks for dope

approved by Time and Life

America loses hope

The President smokes Tobacco votes

Dont Smoke dont smoke dont smoke dont smoke

Dont smoke nope nope nope nope

30 thousand die of coke or

Illegal speed each year

430 thousand cigarette deaths

That's the drug to fear

In USA Dont smoke Dont smoke Dont smoke

Get Hooked on Cigarettes

Go Fight the War on Drugs

Smoke any other Weed

Get bust by Government Thugs

Dont smoke dont smoke the official dope

If you will get in bed

and give your girlfriend head

then you wont want a fag

Nor evermore a drag

Dont Smoke dont smoke Hope Hope Hope Hope

O Please Dont Smoke Dont Smoke

O Please O Please O Please

I'm calling on my knees

Twenty-four hours in bed

and give your boyfriend head

Put something in your mouth

Like skin not cigarette filth

Suck tit suck tit suck cock suck cock

suck clit suck prick suck it

but dont smoke nicotine dont smoke

dont smoke nicotine nicotine it's

too obscene dont smoke dont smoke

nicotine suck cock suck prick suck tit

suck clit suck it But dont smoke shit nope

nope nope nope Dope Dope Dope Dope

the official dope Dont Smoke

Make believe yer sick

Stay in bed and lick

yr cigarette habit greed

One day's all you need

In deed in deed in deed in deed smoke weed

smoke weed Put something green

in between but don't smoke smoke dont smoke

hope hope hope hope Nicotine dont

smoke the official dope

Dope Dope Dope Dope Dont Smoke

Smoke weed indeed smoke grass yass yass

smoke pot but not nicotine no no

indeed it's too obscene

put something green

in between your lips get hip not square

listen to my wail don't dare smoke coffin nails

ugh ugh ugh ugh the government Drug

official habit for Mr. Babbitt

Dont smoke the official dope

dope dope dope dope don't smoke

Dont Smoke Dont Smoke.

Original version: First Blues: Rags, Ballads and Harmonium Songs

Extended version: http://www.youtube.com/

Photo Credit: http://berkshirereview.net/