Facts About Herbal Products: Sorry, You've Been Fooled

Conclusion: The main active compound can be addictive. In practice, people who become dependent tend to use more and more of the herb to maintain the same pleasant effect. Along the way, some of them switch to other drugs when the herb no longer provides enough pleasure, and some do not. The people in the study who switched to other drugs (a large number of them) cannot simply be grouped under herb use. The addiction data examined here therefore cover only people who used the herb but did not switch to other drugs. Compared with tobacco and alcohol, such a sample means very little. So the online figure you are likely to see should read: addiction to the herb alone (without switching to other drugs) is about 10%.

If someone tells you that the herb is about as harmful as alcohol, tobacco, and coffee, and if you are even a little suspicious of those words, I would ask you to take a closer look below.

I want to start with the drug classification system.

After rigorous testing, drugs are generally divided into two types: prescription drugs and over-the-counter drugs. In most countries, the herb and morphine are prescription drugs. In Germany, for example, morphine can only be used for dying patients, while patients can use the herb for epilepsy or neuralgia to help relieve their pain. Even in the Netherlands, where the herb is decriminalized, the amount that each person can buy every day is subject to strict controls. At the same time, coffee, cigarettes, and alcohol are daily necessities, similar in status to over-the-counter drugs. In other words, under our current medical system, it is generally accepted that the herb is much more dangerous than coffee.

Is the general drug grading system perfect? No. Many scholars are experimenting with the grading system to make it work better.

For example, teenagers have recently been abusing tramadol hydrochloride, which causes addiction. The abusive use of tramadol hydrochloride is a defect of the drug classification system, and the government should strictly control the drug. But the fact is that it has not been classified.

Fortunately, some drugs have been studied thoroughly. Researchers found that cigarettes, alcohol, and caffeine also harm the human body, but people ignore the generally low amounts involved.

The more famous quote is from the Lancet:

Tobacco and alcohol are included because the extensive use of both provides us with reliable data showing the risks and harm they cause. When we judge the absolute damage value of other drugs, those two data sets give us a more familiar reference. However, it is almost impossible to compare the scores of tobacco and alcohol directly with the scores of other drugs, because the two are legal drugs, which affects their harm in many ways; mainly, people can obtain tobacco and alcohol quickly.

The author said that the quantity ingested cannot be compared directly, especially between legal drugs such as tobacco and alcohol and an illegal drug such as the herb. Because people can obtain legal medicines quickly, this affects the research result. A picture can help, but a picture is not proof. So the score of the bar chart above, or the position of the bubbles in the bubble chart, does not prove that the herb is less harmful than tobacco and alcohol.

Quotation source: Fang Zuming used the herb for eight years, and he had typically been behaving normally before being investigated. Does that mean the herb itself does not cause harm to life?

Therefore, the claim that "the herb is as harmful as alcohol, tobacco, and coffee" should really be that "under certain conditions, the herb is as harmful as alcohol, tobacco, and coffee."

A half-truth is often the most potent lie. When judging such problems, an ordinary person who lacks professional knowledge is best served by asking an expert, instead of searching the internet and believing only half the truth.

The mental effects of the herb:

01. Emotional (mood) disorders: A brief period of anxiety can occur within 1-2 minutes after using the herb, producing inexplicable and vague anxiety and irritability. After a few minutes, it enters a refreshing period, and the user feels exceptionally stable and comfortable. Relaxed and happy, they think that everything is beautiful and feel full of happiness when dealing with people; then it turns into a period of heightened effect, happy and contented, no longer talking with others, and willing to be alone in a state of blissful calm. Some users are indifferent to the surrounding environment and to other people's care and sympathy. If the user has an anxiety or depression tendency, their symptoms will worsen after using the herb. Emotional changes may trigger strange behaviors, such as giggling, crying, yelling, and even impulsiveness.

02. Abnormal perception: various forms of illusions, hallucinations, and comprehensive disturbances of perception such as time, space, and body shape. What is more prominent is that the user will find that time passes very slowly, with a day feeling like a year, and a few minutes feeling like tens of minutes. I have seen the movie "New Special Police Judge," and I was deeply impressed by the drugs produced by the gangsters. After inhaling the drugs, the concept of time becomes extremely slow, and the effect is to reduce the passage of time in the human brain to 1%.

Objects seen by the eye will deform, become very close and large, and blur the distance of surrounding things. Some users feel that their faces become larger or smaller, their limbs longer or shorter, and some even see their bodies resembling animals, such as pigs and cows. They see other people's facial features distorted, their limbs long and thin, and they look especially weird, so the user smirks incessantly.

Colors feel vivid, rich, and deep, and the surrounding things are colorful. The ability to appreciate music is enhanced, and people are also susceptible to other sounds. The senses of touch, taste, and smell can all be enhanced. The feeling is what some people call the source of inspiration for painters. Of course, whether these artists can control their lives or not is something they do not care about.

There is a "dislocation" of perception, such as seeing sounds, hearing images, and even floating in the air like a soul out of one's body, watching one's body motionless in its original position. Various unconstrained thoughts emerge in the brain, and the user feels the wisdom of the surrounding animals and plants, such as the illusion of seeing the soul of a big tree and talking to it.

To Conclude:

1. The herb is generally a prescription drug in the existing drug system, and it can cause harm to the human body, so you cannot organize a large-scale experiment on healthy people using the herb.

2. The herb is an addictive drug. In practice, people who become dependent will continue to increase their use of the herb to maintain pleasure. In the process, some will switch to other drugs (when the herb provides them with insufficient pleasure), and some will not. People who switch to other drugs in the test (a large number of people) cannot simply be classified under the herb. Therefore, the harm data for the herb investigated here are only for people who used the herb but did not switch to other drugs (for example, a person who just started using the herb). Such a sample is meaningless when compared with tobacco and alcohol. So what leads you to see the online data should be: addiction to the herb (without switching to other drugs) is about 10%.