JOHN W. HUFFMAN: Organic chemist invented a compound in 1995 that is now at the center of a controversy brewing over SYNTHETIC MARIJUANA

IN DECEMBER 2008, John W. Huffman, a professor of organic chemistry at Clemson University, received an e-mail that illustrates how pure scientific research can be exploited in unintended ways. The e-mail, from a blogger in Germany, alerted Huffman to the fact that the synthetic cannabinoid JWH-018 had been detected as an ingredient in some herbal blends marketed over the Internet as a legal substitute for marijuana. Huffman knows JWH-018 well. “We made the stuff in 1995,” he says. “I had an undergraduate student working under the supervision of a very capable postdoc, and this was just one of the things we made.” Their research was published in 1998 in the Journal of Pharmacology & Experimental Therapeutics ( 1998, 285, 995). JWH-018 is the 18th compound that Huffman’s research group synthesized in a series of more than 470 analogs and metabolites of ▵ 9 -tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active component of marijuana. Huffman created these compounds to ...