- Opiated Thai Sticks: Myth or Truth? -

[Hammerhead]

I wouldn't trust a word of that document. The main goal is to makeup as many charges as possible. I see no testing done to confirm Opium was indeed in those sticks. This is nothing but more stories told by people that where told by other people. OILS/HASH/STICKS go together well. Adding these would be common. I did it my self

 

[Gry]

As someone who spent time there in that era,, I never experienced opium or oil soaked stick,, but I am damned sure many had custom batches tailored.. Was a place and era where one could buy custom made shoes easier than buying the premade.

 

[Hammerhead]

A product like that would have to be specifically made for a small group of people. It could have been added after the sticks had landed. Making it there seems unlikely. Making opium water isn't hard if you have opium.. Anything can be made if the price is right. It wouldn't have been a commercial product IMO.

 

[redlaser]

Seems unlikely to dip pot into opium or whatever without charging extra for it.

Anybody that’s ever dried pot unsuccessfully will tell you getting it wet again would be an unnecessary risk.

 

[Dr. Purpur]

A product like that would have to be specifically made for a small group of people. It could have been added after the sticks had landed. Making it there seems unlikely. Making opium water isn't hard if you have opium.. Anything can be made if the price is right. It wouldn't have been a commercial product IMO.

Because of the timing, I always suspected the sticks we got in the early 70s was being brought back by Vietnam vets in their duffle bags. They were using heroin over in Nam, and smoking weed. I only saw opiated sticks during about a 2-3 year span. They did cost more

 

[Cvh]

So, we can agree that it's most likely a myth and that in some rare cases there might have been a couple of batches of opiumnated Thai Sticks?

 

[cyat]

Never had real Thai sticks. But used to get lots of chocolate thai in the 90’s in la. It looked like the nastiest brown weed ever. It actually tasted good and got you extremely high, except it was not a normal weed high. It pretty much made you feel dumb and it was hard to conversate. It left you with an ugly feeling. The taste was sweet. I heard from others years later that it was dipped it opium.

 

[Hammerhead]

So, we can agree that it's most likely a myth and that in some rare cases there might have been a couple of batches of opiumnated Thai Sticks?

I would agree with this. If it was a commercial product allot of us would have experience it or seen it sold. It had to be something that was added later after the sticks had reached there destination or made specifically for a few people which is unlikely..

 

[musigny23]

So, we can agree that it's most likely a myth and that in some rare cases there might have been a couple of batches of opiumnated Thai Sticks?

It always was a myth, despite what the Dr. keeps trying to insist.

In a legal court, it isn't necessary to prove a negative (there were no opiated sticks exported from Thailand), the burden is to PROVE the positive. That hasn't come close to being done. Zero evidence presented, just unsupported anecdotal assertions.

If they had been a real thing, there would be no doubt. Evidence would be plentiful, newspaper articles and government reports. Opiates are just too powerful of a drug to have been present but at the same time leave no trail of hard evidence like hospital statistics of ER incidents and positive tests of confiscated sticks and on and on. They could not have existed without causing very clear consequences.

Rare batches? No. It also still hasn't been explained exactly how these would have been produced. Poppy farming and heroin production were far from Thai stick farming and production. How and why were the two combined? And how was an effective but not overpowering infusion done that not only did no damage but also enhanced the cannabis while preserving the cure. The methods put forward either aren't possible (dipping in opium) or would ruin the cannabis (soaked in heroin production wastewater). Nor was it explained exactly how it was just enough to always be a desirable plus, but never too much and never caused any problems that brought unwanted attention from authorities.

Zombie sticks, they should be called, the mythical sticks that never lived but can't be killed.

 

[Hammerhead]

Plus there where no reports of people overdosing from opiated Thai sticks. This would have been big news since we know you cant overdose on cannabis. There's plenty of people that would use that in there Anti cannabis propaganda.

 

[Donald Mallard]

zombie sticks ,,

i like it musigny,

and i agree with your stance also , its just logical and sensible,
and im sure its accurate given the evidence given , which was of course none other than "my mate said " or "a drug dealer told me so its true , he also charged me more" .. lol ..



i think we can safely put this little fantasy to bed ...

 

[therevverend]

One thing I came away with, from reading about SE Asian culture, cannabis and poppy growing and drug use, they don't, or didn't share the taboos that modern Westerners have towards opiates. They didn't know about needles or heroin or oxycontin. Poppies and cannabis were and are a crucial life-saving medicine that has been used in their culture for thousands of years. The current War on Opiates in the west is a new thing.

For instance my great-grandma was born into a family of peasants from Alsace-Lorraine. They grew poppies on their dairy farms, when she was a child she was given a weak poppy tea when she was sick. Medicine is bitter. I'd also imagine the experience of being sick, bitter medicine, would make some people more immune to later opium addiction.

The diseases that affect the lungs, tuberculosis, the purgative, vomit-inducing effects, people today have no idea how valuable opium was before the advent of modern medicine.

and im sure its accurate given the evidence given , which was of course none other than "my mate said " or "a drug dealer told me so its true , he also charged me more" .. lol ..

No. My friend, my family, who was importing and dealing Thai Sticks from Thailand isn't just some chump or drug dealer or junkie. He's been a close family friend my entire life, a friend of my mother and aunts and uncles and grandmother. He's always welcome at our house. He's grown ganja his entire adult life and has never charged me for seeds, which have always been the best I've ever grown. When we first smoked ganja together he gave me a vitamin bottle with hundreds of seeds in it, a clone and 7 seeclings.

This is the person, when someone he knew robbed him in his patch at gunpoint in the middle of the night, when he saw him a couple days later, and the coward was flinching in fear that he was going to kick his ass...he said, 'grow your own stuff don't rob mine' and gave him a bagful of seed.

So implying that this is a fantasy, that he made up, that he's a liar, that he'd tell some bullshit story for no reason...as far as I'm concerned if he says some of the shipments of Thai Sticks coming to Washington state from Thailand in the 1970s contained opium, then they contained opium. And none of you were there. Who grew the ganja, where it came from before it arrived in Thailand to be sent to America, how they doused the sticks in opium, I don't know, you can argue all you want about that shit.

The imported Thai stick he bought was better then all the other imported ganja at the time, the Mex and Columbian. The stuff with or without the opium. The taste and the effects were stellar. The chocolate Thai wasn't as good, but it was still great stuff.

As far as some niche market, no. If you read the newspaper clippings from the time it was assumed by a lot of people and spread by the media and law enforcement that ALL Thai stick contained opium. Many, many people believed this to be true and happily bought and smoked the stuff anyway. They also sold and bought and smoked ganja doused in gasoline, soaked in paraquat, sprayed with herbicides and pesticides. During prohibition people smoked whatever fucked them up.

And they still do. Look at the shit they're selling at the dispensaries. In Europe where ganja is still illegal. It's doused in all kinds of shit. When I figured this out I grew my own and I always have. Most people don't care.

 

[Hammerhead]

There's def a disconnect from your experience and most others as you can see. All any of use can do is post our experience. Most people that had Thai sticks didn't have opium added. I'm sure we went though a few lbs of Sticks, we had none with opium. Sam and Donald both have been there, so they have 1st hand experience. All the Canna lovers they spoke with said Thai Sticks had no opium added. So everyone will have to make up there own mind. For me it wasn't a commercially exported product, I would have had some.

 

[Donald Mallard]

i dont question the honesty of your mate at all ,
but he was told something that is not true and he simply repeated it in my opinion ..



if there was any proof to back up the story id be happy to read it ,
but all we have is folks telling a story , repeating it ,,


sure thai was strong gunja and many that toked it back then hadnt experienced anything as strong , so some fantasy about it being laced went around to try and explain the potency ...

but if u read the testimony of folks that were there in the 70s they say they never came across it and were told by locals it never existed ,
coupled with the fact the opium was grown no where near the thai sticks , evidence which some guys are completely ignoring and making assumptions that the folks growing the cannabis were also growing opium , this is not true ....

they were different tribes of people who dont really talk to each other let alone do drug business ,

a bit of knowledge of how things work in the mentioned country is needed and would dispel the assumptions pretty quickly ...



as far as im concerned its simply a story to explain why the weed was stronger than other stuff they encountered and im not that interested in continuing to debate it since there is no way of convincing you believers that its just a story , all the evidence has already been put forward and still you guys believe the fantasy opium story ,,

so be it ..

 

[therevverend]

Here's a story about Thai Stick smuggling in my back yard. I know these places. Tons of Thai Stick used to wash up in Puget Sound and on the coast. Notice how the newspaper mentions opium but the sticks don't test out. The shipment was 2 tons and one of countless others. Note the size of the quantities. 44 lbs was a bale. (My friend went through countless bales) The amount of villages working as serfs (I've read the ganja and opium farmers usually didn't own the land but were tied to it by debt) growing the stuff, the women and children spending endless hours tying the string, all for the right to grow a small amount of subsistence vegetables. While guys holding the AK47, the generals and CIA guys and middlemen make the money.

Here's a bust story.

https://law.justia.com/cases/wisconsin/supreme-court/1977/75-537-c-7.html

Notice this time it's the dealer advertising his sticks are laced with opium as a selling point. $21 a stick, 200 sticks, $4200 worth. I noticed the Washington cops quoted $12 a stick. There's your mark up. While it's assumed they are laced with opium when examined they're really laced with 'marijuana and hashish'. Called 'marijuana and hashish sticks'. Ridiculous.

SE Asia in the 70s was not a merry place of hard working farmers gaily weaving wonderful cannabis sticks. It was a society going through an apocalypse, wracked by rapid industrialization, endless wars, and genocide. Millions of displaced refugees were crammed into camps with bad water and bad food. Tribes that had lived traditionally for thousands of years hunting with bows and arrows and maybe muskets were given machine guns, grenade launchers, and whatever else their communist or capitalist handlers thought they needed to slaughter each other.

Petty warlords suddenly found themselves millionaires or governing nations, spewing a lunatic ideology to both educated city dwellers or illiterate farmers. Pitting one against the other. The resources of the region had been raped out for 100 years during the colonial period but had greatly accelerated since the 1950s. One of these resources was drugs, the western world had awakened to a huge appetite. I don't see how anyone in this chaos can hope to account for everything that was churned out of the maelstrom. When you say 'I smoked a couple pounds' or 'I saw some fields'...and I didn't see any opiated Thai sticks. so there's no way there were any.' It comes across as sounding very naive or arrogant.

For a while I listened to Cambodian stoner rock. It's wormed it's way into popular culture the last couple years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR7GzuebiTs

Almost all the musicians on the record died a horrible death, tortured in one of Pol Pot's prisons. The female singer's husband was a paratrooper for the government forces that Pol Pot defeated, the Khmer Rouge hated decadent western music, and she didn't attempt to flee. Didn't leave her home and died as one of the nameless.

but he was told something that is not true

No, no one told him anything. Well, my other friend who went to the doctor because he was sick, was told by the doctor he was experiencing opiate withdrawal symptoms. Because other people had been going to the doctors sick from similar symptoms. After the batch of sticks in the area had ran out and a knew unadulterated batch came in. But he was a kid then, he didn't know anything.

But my friend didn't 'get told' he was buying opiated Thai sticks. He bought batches, shipments, of Thai sticks that were obviously adulterated with something, that burned weird and smoked and tasted differently then ganja. He moved hundreds (thousands?) of pounds of Thai stick, he likely saw more Thai stick then anyone on this site. A few of the BATCHES were adulterated, got you wasted like an opiate. You can't mistake it, eat a couple vicodin and tell me it feels like cannabis. He got Thai sticks from Thailand that obviously had been adulterated with opiates.

I'm curious about the seal, no one else has mentioned it. Every bale came with it's own seal. You have to remove the seal to get into it. I'm guessing none of you were dealing Thai stick at that level. This is my point, I don't like arguing on and on about this type of stuff or going into detail about someone else's business. But this was their business, he was 'the Thai guy' for about 10 years. He always had the best.

I'd be careful about what and who you decide is right and wrong, what exactly you want to censor. Removing opiated Thai sticks from history isn't going to remove opiate addiction from the world. That was tried with cannabis. Demonizing a substance doesn't work, removing the humanity from a person for being addicted to that substance is a terrible thing.

 

[therevverend]

To settle the 'how would you get opiates onto a bud' quandry I can tell you how to make your own opiated Thai Stick. Instead of insulting the reader by making a 'don't try this at home' joke, I'll assume you have a brain.

Most opiates are water soluble so it's simple. Dissolve your favorite opiate in some water. Put it in a spray bottle. Apply and dry. Easy.

(this post is dedicated to the memory of the 'Capri Kid'. A dumb rich kid who's opiate addiction involved putting oxycontin pills on tin foil and smoking them.)

 

[therevverend]

Here's a snippet from a Cannabis Culture article called 'Strains of Yesteryear' that was titled 'Opium Soaked Herb'. Which summarizes exactly what I'm talking about.

https://www.cannabisculture.com/content/2005/06/28/4280/

An element was added to certain shipments of Thai herb in the 70’s: “early water.” A by-product of the heroin trade, early water was the leftover water used to create the heroin from the raw opium. It contained all of the constituents of opium except most of the heroin.

The curing Thai herb was soaked in the water and redried to absorb the opiate alkaloids. The result was a high that was sought out by some, but more than most bargained for. A good wash was an enjoyable thing, but some were over-laced, which caused a dilemma for those who would start spinning after a few hits on a joint.

Notice it says 'certain shipments' which is how my friend described it. A batch comes over opiated. It also mentions the spins. How many times does taking a few pulls from a joint cause the ground to keep coming up and hitting you in the face?

It also says 'early water'. Water left over from making heroin. What is this? Opium isn't one drug like heroin or fentanyl or codeine. It's a mixture of at least 25 different alkaloids that have all sorts of different effects. This is why when people make tea from poppy heads they don't know what they're getting into. Maybe you'll spend the next 8 hours puking, maybe you'll fall asleep, maybe you'll be stimulated and talk for hours. You could die. This is why I wouldn't necessarily call an opiated Thai stick a 'zombie' stick, there's a good chance you won't nod out.. This is because of the effects of Thebaine, an alkaloid that can appear in SE Asian poppies in decent amounts. It can be 'converted industrially into a variety of compounds, including hydrocodone, hydromorphone, oxycodone, oxymorphone, nalbuphine, naloxone, naltrexone, buprenorphine and etorphine'.

In small amounts it's a stimulant. In large amounts it causes convulsions similar to strychnine poisoning, not a pleasant way to die. It is the main alkaloid in Papaver bracteatum, the Iranian poppy. Different strains and varieties of poppies have different and varying levels of alkaloids.

Years ago I had some poppy seeds, grew some lovely red poppies. I was curious what was in them and asked a chemist friend to test them. No morphine or codeine but they contained papaverine, a muscle relaxant. A non-narcotic poppy.

The point of this is that a heroin cook doesn't want all this shit. You need to boil it off and separate the pure morphine from the rest. Here's a blurb I lifted that explains why poppies have been such an important medicine for thousands of years despite their addictive properties. And some of the effects of the poppy you don't know about.

Papaver somniferum (opium poppy) is the source of several pharmaceutical benzylisoquinoline alkaloids including morphine, codeine, and sanguinarine. Moreover, other Papaver species also contain compounds with medicinal implications, such as alkaloid, essential oil, flavonoid, triterpenoid, steroid, and phenylpropanoid. Compared to Chelidonieae, Papaver has distinct and more diverse alkaloids. Papaver compounds display antioxidant, antimutagenic, and anticarcinogenic effects, antimicrobial and antiparasitic activities, anti-inflammatory activity, effect on nervous system, and other effects. Meconopsis, according to the molecular phylogenetic analysis, should belong to Papaver and thus might be treated as a subgenus (except M. cambrica). Transcriptomic studies help decipher the alkaloid biosynthesis pathway, while metabolomics platform is a powerful tool in developing innovative drugs based on at least 149 Papaver species.

 

[Donald Mallard]

yes yes ,

this has been posted already ,, either in this thread or the other where we discussed the same topic until it died as it should ,
it was written by dj short

who was simply told it and has no first hand experience

same as the other guys saying the same thing ,

no first hand experience ,,



the ones that have it , you have pegged as inexperienced and reckon they saw little and made their minds up on that ,
when in fact if u read all the accounts you d find that is not the case ,
sam said he went at least a dozen times in the 70s and discussed the subject with the locals ,
that account alone dispels the crap said by folks that never went and just repeated crap they were told ..

you have also ignored the logistics scenario many have mentioned ,

myself included ,

the thai sticks were not grown anywhere near the opium ,
making it near impossible for them to be combined ..


u can believe what you want , some folks like santa claus , the easter bunny and the tooth fairy ,
but they are not real , nor is the opium weed your talking about ...

 

[therevverend]

you have also ignored the logistics scenario many have mentioned ,

Hypothetical scenarios that could be completely wrong. You're grasping at straws.

the thai sticks were not grown anywhere near the opium ,
making it near impossible for them to be combined ..

Are there roads in Thailand? Are there planes? Do the drug labs exist in the fields where the stuff grows? You haven't proven anything.

I know someone with FIRSTHAND knowledge, not speculation, who actually opened the bales containing imported opiated Thai sticks. You've completely ignored it and dismissed it as some sort of fantasy. Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny? What the hell are you talking about? Could you be more insulting to me and my friend? People on here accept all sorts of origin myths, ridiculous or not without batting an eye. Along with all the conspiracy theories. But I tell my story and I'm fucking the fucking tooth fairy? Since your precious Thai sticks are too damn holy to ever be tainted by something you don't like.

 

[therevverend]

Here's a post from another forum, a guy who got strung out on opiated Thai sticks. Called himself 'Ganja Guru'.

Jan 8, 2006
#13
Thai stick ranks as one of the 3 most potent kinds of weed I've ever smoked.
I remember smoking a pinner in my friends 4 x 4 in a parking lot in the snow outside a casino in Lake Tahoe.
It lieterally felt like I was walking on clouds as we walked into the casino.
I had never been in a casino before, and as we walked by a bank of slots I reached in my pocket, found a quarter and dropped it in a machine & pulled the handle.
Suddenly a bell started ringing and lights flashed and I freaked, thinking that I had encountered a weed-a-lizer and it was alerting everyone that I was high.
But it meant I had just won something like $25.00.
I thought: Cool Place.
I don't remember most of the next 2 hours except that I won $200.00 playing blackjack.

There was a bad side effect to smoking opiated Thai.
Opium is addictive.
I was getting opiated Thai stick on a regular basis in the mid 70's. Smoked it every day or 2 for months.
Then it disappeared. I could get UNopiated Thai stick, but it didn't supply what I needed. I had become addicted to opium.
But no opiated Thai and nowhere that I knew of to get it opium.
I was hurting.
I even smoked heroin once, to ease withdrawal (bad idea).
It took me days and days to get over that, and I made aa promise to myself: no more opium.
Wished I had made the same promise re: cocaine.

Of course he made the story up. Since he isn't Sam THE Skunkman or Donald THE Mallard or some other cannabis expert celebrity who knows everything there is to know about cannabis. We can clearly dismiss his story as bullshit.