New laws have been passed to prohibit the sale of synthetic marijuana. They are not working

Barely six months after Kansas adopted the nation’s first ban on K2, even police acknowledge that the laws are all but meaningless because merchants can so easily offer legal alternatives.

Simple changes to the ingredient gets around the letter of the law. Law enforcement is unable to keep up with this technical change, but the letter is also quickly out of date.

[Clemson University chemistry professor John Huffman, who developed the compounds in 1995,] doubts that law enforcement agencies will be able to devote the necessary resources to identify such complex creations as “1-pentyl-3-(1-naphthoyl)indole,” the substance’s scientific name. The compound sold as K2 is also known by the scientific shorthand of JWH-018, a nod to its creator’s initials.

“The guy in the average crime lab isn’t really capable of doing the kind of sophisticated tests necessary” to identify the substance, he said.

It is a good study of the marriage between security filters and compliance language.

The law tries to be so specific that it names a particular chemical makeup. Attempts to ban thus stimulate innovation and new chemical compounds. The more effective approach is to educate the market about harm. A problem with that, of course, is that the harm has been hard to quantify or even describe. All I saw was increased heart-rate, and that is hardly cause for alarm. Another approach could be to write a requirement more broadly. A problem with that is it may infringe upon other legal, let alone beneficial, behavior.

Speaking of filters, when it is hard to prove harm and hard to write a narrow definition the legal system perhaps should be able to avoid passing an ineffective law.