Raise your hand if you’ve never hotboxed… wait, you don’t know what it is? We got you.
A hotbox in the world of marijuana is when you’re in an enclosed space without a lot of air flow while people smoke marijuana, creating a constant cloud of smoke. People tend to believe that if someone is in a hotbox but isn’t smoking, they’ll end up just as high as the people that are smoking; this is mainly due to popular myth and suggestion.
This story is told all over the world, and a group of investigators from the National Institute on Drug Abuse decided to do an investigation on the true effects of second hand smoke to see if its possible for someone who isn’t smoking to get high just by being in a closed room with people that are smoking.
Hotbox experiment:
This experiment was done in two stages; in the first stage, a group of volunteers were put into an 8×7 square meter room with just 4 joints smoked in an hour. Afterwards, they drug tested the volunteers and only a couple of them tested positive for THC, although they couldn’t feel any symptoms at all.
The second stage was done with another group of volunteers, same characteristics and amount, exactly the same as the previous stage except this time 16 joints were lit in an hour. Those that weren’t smoking felt the effects of the marijuana, and when tested the investigators discovered that those who didn’t smoke had a lower level of THC in their system than those that had smoked.
So, the investigators proved that enough cannabis is smoked in the room, it does indeed give the effect that everyone talks about; however, they wanted to go a step further and they wanted to see what other similar practices could cause the same effect.
They tried out a method in which someone falls asleep and other people blow marijuana smoke in their nose and mouth to see if, when awake, that person feels the same high as if he or she had smoked marijuana. This study revealed that after a reasonable number of drags and smoke blowing, the person will wake up with stoned symptoms.
Now you know that you don’t need to be afraid of getting high by walking into one of the many cannabis clubs all over Spain; although there may be many people smoking, they’re usually wide open spaces that are well ventilated.
Translation: Ciara Murphy
