Pubdate: Thu, 16 Jul 2015
Source: Alaska Dispatch News (AK)
Column: Highly Informed
Copyright: 2015 Alaska Dispatch Publishing
Contact:  http://www.adn.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/18
Note: Anchorage Daily News until July '14
Author: Scott Woodham

COULD AN INVERSION TRAP ENOUGH POT SMOKE TO GET ALL OF ANCHORAGE HIGH?

This week, Highly Informed will take on a question that may seem a 
bit absurd on its face but is actually quite interesting to consider.

Sometimes entertaining absurdity can be instructive, and sometimes 
(as with the famous quotation ascribed to Tertullian defending a core 
tenet of Christianity, "I believe it because it is absurd") it can 
serve as the basis for strong conviction.

With that in mind, Let's get to it. "Concerned Citizen" asks: "Dear 
Highly Informed, if morning conditions are right in the Anchorage 
bowl, would it be possible for an inversion to trap all the pot smoke 
and get the whole city high?"

The short answer is no. Even if an inversion concentrated all of the 
pot smoke created on the most tokingest day in Anchorage, it would 
not get the whole city high. To some people, such as those who have 
health concerns or don't want to be high, that's a blessed relief. To 
others, who may believe cannabis can cure anything from sore muscles 
to a fatally rusty spirit, it's a disappointment.

The reason the answer is an emphatic no is simple. First, there's a 
medical reason. In past columns we've learned that getting high from 
secondhand pot smoke is extremely unlikely, perhaps impossible, from 
casual exposure, as is triggering a positive drug test. Research has 
indicated that the "contact high" effect is elusive, possibly more 
psychological than physical, and that for anyone to get high from 
passively inhaling ambient smoke would require smoke so dense that 
breathing would become very uncomfortable long before any effects 
were felt. Plus, it's known that exhaled secondhand smoke contains 
almost none of cannabis' main psychoactive compound, THC.

The second reason is that, as Dr. Ali Hamade notes, because Anchorage 
has experienced inversions in the past, and because people have 
already been smoking pot here, "This experiment has already been conducted."

The results of the real-world experiment are clear: no reports of 
accidental pot highs in individuals, let alone in the entire 
population, even during the city's worst inversion episodes.

Hamade, a toxicologist and environmental public health program 
manager for the state, said about the danger of the city getting high 
during an inversion, "I can't give you any numbers, but that sounds 
far-fetched."

Assuming for a moment that it would be possible, he said, determining 
the real likelihood and conditions where it could happen would 
require incredibly complex air quality modeling. That model would 
have to take many variables into account, including the number of 
smokers and the concentration of atmospheric THC they are able to 
produce, plus some indication of what concentration would be most 
likely to produce the effect in residents.

But really, Hamade said, the question is moot because individual 
smokers are such small sources, and so few relatively, that the 
atmosphere dilutes their efforts before reaching any level 
approaching the necessary concentration for people to notice it, let 
alone to potentially get high from it. Many people smoke cigarettes, 
for example, but their smoke isn't noticeable citywide.

In other words, Anchorage doesn't have enough troops in Dankenstein's 
Army to fully roast the Anchorage Bowl during an inversion.

So the answer is no, just by common sense, but that doesn't mean it 
isn't interesting to think about. So let's entertain the 
possibilities. What conditions would it take to get all of Anchorage 
high from inhaling cannabis?

Blowin' in the wind

First, let's look at the atmospheric factor. Is it possible for an 
inversion to trap a great deal of smoke in Anchorage? Yes. Is 
Anchorage the ideal place for this experiment? Not exactly.

Although Anchorage isn't as famous as Fairbanks is for severe 
temperature inversions that trap pollutants close to the ground, it 
does experience them from time to time. Because geography is one of 
the many factors that plays a role in making an inversion, sometimes 
they can happen just to a single neighborhood or area of town, as in 
the case of the ominous "brown cloud" that camped over East Anchorage 
in March 2014, photographed by the National Weather Service and 
shared on Twitter.

The conditions likely to create inversions are well-known to 
meteorologists and involve many variables, all specific to the 
location and subject to what's going on in the atmosphere locally, 
regionally and even climactically. But they are not at all unusual in 
Anchorage. Simply defined, according to NOAA, they're "a layer of the 
atmosphere in which air temperature increases with height." And "when 
the layer's base is at the surface, the layer is called a 
surface-based temperature inversion; when the base of the layer is 
above the surface, the layer is called an elevated temperature inversion."

One relative comparison of inversions and air quality in various 
cities done for the municipality of Anchorage in 2014 notes that 
Fairbanks experiences some of the strongest and most frequently 
strong temperature inversions in the world, so this experiment might 
work better there.

Prime time for inversions is generally in the winter, when the sun is 
kind of a stranger and stronger air temperature differences tend to 
form for longer periods of time, but they can and do happen at any 
time when conditions are right. So it is plausible that a lot of pot 
smoke could be concentrated on the ground where people breathe.

But, keeping in mind that secondhand smoke at the concentrations 
we're considering here is far more likely to result in respiratory 
problems than in any sort of high, just how much smoke matters a 
great deal. The more the better, it would seem, to maximize the 
chances that people would cop any buzz at all as they sit coughing on 
the sidewalks short of breath.

As noted above, there probably aren't enough pot smokers in Anchorage 
to stone the city when it's trying to be so good. So it makes sense 
to restrict the hypothetical inversion to a small area, like a single 
neighborhood, or to burn some outrageous amount of extra pot to make 
up for the lack of actual smoke output. But how smoky would it have 
to get, and could it actually build up to that level?

Burning trees

Historically, Anchorage has experienced forest fire smoke trapped by 
inversions near the ground, but due to many variables including air 
movement, it has experienced nothing as bad as other places in the 
state, said Steve Morris, who spent many years in the air quality 
program and is now deputy director of the Anchorage Department of 
Health and Human Services.

Various local and state programs monitor air quality and issue 
advisories whenever necessary, and the state Department of 
Environmental Conservation makes a map of them available online. 
Right now, the western, central and eastern Interior are home to the 
only current air quality advisories in the state because of all the 
forest fires still going strong. Anchorage keeps its own air quality 
index forecast alert web page for quick reference, and the state 
keeps an online round-up of measurement stations.

Morris said that measuring smoke in the atmosphere from forest fires 
means measuring particles known as PM2.5. They're called that because 
they are no larger than 2.5 microns in diameter, roughly 20 to 30 
times smaller than a human hair.

In his recollection, Anchorage's very worst air quality episodes due 
to forest fires are on the level of 70 micrograms of PM2.5 per cubic 
meter averaged over 24 hours. But he said that Fairbanks has seen 
levels above 800 micrograms per cubic meter at the very worst.

The U.S. EPA air quality standards consider levels of PM2.5 above 35 
micrograms per cubic meter "unhealthy for sensitive groups," and 
levels over 800 qualify as "hazardous" for everyone.

When smoke outside gets that bad, people try to stay indoors and take 
other precautions, so even if it were possible to fill Anchorage with 
that much pot smoke, many people would automatically limit their own 
exposure, naturally decreasing the percentage of people who could get high.

The mother of all dabs?

The highest concentrations of forest fire smoke in Anchorage have 
resulted when many acres of trees are on fire. One study found that 
exposing people to the full smoke from 16 joints in an enclosed area 
over an hour resulted in THC levels possible for subjects to be 
considered high. But that's a lot of particulates, certainly more 
than 35 micrograms per cubic meter, and the effect was not the same 
for all participants. There's no easy way to calculate all of this, 
but to reach the necessary saturation level with cannabis smoke, it 
would probably take hundreds of tons of herb burning for days in open 
piles at multiple points around the city, all while a stable 
inversion stayed in place.

But again. That's smoke, not THC or any other cannabinoids, which are 
molecules much smaller than 2.5 microns. Smoke of all kinds, 
including marijuana smoke, is irritating to the respiratory and 
cardiovascular system. As we've learned in previous columns, the 
long-term effects of second-hand and first-hand cannabis smoke are 
still being researched, but so far, scientists believe they're likely 
similar to those of tobacco. So, what if some other less-irritating 
delivery method were involved?

To pack as much THC into the air as possible while minimizing 
irritating particulate matter, probably nothing could beat a series 
of barge-sized vaporizers fed with boulder-sized chunks of cannabis 
concentrates.

If such an outlandish set-up were ever created, it is plausible that 
an entire city could get high, but not certain. It would be more 
likely to work in a confined area, like in a valley that doesn't get 
much air movement. And that's definitely not an accurate description 
of the Anchorage bowl.

Those units would also have to be turned on for some significant 
amount of time (probably days), but they'd contribute almost no 
particulate matter into the air. Vaporizing such a massive amount of 
concentrates to cover Anchorage could conceivably suspend enough THC 
to stone whoever stayed outside. But it would require the right 
atmospheric conditions for an inversion to stay in place that same 
amount of time, and in Anchorage that's less likely than in somewhere 
like Fairbanks. Plus, assuming a large enough cloud of concentrate 
vapor could be created to cover the city, some portion of it would 
drop out of the air the whole time, covering everything in cannabis 
residue as the vapor settled.

So, assuming anyone really did want to get a whole city high, 
including people who didn't want to be -- which wouldn't be cool at 
all -- even the most plausible method would not quite work. It would 
probably just end up leaving the whole city sticky and the people 
barely high -- and broke, assuming everyone pitched in on the 
millions of dollars worth of concentrates it would require.

Concerned Citizen, and anyone else with the same worry, can rest easy.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom