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.
Read more Highly Informed: Seeking answers to Alaska's cannabis questions
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.
Have a question about marijuana news or culture in Alaska? Send it to cannabis-north@alaskadispatch.com with "Highly Informed" in the subject line.