NIDA Created the Frankenstein of Synthetic Cannabis

http://inventors.about.com/od/hstartinventors/a/Synthetic-Marijuana.htm

excerpt

John Huffman is the unwitting inventor of the first synthetic marijuana, which he never intended on inventing. Huffman is a professor of organic chemistry at Clemson University, and it's his intials JWH that are used to name chemicals such as JWH-073 and JWH-018, since he is the one who first synthesized them.

Around twenty-five years ago with funding by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, John Huffman began researching a class of compounds known as cannabinoids. Cannabinoids bind to receptors in the brain, in the same way that the THC in real marijuana does. In the summer of 1995, the first one hundred milligrams of JWH-018, a synthetic cannabinoid, was manufactured by Huffman's students, tested on laboratory mice, and a report was written.