Originally Posted by
DogMom2JoeAndWillie 
Palmitic acid (C16H32O2), stearic acid (C18H36O2), and myristic acid (C14H28O2) are all saturated fatty acids. "Saturated" means that there are no double bonded carbons in the molecule...so there are as many hydrogens in the molecule as possible... the molecule is "saturated" with hydrogen atoms. Oleic acid (C18H34O2) is most abundant FA in human adipose tissue, and it is UNsaturated. If you hydrogenate the double bond (remove the double bond and add hydrogen) of oleic acid you end up with stearic acid (one of the saturated FA's). Palmitoleic acid (C16H30O2) is also a monounsaturated fatty acid, found throughout human adipose tissue. According to Vass' report, recently decomposing samples will have lots of oleic fatty acids (unsaturated). The unsaturated FA's are converted into saturated fatty acids (like stearic acid) over time. This means that some of the oleic acid was converted into other fatty acids while the paper towels were in the hot trunk during the summer. This explains why the the other fatty acids are present...they're products of decomposition and hydrolysis, hydrogenation, oxidation, etc. It also explains why they found lower levels of oleic acid than they would have expected for a recently deceased body...the substance on the paper towels was months old (regardless of where it came from/when decomposition began).
Vass concludes in the end of his report that the sample was consistent with human decomposition and (based on what I've read this evening) I agree with his conclusion.
THC and cannibinol are indicative of the pot....I don't think that the presence of myristic, palmitic, oleic, and/or stearic acids in the pot is significant. The results section of the study says that they only found all four FA's present in half of the samples that they analyzed. They also fail to give any real quantitative information... they don't tell us HOW MUCH of each of these FA's they found in the pot samples...but I'm going to do my best to estimate and explain my thought process.
You've got to remember that they're working with very sensitive instruments (GC-MS) in this study, so they could have been identifying very small, trace amounts of FA's. I doubt that the amount of fatty acid they found on the paper towels could have come from whatever weed KC (or whoever it was) had. I can see where they were able to identify the THC and cannibinol... but they said that SMALL amounts were present. IIRC, pot is something like 5% THC...so if there was a gram of pot in the trunk (thats about a joint) they would've found around 50 milligrams of THC (which would be easy to identify/measure). The sample size they used for the fatty acid study was 100 milligrams...so there would've been a pretty low amount of THC (they abbreviate it CBD+CBN in their table). They give the ratio of fatty acid to CBD+CBN....and they got really little numbers. Assume that the 100 milligrams of pot was 5% THC, then 5 milligrams was actually THC. If they found 0.15 was the ratio of palmitic acid to THC, you can write the equation 0.15=x/5 and then calculate that x=0.75 milligrams of palmitic acid. That means that 1 gram of pot (a joint) would have 7.5 milligrams of palmitic acid in it....which is insignificant in comparison to the amount they found on the paper towels.
OK...I probably just confused everybody....maybe I made a little bit of sense, though! I hope this helps answer the questions you guys have. I'm sorry if it doesn't...I'm not very good at explaining things. If I don't make sense, please let me know and I will do my best to do better.
