Last updated : December 16, 2024
During a three-week period in April, emergency rooms have seen a spike in activity across America that health care professionals have attributed to patients’ use of synthetic marijuana brands such as Spice or K-2. These patients arrive complaining of a range of symptoms, from high blood pressure to hallucinations and psychosis.
The increase in the number of people seeking medical attention after using synthetic marijuana has impacted hospitals from New York to Mississippi. To get an idea of the severity of the situation, consider that during just one week in New York, emergency room staffers saw more than 120 instances of synthetic marijuana use gone wrong. Some of those cases resulted in death.
Medical experts say designer drugs have always posed health risks to users, but this latest jump in ER visits has some concerned that changes in the chemicals used to produce these drugs may be to blame. It’s a valid concern, because chemical alterations are how synthetic marijuana manufacturers have gotten around the Drug Enforcement Agency ban on the five most typically used active ingredients over the last couple of years.
Marilyn Huestis, a research division chief with the National Institute on Drug Abuse said manufacturers are getting craftier in their production techniques, making synthetic marijuana more attractive to potential users because changing the chemical makeup means they are less likely to return a positive test result in a drug test.
Huestis is part of a team that is developing tests for a variety of synthetic marijuana brands, but it’s a time consuming process because the recipe for each of these drugs is constantly changing. Until the mechanisms for testing can be created, Huestis said police officers and health care workers are fighting an uphill battle because they simply don’t know what to look for. Adding insult to injury is the fact that because the chemicals used to make synthetic pot can differ from batch to batch, there’s no telling what kinds of reactions the users might experience.
At Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, Dr. Robert Glatter has noticed more routine users of K-2 showing up in the emergency room. Because these patients have told health care professionals that they had never had a problem with their drug of choice before now, Glatter thinks there may be a new, more harmful version of K-2 hitting the streets. Another indicator that there may be something unusual about this batch of K-2 is that the high lasts more than four to six times longer.
Dr. David Lee, a toxicologist with New York’s North Shore University Hospital, analyzed urine samples from patients who were most recently admitted to area emergency rooms and found one common thread – a molecule known as XLR-11. In 2012, this molecule caused patients to suffer serious kidney damage.
Even more concerning, said Lee, is that XLR-11 is one of many ingredients that could be deadly to users, and many of these additional additives are foreign to chemists.
One patient who reported smoking Spice and K-2 regularly came to the hospital because he was feeling sick after his last use. The patient brought a sample of the product he used along with him for testing, and when the results came back from the lab, Lee learned the mixture contained chemicals that had never been seen before.
Huestis said the combination of unknown ingredients means users have no way of knowing what they’re getting, and because of that it is nearly impossible for anyone to know how these drugs might affect them.
“What’s in it today isn’t going to be what’s in it tomorrow,” she said.
