Synthetic Weed Is Back, Bigger Than Ever, and Scary as Hell (Daily Beast)
Friday Jun 1st, 2018
The young woman had pale skin and fire-red hair, and by all appearances was only minutes away from dying from opioid overdose.
The grim scene unfolded in February, in the Kensington section of North Philadelphia. It’s where the death rate from heroin mixed with illicit fentanyl ranks among the highest in the nation, and the sight of young bodies lying prone and unresponsive on the sidewalk has become the new normal for a cluster of impoverished neighborhoods that have already suffered decades of collateral damage from the war on drugs.
“We are now in our eighth generation of synthetic cannabinoids and they just keep getting more powerful and unpredictable,” said David Leff, a forensic narcotics expert who has spent decades studying the evolution of synthetic drugs. “Users you have no idea what you’re actually consuming. These are substances that have never been tested on humans.”
In fact, so little is known about synthetic cannabinoids that in April, Baltimore’s health commissioner compared smoking K2 to playing “Russian Roulette.”