One Last Hit of K-2
http://www.houstonpress.com/2010-12-02/news/one-last-hit-of-k-2ed
Fake weed's final freewheeling days
By John Nova Lomax
Dec 1 2010
November 24, 2010, Washington D.C.: Using its emergency powers, the
Drug Enforcement Administration announced that it will temporarily
ban five synthetic marijuana compounds,often known by brand names
such as K-2 or Spice, effective in "no fewer than 30 days."
from the DEA Website
This report was written in the last freewheeling days before the federal ban.
--
At first, it seemed like there wasn't much to this synthetic cannabis
malarkey. Tasked by my editor with staking out the wilds of these
new, legal "herbal incense" smoking products, I had duly hopped on my
bike and gone out and plunked down a total of $20 plus tax for two
anemic 1.5-gram sachets of two different brands of the stuff.
The deal went down at a shady, Vietnamese-run Montrose convenience
store, Cypress Hill's "Hand on the Pump" blaring in my ears from my
iPod as the product exchanged hands.
One of the bags went by "K-2 Blue" and the other was an allegedly
mango-flavored concoction called "Spicy Green Herbal Mysteries." (Had
I been so inclined, I could have also chosen Spice, Yucatan Fire,
Solar Flare, or my favorite brand name, Happy Shaman Herbs. In
addition to convenience stores and gas stations, head shops are gold
mines for the stuff.)
The little sacks sat in a desk drawer for a while, but at a staff
party in October, some co-workers and I twisted up a J of the K-2
Blue and fired it up. The effects were minimal, possibly only
imaginary. I noticed, or thought I noticed, that the colors in Greek
Village along lower West Gray might have seemed a little more vibrant
on that warm Indian summer afternoon. And perhaps I was a little more
amenable towards certain co-workers with whom I have had testy
relationships. It was very forgettable, and it seemed like just
another bogus legal "substitute" for an illegal drug, like Ecstasy's
no-account little sister Eve back in the day.
Meanwhile, on a slow Friday afternoon a couple of weeks later at
work, I happened upon the Herbal Mysteries Spicy Green and some
leftover Zig Zags in my desk drawer. Oh well, I thought, let's give
this crapola one last chance. Maybe different brands had different
effects. That was what it said on the Internet, anyway, and we all
know the Internet never lies.
There so happened to be a couple of friends of a co-worker on the
premises, and these two guys, whom we'll call "Moises" and "Hector,"
expressed an interest in joining me.
Moises, a bespectacled, twentysomething Hispanic man with a shaven
head, said he had a long and fruitful relationship with the "Kush"
brand of synthetic marijuana. He had a little bag of it in his pocket
even then. He said he smoked it just about every day.
Sure, he allowed, he would rather be smoking real weed, but he said
he was subject to drug-testing at his job, and since this stuff
didn't show up on his urinalysis, it was his only choice.
"It kinda relaxes you at night, or sometimes I smoke a little through
the day," he said, and added that he was careful never to get too
high at work. (He's a telemarketer.) "I smoke half of a little tiny
joint, and they will last a good while. I don't do it in big amounts."
He said it was safe; he'd never had any problems with it, except for
that one time... "I'd smoked some and I was driving, and I kinda
nodded off, except instead of my head falling forward, it fell back."
He chuckled and shook his head. "I got carried away that time," he said.
Hmmm. Moises didn't look like the kind of guy who would fake a high.
And why would anyone pretend to nod off like that behind the wheel?
Maybe there was something to this after all.
The three of us adjourned to the parking lot behind the Houston Press
building, right there across the street from the new downtown YMCA on
the corner of Pease and Milam. We sparked up my poorly rolled joint
of Spicy Green Herbal Mysteries. I could feel it hit, or "bind to my
receptors" as the chemists would say, even before I exhaled the first
lungful of odd-smelling smoke. I passed it to Moises, who passed it
to Hector. And repeat. And repeat again. Conversation ground to a
halt, as did time. A cop car slid south down Milam, about 100 feet from us.
"I wonder what would happen if he stopped and questioned us,"
wondered Hector aloud.
We chuckled and shook our heads. There wasn't a damn thing he could
do. As these products are officially marketed as incense and labeled
"Not for Human Consumption," there is no law, or at least no law in
Houston (yet), against possessing or smoking them. We could just as
easily have been toking on banana peels as far as the cops were concerned.
But to me, this stuff was far, far more potent than banana peels.
(Yep, I once tried them too.) A few minutes later, my feet and hands
had gone cold. I had major cottonmouth. And to put it simply, I was
freakin' stoned.
I had an afternoon of work ahead of me, including, and this is kind
of important, a taping with Channel 39, in which, for the pleasure of
the Evening News viewership of the entire Greater Houston area, I was
supposed to wax eloquent in front of the cameras about the rise and
fall of the Richmond Strip.
It looked like we were gonna see how well I could, as they say in the
pot-infused music business, work behind a load.
Within a month, most of the K-2 products on Houston store shelves
will be classed as Schedule I drugs, a category the DEA reserves for
the substances it regards as the most "unsafe," and "highly abused,"
"with no medical usage."
These compounds are to be banned for at least one year. "The American
public looks to the DEA to protect its children and communities from
those who would exploit them for their own gain," said DEA Acting
Administrator Michele M. Leonhart in an official statement. "Makers
of these harmful products mislead their customers into thinking that
'fake pot' is a harmless alternative to illegal drugs, but that is
not the case. Today's action will call further attention to the risks
of ingesting unknown compounds and will hopefully take away any
incentive to try these products."
To call my experiences typical of the synthetic marijuana experience
does not do the stuff, well..."justice" isn't quite the right word.
Let's just say they didn't encapsulate the Russian roulette that is
this phenomenon in total.
A former co-worker got into K-2 because he liked to get high and
didn't live in Houston long enough to make a weed connection. He said
he tried the stuff numerous times, and every experience differed
wildly from the last, ranging from almost no effect to pleasant high
to vivid, full-on hallucinations.
Another co-worker shared a spliff with this same man while out at a
happy hour last month. The effects were dramatic. Although she is a
very experienced partier, and says she was only a little tipsy from
drinking, she vomited on the spot with little gastrointestinal
warning and collapsed in a heap outside the bar. She says she simply
could not move, much less get up.
Along with vomiting and hallucinations (and tremors, rapid heartbeat
and increased blood pressure), K-2 has been reported to cause
temporary paralysis, which she says describes exactly the condition
she was in. (Eventually, she was able to muster the strength to dial
up a friend to come collect her.)
So what is this stuff? It's hard to say. Until the upcoming ban was
announced, synthetic marijuana was not regulated by the Drug
Enforcement Administration nor the Food and Drug Administration nor
any other government agency. The wide variance in effects could in
part be explained by the fact that synthetic cannabis products are
quite literally "mixed bags." As certain jurisdictions ban certain
compounds, more and more new brands and concoctions pop up even in
Texas, where no state law prohibits K-2 yet, substances with names
like K-3 or K-4 are starting to appear. But more on those adventures
in modern chemistry later.
The official lists of ingredients on the packages sound like
something from a Renaissance Faire or a dusty, leather-bound volume
plucked from a top shelf at the Hogwarts library "canavalia roses,"
"clematis vitalba," "nelumbo nucifera" and the like but chemists
will tell you the green leafy substances are immaterial; the agents
that get you high are synthetics that most often originated in a lab
at Clemson University in South Carolina.
Beginning in 1984, Clemson organic chemistry professor John W.
Huffman started creating synthetic versions of THC (pot's active
ingredient) for possible use in treating AIDS and multiple sclerosis
and for possible application in chemotherapy regimens.
Over the next 20 years, Huffman's team created about 450
weed-mimicking compounds, all of which bear his initials (JWH) and a
number. JWH-018, one of the five compounds banned by the DEA, is
probably the most common compound in K-2 variants, but now some
others are used that were developed elsewhere, notably the HU
(originally from Israel's Hebrew University) class.
Eventually some of Huffman's recipes trickled onto the Internet, and
by the middle of the last decade, the earliest recreational variants
of his compounds were being sold in Germany. While Huffman realized
that the misuse of his compounds was inevitable, the scientist could
only shake his head. He recently told the journal LiveScience that
some of his synthetics are ten times as powerful as THC. As for those
poor fools who would partake of them, the 78-year-old Huffman says
they are "potential winners of Darwin Awards" who would "do a service
to humanity by removing themselves from the gene pool."
Also, he adds, very little testing has been done on humans, and since
the few mice that were put through extensive JWH experiments were
euthanized, the long-term effects are totally unknown, even on
rodents, but some reports have hinted that some of the compounds
contain carcinogens.
Even so, documented cases of K-2-related mayhem are hard to pin down.
An Iowa teen, normal and well adjusted by all accounts, was said to
have suddenly shot himself after indulging, and in August, a Dallas
teen with a history of smoking the stuff died of a sudden heart
attack that might have been attributable to K-2. (The toxicology
report is still pending.)
But after reading dozens of articles and conducting numerous
interviews, those were the only instances of fatalities we could
find. And other than scattered reports of retail stores running afoul
of local ordinances in places where K-2 has been banned, and stories
in which K-2 may have played a part in crimes committed by miscreants
loaded on multiple drugs, the only solely K-2-related trouble we've
come across in Texas was that of an unidentified man in Bryan who was
arrested for DWI after getting behind the wheel admittedly blasted on
K-2. (And there was also a strange case in Santa Fe, in which an
undercover cop asked a man if he had any K-2 to sell. No, the man
replied, but he would be happy to sell some of his weed.)
In its release to the media, the DEA claimed to have received "an
increasing number of reports from poison centers, hospitals and law
enforcement regarding these products."
That has not been the case in Houston.
Locally, Houston Police narcotics squad Sergeant John Yencha has not
come across any K-2-related havoc. He's quick to point out that since
the substance is legal in Houston and since he does not work patrol,
he would be unlikely to deal with these cases as a first responder,
but he does take an avid interest in studying all manner of
intoxicants. And he has been keeping up with K-2, if not through his
job at HPD.
After a bad trip, a couple of his workout buddies asked him about it,
he said. "They got so screwed up on it that it scared them," Yencha
says. They wanted to know if it was legal and if they would fail a
dope test, Yencha added.
Yes and no, respectively. Very few urinalysis tests detect synthetic
cannabis, which makes it very popular with probationers and parolees,
and people with nosy bosses.
Another demo that favors the stuff is people who simply don't like
breaking the law. A young mother we found through K-2's 2,784-member
Facebook fan page told us she switched from weed to K-2 for fear of
legal ramifications.
While Yencha has not seen or heard of anyone flipping out on K-2
alone, Yencha says he believes that he has seen a pretty serious case
of K-2 interacting with another drug. It happened at his side job
working in the emergency room at St. Luke's.
"This guy came in there and said he was high on K-2, but he also
admitted to smoking some ice [meth], too," Yencha remembers. "It was
really crystal-clear ice. As a matter of fact, he actually brought
the ice to the emergency room with him and asked them to test it to
make sure it wasn't rat poison or something, and he ended up getting
a case filed on him...I'll tell you this: That ice was really, really
clear, but I've never seen nobody that messed up on just ice."
Yencha says the man stayed utterly incoherent for hours and hours,
long after doctors had treated him in the ER and sent him to a bed
upstairs. "I talked to him because I like chasing meth, and I went
upstairs and tried to interview him, and he was still so messed up I
couldn't get a straight answer out of him. He wasn't lying to me
[about the K-2], and he was still really, really high. And ice
[alone] isn't gonna do that."
Dr. Angela Fisher, medical director of the emergency center at Ben
Taub, and Dr. Bobby Kapur, director of Educational Affairs at Baylor
College of Medicine, also say that pure K-2 or weed emergency room
admissions are very rare to downright nonexistent at Ben Taub.
In fact, Kapur says that in his experience, no patient admitted to
Ben Taub has ever said he was there because of K-2.
As with Yencha's meth patient, Ben Taub's drug screens often reveal
that the stoned patients they do see have usually also taken cocaine
or PCP. "A lot of people smoke marijuana laced with either of those
things," Kapur says. "So often we get what we call a rainbow the
kind of thing where everything pops up positive."
Fisher points out that a far bigger problem than K-2, weed or other
party drugs is the so-called holy trinity prescription cocktail of
Xanax, Soma and Vicodin. "Those patients really are debilitated," she
says. "They get in car crashes, they fall down stairs. The
prescription drugs have really become a problem. But the party drugs
like X and marijuana?"
"Those people know what to expect," Kapur interjects. "They think,
'Okay, for the next two hours, I am gonna have this experience.'"
While that is not necessarily the case with K-2's mixed-bag
experience, Fisher speculates that some people who have had negative
trips on K-2 or been shocked by bad side effects may have come down
off their highs before they reached Ben Taub.
She thinks some may be getting treated and released by paramedics,
while others have been comforted and instructed by phone workers at
poison control centers. (According to a spokeswoman for the American
Association of Poison Control Centers, as of November 23, there have
been 2,304 K-2-related calls fielded at 60 poison control centers
nationwide in 2010, up from a mere six the year before.)
As K-2 spread throughout Europe, a backlash of bans followed, and now
some forms of JWH compounds are illegal in Germany, the United
Kingdom, France, Russia and several other countries.
Until last Wednesday, the Drug Enforcement Administration had merely
listed these products as "drug[s] of concern," but the feds had
otherwise punted the question to the states. Since March, some JWH
compounds or substances billed as "synthetic marijuana" compounds
have been banned in 13 states, with legislation under consideration
in six more. (All of which is moot now.)
These bans have met with little opposition from the usual suspects
pot advocacy groups such as the National Organization for the Reform
of Marijuana Laws and the American Civil Liberties Union, which has
officially taken no position on the substances.
As for pot advocates, local drug law reform crusader Dean Becker of
KPFT thinks the whole thing is silly. "Why do we need fake weed when
the real stuff is so much better?" he says.
And as "Radical" Russ Belville, a blogger at NORML's Web site, puts
it: "Do you really, really want to stop people from smoking K-2?
Legalize cannabis. Only prohibition could create a system where
people are so desperate for access to a safe, effective, non-toxic
natural relaxant that they'll smoke a new, synthetic, untested
substitute with no consistency of effect and control over the ingredients."
As the feds will soon likely find out, banning K-2 is not as simple
as banning cocaine or heroin. With K-2, chemists can simply tweak a
molecule here or there and come up with an equally effective fake THC
formula not covered in whatever legislation exists in their states.
Ergo, we're already on to blends with names like K-3 and K-4 in some
places, and remember, Huffman's lab alone came up with 450 synthetic
versions of THC. Law enforcement in Louisiana is already looking like
a dog chasing its tail: After two products called Mojo and Spice were
banned and removed from shelves, a nearly-but-not-quite-identical,
but equally potent one called Potpourri has remained.)
In Texas, dozens of municipalities including Dallas, Bryan and
College Station, Conroe, Santa Fe, Livingston, Alvin, Tomball and
Port Arthur already banned K-2, making its possession or sale a Class
C misdemeanor, punishable by a ticket and fine but no jail time.
Until the feds did it for her, Plano Republican state Senator
Florence Shapiro wanted to change that. She led the now likely
aborted charge to ban K-2 statewide and with enhanced, though as-yet
undefined, possible jail-time punishments. She had said she wanted
the penalties for breaking her hoped-for K-2 law "of equal importance
to real marijuana."
That's a dubious prospect to Scott Henson, a former journalist turned
opposition researcher/political consultant, public policy researcher
and blogger specializing in Texas criminal justice.
To him, the whole drive to ban K-2 has an air of futility about it,
even as it is utterly predictable. (We spoke to Henson before the
federal ban was announced, so he does not intend for his remarks to
apply to their actions.) "Every new thing that somebody claims they
can get high off of, somebody's gonna try to ban that thing in the
Legislature," he says. "That's just a given the prohibitionist
impulse kicks in whether it causes enough damage to justify banning it or not.
Henson also detected an element of grandstanding from Shapiro, and
thinks it predictable that the drive to ban K-2 would come from
Plano, home of the lethal white suburban heroin craze of the late '90s.
Writing bills like this is a no-brainer for politicians, he says.
"Everyone wants to file a bill that's easy to pass, and nothing's
easier to pass than bills like this," he says. "Bills increasing
criminal penalties, creating new crimes, things that are 'for the children'..."
And then there's the whole chemistry aspect. How can you stay one
step ahead of the synthetic THC cooks? Shapiro, and now the DEA,
apparently believes that lawmakers can checkmate the chemists,
possibly by adding any and all of the JWH compounds to the State of
Texas's already enormous list of banned substances, which are broken
down into five so-called "penalty groups." (The upcoming DEA ban
lists only five compounds. Remember that Huffman's Clemson lab
generated 450 forms of synthetic THC by itself.)
Henson doesn't think it's possible or wise. "There's always gonna be
something new," he says. "There's never gonna come a time where we've
banned everything that will get you high. If you ban this one,
they're gonna come up with some new compound. Some of the things they
ban, like psilocybin mushrooms, you're never gonna keep Texans from
having access to those, 'cause they grow in cow patties."
What's more, given the state's budget crunch, Henson doesn't think
Texas can afford jailing more people for victimless crimes. (Jailing
people for K-2 will most likely fall to the states, just as
incarcerating marijuana users does today.)
Henson says that we will be told that enforcing the law will have no
cost. Henson's advice: Don't believe it. While it might not cost the
State of Texas per se, it will come out of taxpayers' pockets one way
or another. "It does cost the locals in jail space, and they will
have to pay for lawyers for the indigent, process through the courts.
All that stuff costs money."
Even before the upcoming ban was announced, and without recourse to
testing, the National Drug Court Resource Center (a federally funded
advisory group for drug courts nationwide) was advising local
probation offices and parole boards to ramp up their searches of
their clients' homes and persons.
"For clients suspected of synthetic cannabinoids abuse, searches
should be frequent, random, unannounced and occur during
non-governmental hours," advises a bulletin on the group's Web site.
"An intrusive inspection of a client's home, car, school, work,
'hangouts' and other restricted areas provides a visible message to
all participants as to the court's monitoring vigilance."
Doctors Kapur and Fisher conduct their interviews in a little office
overlooking the parklike grounds across the street from Ben Taub.
Getting there, you have to walk down a corridor of patients on
stretchers getting pre-admittance triage from scurrying paramedics.
Still, it's a tranquil space amid daily scenes of unbelievable
tragedy: 108,000 patients walk or are wheeled through the doors of
the elite tier-one trauma center yearly.
And almost none of them get there solely because of weed or weed substitutes.
"Marijuana is such a mellowing agent," says Kapur. "Yeah, it's not
like those people are fighting the police," agrees Fisher.
That's precisely the point Henson has been trying to make on his blog
and in his other writings. He believes that every new circumstance
does not require a new law, and that Texans can apply laws already on
the books to situations as they arise. He points out that there are
already 2,383 felonies in the Texas penal code, 11 dealing with
situations involving oysters alone. "That's a lot of felonies and
they keep adding more," he says. "Ten was enough for the good Lord."
Instead of governing substances, Henson believes the state should
ride herd on behaviors. "If someone is a public nuisance, or
endangering others, or driving recklessly or intoxicated while
driving [on any substance], there are already statutes on the books
to deal with all that."
Meanwhile, back at the office, I still had that interview looming and
a full load of God knows which of Professor Huffman's concoctions
roiling in my bloodstream.
Moises, Hector and I had parted ways. I headed back to my desk,
believing everybody in the office knew I was stoned. I could
practically hear them whispering it...
"Look at how stoned Lomax is..."
Pishposh. While I could handle this, it was kind of annoying that, to
paraphrase that genial old stoner anthem, all these people could hear
every word I thought. What then? More of John Prine's "Illegal Smile"
popped up in my head: "Well I went to court / And the judge's name
was Huff-man..." Whoa.
It was best to get back to my office and hide in front of my
computer. Or maybe, if this rocky row kept on getting tougher and
tougher to hoe, I would duck down into the hidey-hole under my desk.
But first I would need water, lots and lots of ice-cold spring water
to drink. It was off for another paranoid, stiff-legged ramble across
the Press office, and when I returned, there was an e-mail from my
co-worker Moises and Hector's friend relaying a question to me.
"What's the name of the stuff you used just now," it read in total.
So evidently this wasn't all in my head and my head alone.
Refreshed by the cold water, and not possessed of the usual case of
munchies, the high started to level off. A comforting thought took
hold: You're not really stoned, Lomax. You're just synthetically
stoned. If weed was cane sugar Dublin-bottled Dr Pepper, this stuff
was the Splenda-laced diet crap from the local bottling plant. You
couldn't even get fat or diabetic or hyper off this crap, and it
wouldn't even eat the enamel off your teeth. But then it might cause
cancer...Or hallucinations, vomiting and temporary paralysis in K-2's case
Right about then the crew from Channel 39 showed up. The Richmond
Strip was not quite dead yet, and neither was I. Showtime.
--
[email protected]
--
To judge for yourself how John Lomax did, go to
www.39online.com/news/local/kiah-richmondstrip-story,0,7924446.story.
.
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