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Brief:

The following is a summary about the inconsistency amongst different synthetic marijuana products. Synthetic marijuana products are mislabeled from the very start. Marketing these products as an alternative to marijuana is false in of itself, as these products have little or nothing to do with real cannabis.

In addition to the false marketing these products use, there is little consistency amongst the dosage of the actual chemicals used to produce the “high” itself. Even samples amongst the same brands and sub brands have huge variances of these dosages.

Excerpt:

In late 2009 sheriff’s offices began getting reports from high school resource officers about kids buying K2 incense and smoking it. Rather than confiscate the material or try to close down the shops selling it, Morris asked undercover officers to go in and buy more. Like Upchurch when he was first setting up shop, Morris analyzed the chemicals appearing in popular brands. (Upchurch isn’t a chemist; he’s a former Web designer, but he paid a private chemical lab to help figure out his initial recipes.) In his own lab, Morris identified three probable ingredients in most blends—JWH-018, JWH-073, and HU-210—and proposed that Kansas ban them. In March 2010 the state made all three illegal. Other states followed suit. Louisiana has even banned the use of the plant damiana, a central American shrub that smells like chamomile and looks a little like pot. The current DEA ban covers five cannabinoids as well as any “analogues,” small manipulations of molecular structures that essentially work the same as the original molecule.

Upchurch orders many of his “special additives” from China, and both he and Morris use the international export directory Alibaba.com to see what’s available. Search “buy JWH” and you’ll find at least 3,800 Chinese labs standing by for custom orders. Hubei Prosperity Galaxy Chemical, for example, offers photos of its operation in Hubei on mainland China, with rows of workers in white suits. Hubei notes on its website that it can ship 5,000 kilograms of JWH-019 per month. (The company declined to comment.) One hundred kilograms is enough to make the equivalent of about 1 million joints of marijuana. Such Web traffic appears to be completely unregulated. On a recent day, Morris spotted one site that had mislabeled an ultrastrong hallucinogen as a low-dose cannabinoid.

For incense smokers, product mislabeling and reformulation can be dangerous. “All of these things act on various parts of your brain called receptor sites,” Morris says, describing the biochemistry that helps regulate normal states of consciousness. Synthetic cannabinoids target the CB1 and CB2 receptors, which either cause hallucinations in the first instance or can alleviate nausea and instill calm in the second. “Think of it as a lock-and-key system,” he says. “The receptor site is the lock and the drug is the key. As the key goes into the lock, it sort of opens up the psychoactive properties of the receptor site.”

After testing more than 100 packets from different suppliers, Morris has noticed a disturbing trend: There is no trend. The type and quantity of mind-altering agents in many blends can vary not only between brands but also between packets of the same stuff. He’s found processors using different synthetic cannabinoids anywhere from two to more than 500 times stronger than THC. Some target the CB1, others the CB2. Many manufacturers are mixing multiple chemicals together to create signature blends, forging new combinations.

Synthetic Marijuana side effects and tragedies have risen along with profits. The American Association of Poison Control Centers logged just 14 calls about the harmful effects of incense in 2009. That number jumped to 2,874 in 2010. By the end of May 2011, it had fielded an additional 2,324, on pace to double last year’s numbers. Hospitals have reported that smoking incense can cause agitation, racing heartbeat, vomiting, intense hallucinations, and seizures. “Marijuana can make you calm and relaxed, but this seems to cause anxiety,” says Dr. Anthony J. Scalzo, medical director of Missouri Poison Control, who spotted the first outbreak of emergency room visits in late 2009. “People think that if you can buy it legally, it must be safe. But they don’t know what they are dealing with,” he says.  Many states have taken the initiative to ban synthetic marijuana.

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SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY. – There’s an herbal incense that experts say can be more harmful than some illegal drugs and several Saratoga Springs High School students have been caught using it.

The city of Saratoga Springs Prevention Council is making an effort to get rid of the “legal” synthetic marijuana after several students were hospitalized after smoking it.

“We know several youth in the county who  have been hospitalized and are staying in mental health facilities because of use,” The Prevention Council’s Director of Counseling services Patty Kilgore said.

Kilgore says the Prevention Council’s working on a two fold campaign to take the incense, that’s sometimes called potpourri out of city stores.

“It’s just plain dangerous, it’s putting  a lot of unknown chemicals into students bodies,” Kilgore said.

First, she says the Council’s asked local smoke shops to remove the product from their shelves. Secondly, they’re going to work towards changing the law to make the substance illegal.

“This is dangerous to our youth, there’s nothing okay with using synthetic drugs,” Kilgore said.

Smoke shop owner Theresa Sheffer says she stopped selling the product a year ago after she way how her customers started reacting to it; several of them showing up at her door before she opened for the day.

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Three teenage boys suffered heart attacks after smoking K2 incense, a form of synthetic marijuana, according to a new case report.

During the span of a few weeks last fall, Dr. Colin Kane, a pediatric cardiologist at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas, was surprised when the teens, all aged 16, were admitted with chest pain. Chest pain — and heart attacks especially — are very unusual in teens, so doctors at first suspected a virus.

But electrocardiograms, which measure the heart’s electrical activity, and blood tests that measure levels of a protein called troponin (high levels are a telltale sign of heart attack), showed that two of the boys had indeed had heart attacks.

The tests for a third boy were inconclusive at first, but while he was in the hospital his chest pain got much worse, and subsequent tests showed he, too, had suffered a heart attack.

All had reported smoking both marijuana and K2 incense between a day and a few weeks before the attack, said Kane, who is also assistant professor of pediatrics and a cardiologist at UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas. The case reports are published in the December issue of Pediatrics.

Dr. Anthony Scalzo, chief of toxicology at St. Louis University and medical director of the Missouri Poison Center at SSM Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center, said it’s difficult to prove that K2 incense caused the heart attacks.

Only one boy had a urine test for K2 incense and that came up negative, which isn’t surprising since the drug has a short half-life in the body, Scalzo explained. All the boys came up negative for other drugs, such as cocaine and methamphetamine, but it’s still possible the boys may have been using other illicit drugs or taking steroids and lied about it.

“This article raises additional concerns about the toxicity of K2 incense and newer synthetic cannabinoids that are out in the market,” Scalzo said. “Youth and parents should be warned about the dangers of these substances and that in any given case it is like a game of Russian roulette. You might be the next case report of a serious seizure, mental health crisis or perhaps a premature heart attack.”

K2 incense and “Spice” are often marketed as incense and sold in packets of herbs that are laced (often sprayed) with synthetic marijuana at “head shops” and online. The drug also goes by other names, including Spice Gold, Spice Diamond, Yucatan Fire, Solar Flare, Genie, PEP Spice and Fire n’ Ice, according to the U.S. Drug Intelligence Center.

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