In this week's Healthy Living, Marcie Fraser reports on the abuse of K2, a hallucinogen being sold legally as incense, and what the Drug Enforcement Agency plans to do about it.
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Hallucinations, psychotic episodes, heart palpitations. If you were smoking something that was causing these side effects most of us would stop but some people are not, they are enjoying the high they get from synthetic marijuana which is being sold as incense.
"Purple Sky, Black Mamba. K2 Spice," said Agent James Burns of the Drug Enforcement Agency.
That's what they are calling it, and this is what's in it.
"JWH 180, JWH 108," said Burns.
It's synthetic marijuana and it's legal because it's sold as an incense, the package warns 'not for human consumption or inhalation,' yet people are smoking it. Outlawing it is difficult. The DEA banned the product last March after pinpointing the five chemicals used to make it, however, the people who make the drug, keep changing the chemical composition.
Burns said, “What they are using has not been scheduled. We are working with congress right now in order to try to make the scheduling one, permanent and two, try to write the law that in such a way that is not overly broad but will also control the knockoffs or analogs."
It's hard to track the buying and selling of this product because it's bought in such small amounts.
"Unfortunately I have only so many resources and the cases that we are look at deal with larger quantities of both of illegal and legal drugs,” said Burns.
Because K2 is sold on the internet, the Drug Enforcement Agency said this is opening the door for other scams artists posing as DEA agents as well as identification theft.
Many of the websites that sell K2 are shady and they sell your credit card information to other crooks. The DEA warns to stay away from the internet and avoid buying yourself trouble on sites like these.