What makes k2 legal

But while the drug is making news , most of us have no clue what it is. With K2, manufacturers take some kind of plant leaf and spray it with several chemicals, Jason M. Jerry, M. Users then smoke it like a cigarette or joint. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has declared the number of synthetic marijuana overdoses an outbreak.

So why are people still using it? Because the chemical composition of many synthetic cannabinoid products is unknown and may change from batch to batch, these products are likely to contain substances that cause dramatically different effects than the user might expect. People who have used synthetic cannabinoids and have been taken to emergency rooms have shown severe effects including:. Yes, synthetic cannabinoids can be addictive.

Regular users trying to quit may have the following withdrawal symptoms:. Behavioral therapies and medications have not specifically been tested for treatment of addiction to these products.

Health care providers should screen patients for possible co-occurring mental health conditions. An overdose occurs when a person uses too much of a drug and has a dangerous reaction that results in serious, harmful symptoms or death. Use of synthetic cannabinoids can cause:. Deaths can also occur when dangerous synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, are added to the packaged mixture without the user knowing it. This publication is available for your use and may be reproduced in its entirety without permission from NIDA.

Department of Health and Human Services. National Institutes of Health. Drug Topics. More Drug Topics. Quick Links. About NIDA. As journals went online, she says, chemists looking to make illicit drugs could access not only the chemical compounds of synthetic cannabinoids, but also the data on their potency.

Wiley suspects the street drugs were first generated in China, but no one knows for sure their precise origin. DEA officials first started to notice the drugs turning up in raids they were doing of shipping containers coming from Europe. In , methamphetamine topped the charts with , drug reports from labs testing compounds in cases of overdoses or drug raids and seizures.

These rogue chemists were taking the recipes of these synthetic cannabinoids right out of the journals. Although the numbers suggest usage is lower for synthetic cannabinoids than for meth or cannabis, the DEA started to become concerned about synthetic cannabinoids as soon as they appeared in the US, mainly because people were getting sick from them.

The trouble is that quality control for making synthetic cannabinoids is essentially non-existent, Carreno says. The drug is sprayed onto plant material in large warehouses or sometimes mixed in animal feed troughs, and so the amount of chemical that lands on each piece of plant material is variable, making some batches of Spice of K2 really strong and others not potent at all.

Synthetic cannabinoids have been connected with strings of deaths and devastating overdoses since In alone, 56 people overdosed and two died in Chicago; nearly 50 users overdosed in Brooklyn; and more than people got sick in New Haven. In that case, some individuals did test positive for fentanyl, an opioid, in combination with synthetic cannabinoids, which can be a factor in overdosing.

But according to a blog published by The Lancet , the main culprit was Fubinaca—a Pfizer-created synthetic cannabinoid—based painkiller that was made illegal in The DEA moved to make five synthetic cannabinoids illegal for consumption in , and the federal law passed in