Synthetic marijuana, other forms of cannabinoids still being sold 'legally' says DEA

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Federal and local police in New Jersey, recently, conducted a joint operation to raid a manufacturing warehouse in Passaic. And, they were so successful that they were able to pull off the biggest bust of synthetic marijuana in New Jersey history.

The police authorities seized 2,000 packages of synthetic marijuana, 234 small bottles of bath salts or synthetic ecstasy and over 32,000 illegally made male enhancement pills with an estimated total worth of $27 million; four men were apprehended, ABC7NY reported.

But, this huge bust is only a small step in the fight against this prevalent issue of synthetic cannabinoids, or also referred to as synthetic marijuana. Thousands of people were sent to emergency rooms across the U.S. because of side effects such as psychotic episodes and seizures. This year alone, calls to poison control centers were almost two times more than last year's total and we are not even through with the year, according to a report from NPR.org.

And, although, there have been about a dozen types of synthetic cannabinoids already banned by the federal government, packets of synthetic marijuana, which is also referred to as K2 or spice in the streets, can still be purchased in many mom-and-pop convenience stores, because they contain versions of cannabinoids not covered by the ban, Matt Strait of the Drug Enforcement Administration said.

"They are in a legal grey area because they're not specifically named in the statute," he said. This is the reason why the police are having a hard time keeping up with the makers and dealers of synthetic marijuana.

Angel Stanley, a psychiatric nurse at the Syracuse Behavioral Healthcare, said that some of the symptoms she saw from the patients who smoke synthetic marijuana include auditory hallucinations, visual hallucinations, disorganized thinking, delusional thinking, and paranoia.

The drug enforcement officials said that it is hard to tell what the exact effect is after smoking or ingesting synthetic marijuana because the chemists who make it are constantly changing the main ingredients. This is also a cause of problems for healthcare professionals dealing with the treatment of patients.

"We know how to treat an alcoholic. We know how to treat an opiate patient. We know how to treat somebody's who's using cocaine. But, when we say we know how to treat somebody who is using synthetics—to a certain extent we do," said Jeremy Klemanski, head of Syracuse Behavioral Healthcare.  

He also added that they are going to struggle until they get to that point where the treatment system has sophisticated testing as the labs that are inventing and creating these things.