Officials are calling weaponized marijuana a serious threat to NYC, as borough police battle a synthetic drug that, like the current Legionnaire’s outbreak, is spreading like an epidemic.
Known on the streets as Spice or K2, the dirt cheap but deadly high is responsible for a troubling spike in emergency hospitalizations, as well as a number of fatal overdoses and extreme acts of violence.
Frequent users of the pseudo-herbal mystery compound experience superhuman strength, paranoia, visual and auditory hallucinations -- even sudden death -- making the popularity of synthetic marijuana a “great and growing concern here in New York,” said NYPD Police Commissioner William Bratton.
And, at only two or three bucks a baggie, “you’re going to see a lot more of it in the short term,” he predicted this week.
In the past four months alone nearly 2000 New Yorkers ended up in hospitals for abusing the banned substance, according to the Commissioner. An alarming figure that doesn’t include those arrested for illegally possessing and/or selling it, or acting so dangerously bizarre while under its influence they had to be jailed for their own protection.
Those kind of scary crime stats and side effects have led law enforcement to finally regard the artificial dope with a reputation for murder as weaponized, and to crack down on NYC’s dime-store dealers as public enemy number one.
