Over the course of two days in mid-August, more than 95 people in New Haven, Connecticut, overdosed.
Their drug, however, wasn’t heroin. It was synthetic cannabinoids, commonly sold as K2, Spice, or potpourri. The fallout from the incident was so widespread that experts have referred to it as a “mass casualty incident.” In nearby Baltimore, a new study by the University of Maryland’s Center for Substance Abuse Research (CESAR) published this month articulates many of the problems with identifying and treating synthetic cannabinoid overdoses.
Researchers studied urine samples of patients with suspected synthetic cannabinoid overdose at two different hospitals, the University of Maryland Medical Center Midtown Campus in Baltimore and the University of Maryland Prince George’s Hospital Center in Cheverly, a suburb of Washington, D.C.
They almost immediately hit a snag with their study.
If the patients had been using Spice, why wasn’t it showing up in their urine?
“When we got the results back, it was just kind of amazing because we expected to find a large percentage testing positive for the synthetic cannabinoids metabolites we were testing for, and what we found was that in the first go around only I think one specimen testing positive for it,” said principal investigator Eric Wish, PhD, a principal study investigator and director of CESAR at the University of Maryland, College Park, College of Behavioral & Social Sciences.
Despite testing the urine for 169 different drugs, including 26 metabolites of synthetic cannabinoids, it simply wasn’t there. The issue, say experts, highlights an urgent need for improved testing for so-called new psychoactive substances, including Spice and synthetic cathinones, also known as bath salts. These new drugs don’t show up on standard drug tests, making it difficult to form a clear diagnosis. Designer drugs continually manage to dodge legislation because whenever a certain variety is outlawed based on its chemical structure, a new similar chemical is manufactured and sold legally.>>>
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