Fake pot puts teen at death's door


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(CNN) -- Hospital staff removed Emily Bauer's breathing tube and stopped all medication and nourishment at 1:15 p.m. December 16. Only morphine flowed into her body, as the family waited by her side in her final moments.

But the next morning, she was still alive.

"Good morning, I love you," her mother told Emily as she approached the bed.

A hoarse voice whispered back, "I love you too."

Emily was back.

Her family said the drug that landed the Cypress, Texas, teenager, then 16, in the ICU two weeks earlier wasn't bought from a dealer or offered to her at a party. It was a form of synthetic weed packaged as "potpourri" that she and friends bought at a gas station.

Best known by the street names "Spice" or "K2," fake weed is an herbal mixture sprayed with chemicals that's meant to create a high similar to smoking marijuana, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Advertised as a "legal" alternative to weed, it's often sold as incense or potpourri and in most states, it's anything but legal.

Synthetic marijuana was linked to 11,406 drug-related emergency department visits in 2010, according to a first-of-its-kind report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. This is when it first started showing up on health providers' radar, as the Drug Abuse Warning Nework detected a measurable number of emergency visits.

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i am very concerned by all the ways that kids are trying to get high these days. I have a daughter and it terrifies me that some day she might fall in with the wrong crowd and have something like this happen to her.

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If marijuana was legal in Texas, I wonder if this would've happened. Either way this synthetic stuff is really messed up.

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I saw this earlier on CNN. One thing I thought was weird though...

Bryant said doctors at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center said the migraines were possibly related to using the drug.

"We correlated the time she got migraines with the time she started smoking this stuff," he said. "In their professional opinion, they think it's related. But medically speaking, they don't have a picture of her brain from before and after, so they can't say."

It sounds to me, unless I'm misreading, that they're not sure if the synthetic drug abuse caused her issues. Am I wrong in how I'm reading this?

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Real marijuana = never had a single death because of it.[*]

Does not include deaths from lung cancer at 8% joint year as opposed to 7% pack year etc

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The fake stuff = lots of people gets bad reaction to it, injured or death occur.

Real marijuana = never had a single death because of it.

Yeah, very ironic isn't it?

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^ Except all the drug sellers who kill each other.

no one kills people over weed! it only happens if the dealers sell other things on the side .. its the high dealers who sell assortments of drugs that kill not the random weed dealer

Does not include deaths from lung cancer at 8% joint year as opposed to 7% pack year etc

??? you only get lung cancer if you smoke it with tabaco smoking it pure as an adult has very little negative effects if any at all.. the only issues that come with weed is when young people smoke to much of it and develop phycosis (please forgive my spelling I am a scientist not an English professor)

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If marijuana were legal in the US, there would surely be a reduction in drug violence both here and in Mexico.

I also think the risk of lung cancer is exaggerated, but there are safer ways to use marijuana like vaporizing or cooking.

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no one kills people over weed! it only happens if the dealers sell other things on the side .. its the high dealers who sell assortments of drugs that kill not the random weed dealer

You haven't read the News much.

Marijuana dealers are killing people all the time.

Kentucky goes after 'Marijuana Belt' growers

A typical day will involve hitting 15 to 20 marijuana plots ? most spotted by Holden or another pilot in a helicopter. They have learned to spot the tell-tale earthen trails and bluish-green of pot patches. They mark the GPS coordinates, then guide in ground forces to cut and burn the crop.

A display case in the squat concrete building where they've gathered is a reminder of the booby traps they might face: Pipe bombs with trip wires, fishing hooks strung face-high across trails, sharpened bamboo sticks, ankle-crushing bear traps; and boards pounded through with three-inch nails that are laid on the ground and covered with leaves.

"Some growers will take a poisonous snake and with monofilament wire, tie it to the plot," Shemelya says, leaving police to find "one (very mad) ****ed-off copperhead."

*************************

Booby-trapped Pot Field Fatal For 3 Walking Through

EVANSTON, KY. ? Three men walking across a marijuana field were killed when they set off exploding booby traps, police said Friday. The bodies of brothers Lloyd and Luke Miller and Luther Vanderpool were discovered Friday morning, state Trooper Gilbert Acciardo said. The men apparently walked into a trip wire that triggered four separate explosions. Four plots containing a total of 55 marijuana plants were discovered nearby. The land, about 25 miles east of Jackson, is owned by a local coal company that Acciardo refused to identify. A member of the Miller family found the bodies after the family began a search when the two brothers didn't come home Thursday night. It was unknown what the three men were doing at the site.

**************

This manual forcefully demonstrates the deadly lengths to which drug dealers will go to protect their illegal labs and fields. See how military mines, grenades, fire bombs, rockets and other explosive booby traps have been rigged along trails and behind doors to harm unwanted intruders.

http://www.amazon.co...e/dp/0873646819

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But for many tens of thousands of ER visits marijuana is the only drug mentioned. And there?s even data suggesting that, as the authors of ?Marijuana Legalization? put it, ?marijuana can kill.? Between 1999 and 2007, the Centers for Disease Control, somewhat curiously, attributed 26 deaths to cannabis use?half in the subcategory ?dependence.?

http://reason.com/bl...galization-have

***********************************************

Alleged Mobster Denies Killing Of Marijuana Dealer

Joseph Rico, an alleged mob associate, testified in his defense yesterday that he did not kill a marijuana dealer in January 1983 after stiffing him on a $14,000 drug deal.

"I swear on my mother's grave, I did not do it," said Rico, 45, who is accused of shooting, strangling and stabbing Robert Hornickel of Maple Shade, N.J.

***************************************************

Kansas City man charged in pot dealer?s death

Jackson County prosecutors on Saturday accused a 24-year-old man of killing his marijuana dealer during a robbery in Kansas City last week after the dealer balked at lying on the floor.

?Are you kidding me?? Brandon J. Sloan reportedly said after the gunman?s demand to get down.

The robber filed a single shot into Sloan?s head and said, ?Does it look like I?m playing??

Read more here: http://www.kansascit...l#storylink=cpy

************************************************************************

Since 2008 more than 7,000 people?over 1,000 last January alone, including Mexican civilians, journalists, police, and public officials?have been killed in clashes with warring drug traffickers. Wire-service reports estimate that Mexico?s drug lords employ over 100,000 soldiers?approximately as many as the Mexican army?and that the cartels? wealth, intimidation, and influence extend to the highest echelons of law enforcement and government. Where do the cartels get their unprecedented wealth and power? By trafficking in illicit drugs?primarily marijuana?over the border into the United States.

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??? you only get lung cancer if you smoke it with tabaco smoking it pure as an adult has very little negative effects if any at all.. the only issues that come with weed is when young people smoke to much of it and develop phycosis (please forgive my spelling I am a scientist not an English professor)

Read it and weep.

http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/31/2/280.full#sec-8

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^ Except all the drug sellers who kill each other.

And an unknown number who die from an undisgnosed anaphylaxis; a Spanish study last year showed most of those allergic to tomato and tobacco also showed a reaction to cannabis.

Other studies showed an increase in auto deaths of at least 92% among cannabis users. This has caused many states, including Michigan, to start defining cannabis intoxication as equal to alcohol intoxication in impaired driving cases. The signs here say "Buzzed Driving Is Drunk Driving."

Be careful kiddies...

buzzed_ooh_headwound.jpg

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I'm gunna sound mean but to be honest if you use any form of drug sold to you from some asshat in the street you kind of deserve it, I am not saying Marijuana is bad and I know no one has died directly from taking Real Marijuana but if kids are going to buy the fake stuff from random people they honestly deserve it. No sympathy for the kid and heck if I was caught taking anything like that I would of had it beaten out of me.

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It's certainly true that this sort of incident wouldn't occur if laws on cannabis were somewhat more relaxed, or better yet that it be decriminalized. Not only is cannabis not all that harmful, particularly if eaten or smoked in a vaporizer, but it also has a range of medical uses as California has come to accept with it's pioneering approach to cannabis control.

Though true that dealers have often been known to kill each other over territory control and customer base among other reasons, it is more often than not also true that these people are not only quite often dealing in other more harmful and addictive substances but that they are integrally linked with organised crime, gang mentality and the criminal underworld in general. Would it not then make sense to, if not legalize, then decriminalize cannabis in order to take control of the supply out of the gangsters hands? Surely this would have a greatly beneficial impact on crime rates and could even pose to make cannabis an excellent, taxable cash crop. Besides, in Holland, where cannabis is essentially legal, only a fraction of the national population actually smoke themselves though cultivation of the crop grosses large profit, encouraged tourism and made substantial tax income for the government, much like in France where sales of beer and wine are permitted from 14 years old and children often drink wine with their meals, as is tradition, there is a rather low rate of alcoholism, as such, statistically speaking, it is clear that criminalization leads to abuse, not hinders it...

I will note at this point that, let's face it, prohibition didn't work! In fact the sale of alcohol continued somewhat unabated (not for the feds attempts to stop it) though the overall quality of what was being sold drastically deteriorated no doubt causing more alcohol related hospitalizations and quite likely deaths (both alcohol and gang related), not to mention allowing mafia and gang influences to profit from this. And lets face it, alcohol is a bigger killer and cause of greater social and societal degradation than cannabis has ever been. Alcohol is a very potent and harmful drug (yes it IS a drug, don't forget that!).

At the end of the day, people want to get high, that will never change, probably much to the dislike of the 'morally high standing', good, law abiding, alcohol drinking (still getting high, just legally...) members of society, and this case is a fine example of that. Cut off the supply and these people will turn elsewhere, often with less than desirable results, as in this tragic case.

I think my point is made...

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