The young man shook uncontrollably and couldn’t speak. As an emergency room doctor tried to figure out what was wrong, the man’s friends showed a package of herbs clearly marked “not for human consumption.” The man and his friends had smoked "spice."... Read more»
Rebekah Zemansky/Cronkite News Service
Concerns about spice have prompted Kansas, Kentucky, Alabama, Arkansas and Missouri to regulate K2, one brand under which spice is sold.
2319111111I want to help TucsonSentinel.com offer a real news alternative!
We're committed to making quality news accessible; we'll never set up a paywall or charge for our site. But we rely on your support to bring you independent news without the spin. Use our convenient PayPal/credit card donation form below or contact us at donate@tucsonsentinel.com today.
Subscribe and stretch your donation over time:
Or give a secure one-time gift with PayPal or your credit card:
TucsonSentinel.com is an Arizona nonprofit organization. Your contribution is tax-deductible.
Please be respectful and relevant. Thought-provoking. Or at least funny.
We want comments to advance the discussion and we need your help. Debate, disagree, yell (digitally) or laugh, but do it with respect.
We won't censor your comments if we don't agree with you; we want viewpoints from across the political spectrum. We're dedicated to sparking an open, active discussion. We believe people with differing opinions can spark debate and effect change.
Comments are open to registered users of TucsonSentinel.com.
Keep in mind:
TucsonSentinel.com does not allow:
Comments that violate these guidelines may be removed. We reserve the right to make up the rules as we go along.
Commentors are solely responsible for the opinions they express and the accuracy of the information they provide. Users who violate these standards may lose their privileges on TucsonSentinel.com.
Sentinel editors can't read every comment. Trolls, spammers and other troublemakers can slide under the bridge. We rely on you to help maintain a healthy conversation - more than likely, you're reading these comments before the editors.
What if you see something inappropriate? Use the 'Flag' button to send it to a moderation queue. Help us out and tell us why you're reporting it; please don't report someone just because you disagree with them. Boy who cried wolf and all that. We'll take appropriate action on violations.
We will not edit comments to alter their meaning or censor comments because of political content.
We will not remove comments solely because they are heartless, cruel, coarse, foolish or just plain wrong. Your disapproval can maintain a decent signal to noise ratio. Ultimately, however, self-policing is the best method.
Bottom line, don't be a jerk.
2 comments on this story
LOL. Siete, JWH-018 is clearly NOT a hallucinogen like LSD. The young man talked about at the beginning overdosed on a very viable substance. If we are going to start legislation solely on the basis of the fact of whether or not a substance is overdosable… don’t forget to ban practically every substance that we already see on our shelves in our stores. If someone overdosed on Tylenol PM when it first came out, would you be like “OMG, we need to make sure nobody ever takes this stuff again!” or would you look at the substance with a practical understanding that it may have medical value. Tylenol PM has practical application, and so does Spice. If you think that careless emo adolescents are the only people that smoke Spice then you are unaware of the tens of thousands of people all over the US that take it for the same medicinal purposes as marijuana. The acetaminophen in Tylenol is known to cause renal failure. OMG renal failure? What are we going to do about that!! Maybe we should start legislation and LOCK UP EVERY BASTARD CAUGHT WITH THAT STUFF. Get real.
The reason the guy overdosed on the substance is because the manufacture that made it and the people that he bought it from where not at liberty to provide the very important dosage information that the product should have had written on it. The product was obviously selling because people enjoy consuming it, but in our society it’s taboo to enjoy any substance that alters your state of being unless it’s been authorized by the FDA, and the FDA doesn’t approve anything that agitates religious paranoia, so someone ends up in suffering from having been poorly informed. I personally know people that have been smoking Spice for a very long time, with absolutely no issues. No fevers, no paranoia, no seizures, maybe a mild headache, but that could have very well come from the fast food they ate that day. The reason this incident happened is because of the lack of liberty that should have been there. As a society we can fix that problem. If we truly care about life, and we don’t want people to suffer like this again, no other approach is going to work better than just simply allowing a drug user to be a drug user without having to be so stealthy and paranoid and misinformed. If you think that outlawing every substance that has any history of sending people to the hospital, you will perpetuate a never ending war that will have people continuously suffering, whether it be that they end up in a hospital in or in a jail cell. It takes either a cold blooded or clueless individual to want to keep the war going.