LEGALIZE IT –
June 1, 2018 – The young woman had pale skin and fire-red hair, and by all appearances was only minutes away from dying from opioid overdose. The grim scene unfolded in February, in the Kensington section of North Philadelphia. It’s where the death rate from heroin mixed with illicit fentanyl ranks among the highest in the nation, and the sight of young bodies lying prone and unresponsive on the sidewalk has become the new normal for a cluster of impoverished neighborhoods that have already suffered decades of collateral damage from the war on drugs … But in spite of the fresh needle marks on the young woman’s arms, it wasn’t a strong new batch of fentanyl-laced dope that sent her plummeting to the pavement near a makeshift campsite of homeless IV drug users. Instead, witnesses said the woman was having a bad reaction to “Tookie,” a local street name for K2—a generic term used to describe one of hundreds of synthetic drugs designed to mimic the properties of the chemical in marijuana that makes people high, THC. Unlike its organic cousin, however, synthetic cannabinoids can cause a range of adverse side effects, including seizures, psychosis, and cardiac arrest. Thousands of people have been hospitalized over the past decade after smoking synthetic cannabinoids, and dozens of fatalities have been attributed to the drugs, often when they are taken in combination with other substances.
