Maybe there's been an explosion in K2 use, then, and that's what people are flipping out about?
This story from Arizona quotes a smoke-shop owner saying that "the trend has just exploded in the last 60 days," but one guy in Phoenix does not a compelling data source make. In St. Louis, Anthony Scalzo, a pediatrician and toxicologist at Saint Louis University Hospital, says he's seen nearly 30 teenagers come through local ERs suffering from bad trips on K2 just in the last six weeks, but this is an aberration. Scalzo says he's spoken with his counterparts at poison-control centers in Atlanta, New Jersey, and New York City. Their recent case loads, respectively: 12, 2, and 0. And no one's tracking K2-related medical cases nationwide. There is a database, the National Poison Data System, that could. But Scalzo says, "It doesn't even have a code for K2."
More likely, the greater danger involved in buying K2 stems from the fact that it's an unregulated mixture of God knows what. "You don't know what you're getting," says Scalzo. "It's buyer-beware."
That leaves Scalzo very worried about the kids coming through the ERs in his area, because they aren't acting like you might expect a K2 user to act. "They're jacked up. They're agitated and anxious, sometimes delirious," Scalzo says. "And they're completely surprised by what has happened to them, because they were just expecting to get mellow." Scalzo also notes that cannabinoids (a fancy word for potlike chemicals) "have protective effects on the cardiovascular system, which again goes against the grain of what we are seeing with cardiovascular stress with K2." In other words, these kids' hearts are racing and their blood pressure is way up—which is exactly the opposite of what it should be on K2. All this, Scalzo says, "leads me to conclude that we may have a contaminant in the product."
