Matt Cohen
Jul 27, 2015 2:51 pm

On Friday, first responders treated 14 people near the Columbia Heights Metro station for suspected overdoses of synthetic drugs. It's just the latest in a series of incidents related to the substances in D.C. over the last few months, including mass overdoses among homeless residents, violence, and possible links to other crimes.

The synthetic drugs in question - known as K2, Spice, Bizarro, Scooby Snax, and Trainwreck - are often referred to as "synthetic marijuana." In reality, however, it's a drug that's far more dangerous than the one it supposedly mimics, and calling it "synthetic marijuana" is grossly inaccurate.

What someone gets when they purchase a bag of, say, Scooby Snax, is potpourri. But it's not regular potpourri; it's been sprayed with a chemical compound meant to mimic the effects of marijuana, albeit without using illegal cannabinoids. Dr. Malik Burnett, a former policy organizer for the Drug Policy Alliance says that the reason the moniker "synthetic marijuana" has unfortunately stuck to these particular drugs is because of the way manufacturers engineer a chemical structure meant to be like THC, the active chemical cannabinoid in marijuana.

But the reality is that the cannabinoid-mimicking compound synthesized for these drugs isn't actually much like a cannabinoid in the slightest. "The only part that's really marijuana-like is the active part of the chemical compound, because it looks like a cannabinoid," Burnett says, "but it's not a cannabinoid at all." ... So what exactly is it that people are consuming when they smoke "synthetic marijuana" and what about it is causing all this violent behavior? Well, it's complicated, and not because the chemistry is complicated, but because it's actually a bunch of different synthetic chemical compounds that are constantly being changed.