News & Updates

Through the first half of the year, killings in D.C. jumped about 20 percent from the same period in 2014. Mayor Muriel Bowser said flatly that she believes the synthetic drugs — which go by names such as K-2 and Spice — are responsible for an uptick in homicides.

New York, Chicago and Milwaukee are among other large cities that have also experienced an increase in violence this year after a long trend in the opposite direction.

“It’s bad enough that we’ve got a drug that’s having this impact on our community, but to have businesses selling it, that’s unacceptable,” Lanier says.

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Hundreds of so-called ‘head shops’ which peddle legal highs on Britain’s high streets will be forced to close as a result of new laws. The ban on all new synthetic drugs to be announced in the Queen’s Speech will stop the estimated 250 shops circumventing the law and selling noxious substances with impunity. The Mail understands that the new law will create a blanket ban on all legal highs so that new noxious substances are automatically outlawed before they hit the streets. Under the existing laborious system, a committee of experts is required to conclude that new drugs are harmful before they can be banned.

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Five students, all juveniles, are charged with possession of a controlled substance. Meade County Sheriff William Kerrick said he’s confident that all of them had consumed either THC, the chemical in marijuana, or a synthetic marijuana known as “spice.” Kerrick accused the teenagers of smoking the drugs through electronic cigarettes. It has become common in Jefferson County schools too, despite legislative efforts to crack down, said Jon Jasper, a counselor for the nonprofit Morton Center.

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Synthetic drugs often have ridiculous names, like white rush or meow meow, that almost belie that fact that these substances are part of a growing deadly trend. The rise in popularity of a one new synthetic drug in South Florida has led to 18 deaths in Broward County alone since last September, reports the New York Times.

The drug, called “flakka” or “gravel,” depending on regional vernacular, is a powerful stimulant that can induce paranoia and hallucinations among other unwanted side effects. The high lasts a few hours, but the damage caused to the brain and kidneys can be permanent and even deadly. Users who have died from the drug typically succumb to heat stroke, according to Broward County’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Craig Mallak, as body temperatures rise to upwards of 105 degrees.

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A hazardous new synthetic drug originating in China is being blamed for 18 recent deaths in a single South Florida county, as police grapple with an inexpensive narcotic that causes exaggerated strength and dangerous paranoid hallucinations. On Thursday, the Fort Lauderdale police killed a man, reportedly high on the man-made street drug, alpha-PVP, known more commonly as flakka, who had held a woman hostage with a knife to her throat.

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