Marijuana alternative’s popularity soars (Fayetteville Observer)
A designer drug that replicates the high of marijuana is the new darling of a growing number of tobacco shops in Fayetteville.
The legal substance, known as spice, contains a lab-made chemical that affects the same receptors in the brain as the active ingredient in marijuana. The federal Drug Enforcement Administration estimates that spice is 10 to 15 times stronger than marijuana.
The product has been sold in the United States since about 2006, but its popularity has soared in the past year, even as military and civilian authorities work to outlaw it.
“It’s just as popular as beer,” said Jeff Sizemore, owner of R’s Gems & Rocks on Bragg Boulevard. “We go back into the 1970s, and we’ve never sold anything like this stuff does.”
Spice’s popularity may be one reason that so many tobacco shops have opened in Fayetteville recently. Figures from the city’s finance office show that 21 of Fayetteville’s 27 tobacco shops opened in 2009 or 2010. Two more shops have opened in Spring Lake in the same timeframe, one in the past couple of weeks. Most of the shops sell spice.
Spice doesn’t show up on most urinalyses, which adds to its attraction for soldiers and others who are regularly tested for illegal drugs.
Spc. Andrew Falusi, a Fort Bragg paratrooper, said he knows several soldiers who smoke spice. He said he tried it once with fellow soldiers, but he didn’t like the way it made him feel.
The growing use of spice has drawn the attention of military commanders. On Wednesday, Fort Bragg banned the use or possession of spice on the Army post, joining at least nine other Army installations in doing so.
Soldiers caught with it on or off post can be punished for the equivalent of failing to obey an order, said Col. Chad McRee, commander of the 16th Military Police Brigade and director of emergency services on Fort Bragg.
Soldiers also can be punished for shopping at any store that sells spice, McRee said. Fort Bragg officials consider spice to be drug paraphernalia, and any business that sells it is on the installation’s off-limits list.
“It’s very important that even though it seems harmless … it is absolutely dangerous and unlawful to be used if you’re a soldier,” McRee said. “What we know at this point is there are some very bad effects. What we don’t know is how bad these effects can become.”
Still, McRee acknowledged that there are loopholes that can make enforcement difficult. Because spice doesn’t show up on most drug tests, possession is the only method for enforcement.
At Fort Bragg, 29 soldiers have been caught with spice in the past month, McRee said.
“You can see that it’s plentiful,” he said.
Sales clerks at stores that carry spice – which is packaged as incense with names such as Funky Monkey, K2 and Afghan Kush – say it is the best-selling product they have ever seen. The packages sell for between $25 and $50 and typically contain 3 to 4 grams of leafy greens sprayed with the ingredient that mimics marijuana.
Fayetteville police are finding that some people prefer not to pay for it.
Police have responded to at least a dozen break-ins in the past couple of months where spice was stolen, department spokesman Dan Grubb said.
Sizemore, the smoke shop owner, said soldiers’ girlfriends or spouses often buy spice at his store. He said many people empty it into an unmarked container in the parking lot to better hide the product from military authorities.
The DEA has labeled spice a drug of concern.
Eric See, chairman of the Department of Justice Studies and Applied Forensic Science at Methodist University, said the drug is too new for any research to have been conducted on its long-term health effects.
Some side effects reported include nausea, vomiting, hallucinations, anxiety attacks and muscle spasms.
The American Association of Poison Control Centers reported that spice use has led to more than 1,300 calls to poison control centers around the country.
Warnings on packages of spice state that it’s not for human consumption, but the people who buy and sell it know its intended use. Many shops around Fayetteville that sell spice display pipes or bongs alongside the product.
The warnings don’t seem to have much sway on people, though.
Sizemore said that in the week following military paydays, he usually sells between 1,000 and 1,500 packages of spice. He said spice has single-handedly saved his business.
Sizemore said he smokes about 30 to 40grams of spice a week. He said he prefers spice over marijuana because it’s stronger and it’s legal.
“It slows you down a little bit, calms you out,” he said. “It’s a really good feel-good.”
Ben Anstead, owner of Anstead’s Tobacco Co. at Cross Creek Mall, said he doesn’t carry spice because he doesn’t want his store to be associated with such products. People ask about it daily, and the frequency has increased in the past six months, he said.
See said he expects spice to eventually become illegal, like other designer drugs that have come before it since the 1960s.
Ecstasy and methamphetamine were created in a lab and were at one time legal, See said.
“Ever since people have had chemistry kits, they have made drugs,” he said. “It’s a cat and mouse of who can get what and how far ahead of the laws they can stay.
“As soon as a law is passed on this particular designer drug, there’ll be something else to replace it.”
One of the main compounds used in spice – known as JWH-018 – was developed by researchers studying cannabinoids at Clemson University in the 1990s.
The compound’s name comes from the initials of John W. Huffman, an organic chemist at Clemson. Huffman has said in published interviews that his discovery was never meant for recreational use.
Details of the discovery were first published in a scientific journal in 1998. Afterward, manufacturers began developing products based on it.
At least 10 states, including Georgia and Tennessee, have already banned spice, and four more have legislation pending to ban it, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Spice also has been banned in Germany, France and several other countries in Europe and Asia.
District Court Judge Kim Tucker, who oversees many of Cumberland County’s drug and alcohol cases, has outlawed the use of spice by people on probation.
Larry Clubine, a drug- and alcohol-abuse counselor in Fayetteville, said that about six months ago, he noticed people on probation showing up stoned for required treatment sessions.
“They acted like someone who had been smoking really good weed,” he said.
Clubine confronted one of them and eventually learned that some people convicted of using marijuana had switched to spice.
“The drug screens were coming up clean, yet there was a realization that some people were still using some substance. We just couldn’t detect it,” Tucker said. “We didn’t have the technology to detect it, but now we do.”
At the end of last month, Cumberland County began using a new urinalysis made specifically to test for spice. At $30 to $50 per test, it costs much more than the standard test that screens for about 10 common drugs.
Tucker now randomly tests for spice.
People in the court’s drug program caught using spice are punished with community service or jail time.
State Sen. William Purcell, a Democrat from Laurinburg, said if re-elected he will consider introducing legislation next year to outlaw spice in North Carolina. Purcell said he has heard from other state legislators who are interested in banning spice.
State Rep. Rick Glazier, a Democrat from Fayetteville, said he would back Purcell.
Last year, Purcell sponsored a bill that outlawed salvia, an herbal product with hallucinogenic effects.
Purcell said the law will need to be carefully constructed so that it doesn’t leave a loophole for manufacturers to keep selling spice after making a small molecular change in the product to skirt the statute.
“I’d hate to have a drug out there that alters the mind and yet we don’t know what the permanent effects are,” Purcell said. “I think we need to have some control on it.”
See said spice will continue to be popular until the federal government makes it illegal. If North Carolina outlaws it, buyers will drive to a bordering state to buy it, he said.
“I think there are drugs out there that are a lot worse than this, but at the same time, we need to be vigilant,” See said. “We need to be worried about it because we don’t know the long-term consequences.”
Staff writer John Ramsey can be reached at ramseyj@fayobserver.com or 486-3574.
Published: 05:23 AM, Sun Oct 17, 2010
By John Ramsey
Staff writer
