From the Deseret News:

Matt Fairbanks, special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration in Utah, calls it a game of "chemical cat and mouse."

As fast as law government agencies are banning synthetic substances such as spice and bath salts, criminals are changing a molecule or two to come up with a new substance just as dangerous that doesn't meet the criteria of the law that banned the last synthetic drug.

One of the latest substances that has law enforcers worried: synthetic marijuana brownies. "Candy Weed," as it's known, is synthetic THC mixed with flavored corn syrup and made into little candy squares. Fairbanks said it's a trend that law enforcement officers haven't seen in Utah yet. But once a new drug appears in places like California, he said it's only a matter of time before it finds its way to the Beehive State.

A 2011 National Institute on Drug Abuse survey found that more than 11 percent of twelfth-graders reported using synthetic marijuana, according to the Utah Attorney General's Office.

The American Association of Poison Control Centers reported receiving 2,906 calls because of Spice in 2010 and 6,955 in 2011, showing an increased popularity of the drug. Spice accounted for 11,206 emergency room visits in 2010, and 75 percent of patients were ages 12 to 29, according to recent survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Also from Action News (Philadelphia):

Parents are being urged to be on the lookout for a deceiving piece of candy. It's called weed candy, and police are concerned that it could be laced with more than marijuana.

It is an emerging trend in the world of illegal drugs, and they call it "pot candy" or "weed candy."

Authorities say what makes these candies particularly dangerous is that there is no telling if they might be laced with other drugs or toxic chemicals.

Any parents should look for unwrapped or re-wrapped candies that look like Jolly Ranchers.

From Mississippi News Now:

A man accused of attacking his pregnant wife and killing their unborn baby appeared in court for a hearing Thursday for the first time since the October incident. On his way into court, Jeffery Reynolds blamed synthetic marijuana for what happened.

The Livingston Parish Sheriff's Office said Reynolds attacked his wife, Paula, 28, with a kitchen knife at their Walker, LA home on Oct. 23, 2012.

Investigators said he stabbed her in the abdomen and cut their baby out of her. She survived the attack.

A toxicology test was run on Reynolds, but at last report, the results had not been sent back to authorities.

Reynolds remains behind bars on $500,000 bond. He is charged with first-degree feticide and second-degree attempted murder.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Supreme Court justices showed unease Wednesday about letting police without a search warrant draw a blood sample from an unwilling drunken-driving suspect, but they also expressed sympathy for the urgency faced by officers in such traffic stops.

The justices heard arguments in a hot-button case on constitutional rights from Missouri, where authorities stuck a needle into the arm of handcuffed suspect Tyler McNeely.

The state, backed by the Obama administration, said it shouldn't have to wait for a magistrate's approval because blood-alcohol level diminishes after a person stops drinking. Mr. McNeely's lawyers said his Fourth Amendment protection against "unreasonable searches" was violated. They said 25 states explicitly require warrants for involuntary blood draws, suggesting the safeguard is workable.

Justices looked for middle ground between the two positions, although it wasn't clear if they could find it.

By requiring police to obtain a search warrant, often done through a telephone call to an on-duty magistrate, "you have a second judgment," said Justice Stephen Breyer. "The officer has to talk to somebody, so he's a little more careful. And that's a protection...for others who maybe weren't wobbling."

On the other hand, he continued, many states "want to enforce strict rules against drunk driving," and sometimes "it's not easy to get hold of a magistrate in 15 minutes."

A decision in the case, Missouri v. McNeely, is expected before July.

From the Town and Country-Manchester Patch:

St. Louis County Police are warning parents and teens about a new sythentic drug called "N-Bomb" that is already responsible for deaths in several states.

The name stems from its chemical composition, 2C-I-NBOMe or 25INBOMe, and police say it is a powerful hallucinogen that is a more potent and deadly derivative of mescaline. It has been reportedly responsible for fatal overdoses in California, North Dakota, Minnesota, Lousiana and Virginia.

St. Louis County Police said the substance has been purchased undercover in the metro area by drug detectives. Chief Tim Fitch said it's important for the public to be aware about the dangerous nature of this relatively new drug.

Effects of the drug are similar to LSD and include hallucinations, impairment of perception to sound and depth, and uncontrollable body movements.

The statement from law enforcement was partly in response to a Chesterfield mother who said she believes her teenage daughter was offered N-Bomb at a New Year's Eve Party in Wildwood and nearly overdosed as a result.

From Salon.com:

This is the year of the knockoff. A witch’s brew of new synthetic drugs, most of them stimulants, peddled as either bath salts or “spice” concoctions, has offered users new forms of Russian Roulette, and has irrevocably changed the face of international drug dealing. 2012 was also the year hysteria took over. Myths began to accumulate, and everywhere you looked, somebody was supposedly doing something psychotic due to the new synthetics.

By 2012, amphetamine-type stimulants, including synthetic bath salt derivatives, had become more popular worldwide than either cocaine or heroin, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). This international eclipsing of the plant-based “hard drugs” of the past represents a major paradigm shift in the landscape of the illegal drug trade. The stunning market growth of synthetic stimulants is not hard to understand. Bath salt drug products soared in popularity throughout 2012 due largely to the belief among users that the drugs were: 1) quasi-legal, 2) non-addictive, 3) relatively safe, and 4) invisible to drug tests.

By the end of the year, it had become clear that none of these things was still true.

To begin with, bath salts—just like Spice and other cannabis spinoffs—are no longer legal. And many of the drugs found in bath salts appear to be addictive. Some carry known health hazards. And, although it was the desire to finesse drug testing that gave a major push to this new class of recreational chemicals, major bath salt ingredients can now be detected in routine urinalysis. Researchers have teased out the main culprits in both categories of synthetics—for synthetic marijuana, it’s the JWH family of research chemicals. For stimulants, it’s the cathinones, compounds like mephedrone and MDPV, members of a family of psychoactive alkaloids that includes khat, the chewable form of speed popular in East Africa.

There are new drug tests out there that can detect many of the major ingredients in both bath salts and spice-style cannabis products. And that marks a major change that law enforcement hopes will cripple growth in this fast-moving industry.

“Increasingly, and especially in the U.S. military, testing firms are including these compounds in their methodology,” says Dr. Kroll. More drug test kit manufacturers are sure to ramp up production in the near future, but it is a costly effort. “Folks probably aren’t aware of how hard it is to develop methods to detect all of these compounds,” adds Kroll.

From The Bangor Daily News:

Maine health officials are investigating a cluster of serious bacterial illnesses among users of synthetic bath salts.

Four patients with a history of injecting the drug were sickened by the Group A streptococcal bacterium over the last several weeks, according to a health alert issued by the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The common germ is responsible for strep throat and skin problems in its milder form but can also lead to life-threatening infections including the much-feared flesh-eating bacteria.

Two of the cases resulted in streptococcal toxic shock syndrome, which causes a rapid drop in blood pressure and can lead to organ failure. All of the patients were hospitalized, one required treatment in intensive care, and one developed necrotizing fasciitis, a condition that’s known as flesh-eating bacteria in its rare and most dangerous form.

The bacteria likely cropped up among bath salts users not through the sharing of needles but because injecting drugs gives it a way to enter the body, Sears said. For that reason, health officials are also concerned that the infection could strike users who inject drugs of any kind, he said.

Maine CDC has advised physicians and other health providers to be on the lookout for the infections among intravenous drug users, but the public should also be aware, Sears said.

From FOX News:

The commonly prescribed diabetes drug metformin could potentially double as an effective form of ovarian cancer treatment, according to a new study.

Researchers from the Mayo Clinic found that ovarian cancer patients – who also had diabetes – lived longer than other ovarian cancer patients when they were taking metformin. According to the scientists, they had been researching the link between metformin and its potential anti-cancer properties for many years.

Dr. Sanjeev Kumar, a Mayo Clinic gynecologic oncology fellow, and his colleagues examined 239 ovarian cancer patients, 61 of whom were taking metformin. Compared with the other 178 patients, those taking metformin had a much higher survival rate – with 67 percent of the metformin-taking patients surviving after five years, versus 47 percent of those who were not taking the medication.

When taking into consideration other factors – such as the patients’ body mass indexes or the severity of their cancer – those who were taking metformin were four times more likely to survive than those who did not take the medication.

While the results of the study are promising, Kumar and Shridhar caution that the drug would not be a cure for ovarian cancer. Instead, it could potentially be used in combination with already existing ovarian cancer treatments – to provide patients with the best overall therapy.

The study was published online in the journal Cancer.

From FOX Sports:

Adderall (amphetamine and dextroamphetamine) has moved from the college campuses into locker rooms, and professional sports are cracking down on its use.

The prescription drug that can sharpen focus and hone impulse control has become popular in NFL circles — at least seven players have received suspensions from the league office this season related to Adderall use.

And it appears some NFL players may be using, and abusing, Adderall just as some high school and college students do: by relying on it as a chemical aid to quickly help them cram and disseminate reams of complex information.

The difference isn’t all that striking, some psychologists say. Pulling an all-nighter to finish a complicated term paper can be equated to a player being forced to quickly recognize and react to the coverage on an NFL playing field.

As far as Adderall being recognized as a focus aid during a game, Bay Area Lab Co-Operative founder Victor Conte told FOXSports.com that drugs like Adderall — despite little literature to back up the effectiveness of such drugs in sports — are indeed considered performance-enhancing.

None of the players would have been suspended if they had a legitimate, clinical need for Adderall, which often is prescribed to children and adults with attention deficit disorder (ADD) or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

The NFL Players Association is in the midst of alerting its membership about the need to file for a therapeutic use exemption, or a TUE, to avoid the four-game bans that come with a positive test for Adderall without such a waiver.

While players have increasingly turned to Adderall to help sharpen their game focus, Gardner said the drug is no panacea as a study aid. Some players may gain no benefit at all.

Before the recent spate of positives in the NFL, “uppers” were thought to be more of a problem in Major League Baseball. The use of “greenies” — energy-boosting amphetamines — first came to the public’s attention with the release of the 1970 book “Ball Four,” written by former major-league pitcher Jim Bouton.

The National Hockey League and even NASCAR — driver A.J. Allmendinger was suspended this season after he tested positive for a substance he said was Adderall — have experienced issues with their athletes and amphetamines.

When MLB began to crack down on the use of amphetamines before the 2006 season by enforcing a 25-game suspension for a first offense, players in that sport began gravitating toward Adderall. The number of therapeutic-use exemptions in baseball jumped from 28 in 2006 to more than 100 in each season since, according to figures provided by MLB.

Unlike the NFL, experts see Adderall use in baseball attributed more to its effect as stimulant to combat a long, 162-game season. There were 105 MLB exemptions approved in 2011, a usage rate, about 8.75 percent, that is about double than the general adult population, about 4 percent to 5 percent.

The NFL does not disclose how many of its players have exemptions for Adderall, although Birch said the drug’s use in the NFL is lower than the overall male population within the same age group. A player not only has to have a valid diagnosis for ADD or ADHD along with a prescription for Adderall, but the TUE filed by the player needs the approval for football’s independent administrator.

From the Dayton Daily News:

Ohio lawmakers outlawed bath salts and other dangerous synthetic drugs last year, but clever chemists are finding ways to circumvent the law by creating new compounds, said Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine at a press conference on Wednesday.

DeWine is urging lawmakers to pass Ohio Substitute House Bill 334, because he said it contains a provision that could stop designer-drug makers from easily skirting the law. DeWine said authorities are currently unable to prosecute some drug cases, because the substances contain chemical compounds that are not subject to the ban.

Ohio House Bill 64, which became law in October 2011, banned the sale, manufacturing, distribution and possession of bath salts and other synthetic drugs. Lawmakers said the legislation was written in such a way as to prevent synthetic-drug manufacturers from simply “tweaking” their products to get around the ban.

But officials said chemists continue to produce substances that are not prohibited under current law. DeWine said H.B. 334 will change the law to cover the newer chemicals, which are sold at some corner stores, small shops and online.

DeWine also vowed to crack down on the sale, use and distribution of these drugs through civil and criminal measures. He said businesses that sell these drugs may face closure or lawsuits. He said distributors and manufacturers will be prosecuted. He also said law officers will receive training on how to investigate and prosecute these cases.

From Fox News:

Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize recreational use of marijuana Tuesday night, setting up a battle between the states and the federal government, which prohibits use of the drug.

The Colorado measure has sparked a national debate about marijuana policy, with supporters pushing for the federal government to end marijuana prohibition nationwide. The Colorado measure states adults over 21 can possess up to 1 ounce of marijuana, or six marijuana plants, for personal use. Opponents have said it will make the state a haven for drug tourists.

The measure in Washington State, Initiative 502, will legalize and regulate the production, possession and distribution of marijuana for residents age 21 and older.

The new law will impose a 25 percent tax rate on marijuana when the grower sells it to the processor, when the processor sells it to the retailer and when the retailer sells it to the customer. The measure could bring in $500 million, a figure analysts dispute.

Voters in Oregon, where the pro-marijuana advocates were less organized and poorly funded, defeated a ballot measure that would have allowed the commercial growth and sale of marijuana to adults. Known as Measure 80, it would have legalized pot through state-licensed stores, allowed unlicensed growth and use of marijuana by adults and prohibit restrictions on pot.

In Arkansas, voters rejected a measure legalizing medical marijuana, while in Massachusetts, voters supported a similar measure.