From NJ.com:

New Jersey’s recent battle with designer drugs has been a game of cat and-mouse.

Last year the state banned methamphetamine-like powders known as "bath salts."

But users moved to a similar, still-legal drug called "2CE."

And when chemicals used to make synthetic marijuana were banned, dealers found new ways to create the substances and sidestep the law.

Faced with a evolving problem that many are struggling to understand, Attorney General Jeff Chiesa today announced what he described as a sweeping solution to the designer drug problem:

Ban first. Ask questions later.

Under the new ban, Chiesa said, any chemicals that mimic the effects of marijuana are now illegal in New Jersey, according to an emergency order issued today by the state Division of Consumer Affairs.

The ban lists 10 classes of chemicals, outlawing hundreds of compounds that could be used to create synthetic marijuanas.

He said it also bars the sale of any substances that might be used to create the drug in the future, a provision to illegalize compounds not specified in the ban. No chemicals listed in the ban are used in other products, he said.

From WDTV.com:

From Radar Online.com:

Demi Moore’s frantic 9-1-1 phone call has shed more light on the night she had a seizure and was rushed to the hospital, and it may have also revealed the substance that she was smoking.

As RadarOnline.com previously reported, a friend of Moore’s can be heard on the call explaining to the operator: “She smoked something, it’s not marijuana, it’s similar to incense. She seems to be having convulsions.”

A likely possibility is that Demi was smoking K2 Spice, a “currently legal herbal incense product spiked with powerful designer drugs” that don't show up in tests, according to WebMD.

RadarOnline.com spoke with addictions specialist Dr. Phil Dembo, who said judging by the description on the 911 call, he believes Moore was smoking K2 Spice, which is currently legal in the U.S. but under investigation by the Drug Enforcement Agency.

Dr. Dembo said Demi’s convulsions could have been a result of smoking the substance.

From WTAE.com (Pittsburgh):

A 13-year-old boy who ended up in the hospital after smoking a synthetic form of marijuana has died, a month after receiving a double-lung transplant.

Brandon Rice injured his lungs in August after smoking a substance known as K2.

Shortly after smoking the drug, the teen developed nausea, a full body rash, headaches and high fever. His father said the substance caused a chemical burn in his son’s lungs.

The teen received a double-lung transplant on Sept. 28. His aunt said his prognosis was so good that the family had begun sending out emails to help raise funds for transplants.

But less than 15 minutes after they sent the e-mails, Brandon Rice passed away.

Rice’s family said an infection from the transplant likely took his life.

Rice's parents said they want other teens to know just how dangerous synthetic drugs can be.

From IndependentMail.com:

Anderson University basketball player Lamar Jack died after ingesting a chemical that is a key ingredient in synthetic marijuana, the county corner said Saturday.

Lab testing and analysis revealed that Jack had the chemical JWH-018 in his body when he collapsed during a preseason warm-up with his team on Sept. 30. Just days later, on Oct. 4, Jack died. He was 19.

On the basis of an autopsy and the toxicology test results, Shore is ruling Jack’s death accidental — caused by “acute drug toxicity with excited delirium that led to multiple organ failure.”

The chemical found in Jack’s body is used to make fake pot, a classification of substances that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration calls synthetic cannabanoids.

From The Juvenile Justice Information Exchange:

Three Louisiana State University football players have been placed on suspension after testing positive for synthetic marijuana, a source told the New Orleans Times Picayune.

Synthetic marijuana use has been on the rise among athletes in recent years, according to a report by Sportsology.com, due to the absence of THC and the player’s ability to pass a drug test after use. But both law enforcement authorities and drug test technologies have been adjusting to the trend.

As JJIE reported, in November 2010 the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) added five variations of synthetic marijuana to the official list of illicit drugs, placing a ban on the drug nationally. While the DEA effectively banned what officials considered the five most dangerous compounds, there are alternatives. Similar compounds that are still legal produce comparable effects, and manufacturers wasted no time in making the switch.

Many states, including Louisiana, have taken up more extensive bans on the substance.

When it comes to college football, however, synthetic marijuana -– also known as Spice, K2 and Black Mamba -– is already on the National College Athletic Association’s banned substance list. Regardless of state or national law, players can still face suspension under the ban.

From TuscaloosaNews.com:

In the past few months, at least 15 young adults have sought emergency medical treatment at DCH Regional Medical Center with the same symptoms: a racing heart and paranoia.

It sounds like a bad reaction to an illegal drug, but it's not. It's a bad reaction to a legal substance that can be purchased in gas stations and tobacco stores across Alabama.

Marketed as "incense," synthetic marijuana, sometimes called "fake pot," is a herbal product that has been treated with chemicals that mimic the effects of marijuana when smoked. Similar chemicals were made illegal in Alabama last year, but chemists can alter the compounds to remain within the constraints, but perhaps not the spirit, of the law.

Users report that the effects are similar, if not more intense, than the real thing. Some gas station and tobacco store owners in Tuscaloosa who declined to be interviewed on the record about synthetic marijuana said last week that the product is a top seller.

DCH spokesman Brad Fisher said that most of the people who have sought treatment are in their early 20s and are usually discharged within two or three hours, according to emergency room doctors.

Often called "Spice" or "K2," synthetic marijuana is cheaper, easier to obtain and doesn't show up on drug tests. There's no age limit to purchase the product, which is often labeled "not for human consumption."

Police say that it's difficult to enforce the ban on the chemicals that were outlawed last year because they have no way to (field) test the product.

The Regional Poison Control Center at Children's Hospital of Alabama reports receiving 67 calls from people who have smoked synthetic pot since October 2010, according to the Alabama Department of Public Health. Three were children between 6 and 12, 15 were teenagers and 22 were in their 20s. Of those, 76 percent were male. At least 56 were treated for toxic exposure in hospital emergency rooms. According to the American Association of Poison Control Centers, more than 6,700 calls were made to poison control centers nationally in 2010 and in the first seven months of 2011 about synthetic marijuana. 

From the Star Tribune:

Every morning, dozens of customers line up outside the doors of Last Place on Earth so they can buy fake pot and other synthetic drugs as soon as the store opens at 10 a.m.

They are drawn to this old brick building because they know the head shop is one of the last places in Minnesota that openly sells the sometimes deadly substances despite a July 1 ban on synthetic drugs.

Some come from the Twin Cities, according to owner Jim Carlson. Others travel even farther. On Friday, a trucker from Grand Rapids, Minn., said he started making the 80-mile drive to Carlson's store every three weeks because his neighborhood smoke shop stopped selling "herbal incense."

Duluth resident Heidi Middleton, who was first in line, said she comes almost every day. "If I don't have weed in my system, I go into convulsions and throw up," said Middleton, 38. "It mellows me out."

Any day now, Carlson predicts, police will raid the shop he's owned for 29 years and arrest him. But every day that doesn't happen puts another $16,000 or so in his till, Carlson estimates. That means the small, crowded shop is hauling in almost $6 million a year from synthetic marijuana and stimulants.

"Our sales are just insane," Carlson recently told the Star Tribune. "If anything it's gotten stronger with a lot of my competition getting out of it, nervous, not knowing what's going on."

Local officials, who have tried in vain for years to force Carlson to stop selling drug-related merchandise, think the retailer has gone way too far this time.

"He flaunts and he taunts, and I think it's absolutely disgusting how you can sell a product to people that damages users and innocent bystanders," Duluth City Council Member Todd Fedora said.

Last year, Fedora spearheaded an effort to make Duluth the first city in the state to ban synthetic pot. But the city stopped trying to enforce the ordinance after Carlson threatened to hold the city responsible for his economic losses in a federal lawsuit that claimed the rule was unconstitutionally broad.

Duluth Police Chief Gordon Ramsay said Carlson is on his radar. "We're aware of the problem and are working on it," Ramsay told the Star Tribune Thursday.

Carlson, whose business has tripled since he started selling synthetic drugs two years ago, said he's willing to risk arrest for several reasons: The money is so good, and he believes banning drugs doesn't work and infringes on people's rights.

He also claims to have taken steps to make sure his products don't violate the state's new ban, though the results of a test conducted for the Star Tribune showed that some of his synthetic pot contained a chemical specifically outlawed in Minnesota. Carlson said his supplier made a mistake and has since switched to a legal formula.

"If I get busted, I would demand a jury trial," said Carlson, who complained Monday to the City Council that police were harassing customers in front of his store.

From Guardian News (UK):

New "legal highs" are being discovered at the rate of one a week, outstripping attempts to control their availability and exposing what some experts claim is the "ridiculous and irrational" government policy of prohibition.

Officials monitoring the European drugs market identified 20 new synthetic psychoactive substances in the first four months of this year, according to Paolo Deluca, co-principal investigator at the Psychonaut Research Project, an EU-funded organisation based at King's College London, which studies trends in drug use. He said officials at the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), an early-warning unit, had detected 20 new substances for sale by May this year. In 2010 the agency had noted 41 new psychoactive substances, a record number, many of which were synthetic cathinone derivatives that can imitate the effects of cocaine, ecstasy or amphetamines.

Deluca said that, given the plethora of new substances, the government's attempts to ban legal highs is not a "feasible" solution. "It's also becoming very difficult to know exactly how many new compounds there are, because you have all these brand names and when you test the batch they are different from the following one." The UK, according to his reasearch, remains Europe's largest market for legal highs and synthetic compounds.

The EMCDDA favours generic bans that would cover entire groups of structurally related synthetic compounds, or chemical families, therefore removing the need to ban individual substances as they appear on the market. Deluca said: "It is impossible to implement a ban for every single new compound."

From the StarTribune:

Designer drugs can be purchased easily online, leading users to believe they are safer than street drugs. But the chemicals can be unpredictable - and disastrous.

Past midnight, Kat Green arrived home from her police shift exhausted. Then her smartphone started ringing with urgent messages. Mass drug overdose. Party at a ranch house outside of town. On the way, more information trickled in: At least a half-dozen young adults sick, some near death.

Packaged and sold as innocuous products such as "herbal incense" and "bath salts," the drugs are touted by users as legal alternatives to marijuana, cocaine and other controlled substances that can bring stiff penalties and jail time in even small amounts.

Altogether, poison control centers have received more than 6,600 calls about designer synthetics this year, 10 times more than the first half of 2010. Synthetic drugs have been linked or suspected in more than 20 deaths nationally in the past year, while emergency rooms are treating more patients who have overdosed on sometimes tiny amounts of designer synthetics.

Merchants are introducing new products online, too. When the DEA temporarily banned five chemicals used to make synthetic marijuana early this year, retailers started promoting new mixtures they claimed were not covered by any bans.

The market is too lucrative to disappear. Herbal incense, sometimes called synthetic marijuana, accounted for nearly $5 billion in sales last year, according to an estimate from the Retail Compliance Association, a national retailers group that formed to challenge herbal incense bans.

The new drugs lack regulatory oversight and quality control. Users often rely on each others' Internet postings to find out how much they should take and what they could experience.

Many of the substances are so new to the market that they have little track record. What may give one user a euphoric high could permanently injure someone else. Erratic labeling means buyers sometimes wind up with vastly different chemicals than the ones they ordered.

More than a week before the deadly party, college student Cody Weddle visited a little-known chemical website and placed an order, court documents allege. He and others had researched 2C-E, an investigator said. Internet posts describe it as a sensory-enhancing psychedelic similar to LSD. A user nicknamed "Easy Rider" told Web readers about her "joyful night" on 2C-E, which made her feel "very warm and happy" and "more in control of myself than the drunk people around me."

Around midnight, less than an hour after swallowing the drugged water, some at the party started wondering what was wrong with their batch. Instead of feeling great, many felt nauseated.

Stacy Jewell lay sick in a bedroom. Others threw up on the lawn and in the living room. Everyone dripped with sweat.

At age 22, Stacy Jewell -- who in recent years had tried to talk others out of doing drugs -- died after a drug overdose.

After a week of waiting, Oklahoma law dictated Andrew Akerman's life support be turned off.

Preliminary tests later revealed that the powder delivered to rural Oklahoma wasn't 2C-E at all, but a drug called Bromo-DragonFLY -- a chemical that some websites warn is even more dangerous.

The man accused of placing the Internet order sits in jail charged with murder -- a charge that has drawn mixed feelings in town. Some residents think it is too harsh, that Weddle didn't intend to hurt anyone and those at the party freely chose to take the drug. Authorities continue to investigate others who were at the party.