Mike is a forklift operator from downstate Illinois, whose name has been changed to protect his privacy. In the early 2010s, while living in Decatur, Mike was able to work reliably, though he was required to undergo regular drug testing. For that reason he tried to limit his use of drugs he knew the company would check for, such as marijuana. He was glad, then, to hear about an alternative. Fake marijuana was not only cheap and available legally in stores, it also didn’t show up on drug screenings. The drug was so new—and there were so many different strains—that tests hadn’t been formulated for it yet. If one was on the job, on parole, or even just had untrusting parents who administered tests, it was perfect. “That’s why most people start smoking it,” Mike said. “Because it’s untraceable.”
Whenever he got the urge—which was increasingly often—he would head down to the corner market and buy a gram bag for fifteen bucks. Sometimes he would get lucky, and a ten-gram bag would be on sale for only twenty-five dollars.
Some people knew it as Spice, but Mike called it K2. These were just two of the many brand names slapped on the multicolored, glossy packets containing the drug, including King Kong, Scooby Snacks, and Laugh Out Loud. One was called Power Diesel, a nod to the marijuana strain known as Sour Diesel. Sometimes it was labeled “potpourri” or “incense.” Also deceptive were the notes on all packages warning that their ingredients were “not for human consumption.”
In superficial ways the fake blends—more precisely called synthetic cannabinoids—were like regular marijuana. Mike would smoke them out of a glass pipe or even roll them up in a joint. But that’s where the similarities ended. “It would get you extremely high,” Mike said. “The taste, the effect, the high—everything’s different.” It wasn’t a mellow, relaxing high; it made his heart race. Sometimes it was enjoyable, but sometimes it made him throw up or pass out. Unlike marijuana, K2 is not a plant. Rather, it’s a chemical compound that is usually dissolved in a solvent (often acetone) and then sprayed onto dried plant leaves so it resembles marijuana. Furthermore, though K2 was then sold in sealed, professional-looking packages, there was no quality control. Some packets were mild, with little effect at all. Others were extremely potent.
There was a lot of overlap, Mike said, with the heroin community. People in a state of heroin withdrawal would smoke some K2 because it might make them pass out—temporarily freeing them from the physical agony of opiate withdrawal. Eventually, though, came the sickness. K2 withdrawal, he said, is “even worse” than fentanyl withdrawal, which he also experienced. “You puke constantly, every day. Your skin turns green. People was thinking I was dying.”
Mike went cold turkey, and it took him more than three full weeks to get well. It was a misery he wouldn’t wish on anyone. “Pure sickness,” he said.
Mike had never heard of John William Huffman, an organic-chemistry professor in the Deep South nearing retirement around the time Mike was getting hooked on fake marijuana. But Huffman helped set in motion the explosion of synthetic cannabinoids in the first place.
Born in 1932, Huffman grew up in the northern part of Illinois, in Evanston. He had a chemistry set full of compounds that would soon be removed from such products, including the ingredients for making gunpowder. His father was a doctor, and Huffman was expected to be one too, but as a premed student at Northwestern University he took a shine to organic chemistry, and his path changed. He got his PhD at Harvard in 1957 and, after a stint at Georgia Tech, became an organic-chemistry professor at Clemson University in South Carolina. In the late 1980s he received a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) for the synthesis of the psychoactive component of the khat plant, cathinone.
When this grant ended, Huffman sought additional funding from NIDA for the synthesis of THC carboxylic acid, which is produced in the body after one consumes marijuana. In 1990, a graduate student alerted him to some interesting compounds developed by the pharmaceutical company Sterling-Winthrop, which was hoping to create new nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, along the lines of aspirin or ibuprofen. And, indeed, Sterling Winthrop’s compounds had good analgesic, or pain-reducing, effects. But there was also something strange about them. They bound to a cannabinoid receptor. This was curious, because the compounds had a totally different structure than THC, the main psychoactive component of marijuana.
Sterling-Winthrop wasn’t interested in these compounds—the company wanted a pain reliever, not a wild-card drug associated with recreational chemicals—but Huffman was interested in why they interacted with the same receptor as THC. NIDA saw the potential research benefits in this pursuit (new medicines could potentially emerge) and agreed to fund Huffman’s project, giving his lab more than $2 million for research. Between the early 1990s and 2011, when Huffman retired, his Clemson lab made more than four hundred new synthetic-cannabinoid compounds, studying how they interacted with the cannabinoid receptors that are found in the central nervous system and the immune system. The goal was to understand the receptors better, to potentially help develop everything from pain-relief medicine to cancer treatments. “These receptors don’t exist so that people can smoke marijuana and get high,” Huffman said. “They play a role in regulating appetite, nausea, mood, pain and inflammation.”
“These compounds that Huffman made were pharmacological tools—tools we can use to understand what’s happening in the brain,” said Marilyn Huestis, senior investigator at NIDA. “He created an entire line of chemicals … that enlightened us so much.” Huffman said one of his compounds has shown potential, in mice, to battle skin cancer and brain tumors. Other scientists have also made progress; in 2018, for example, Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine researchers found 10 synthetic cannabinoids that stopped colorectal cancer cells from growing.
Huffman was far from the only scientist making synthetic-cannabinoid compounds. After cannabinoid receptors were first identified in 1988 by St. Louis University Medical School pharmacology professor Allyn Howlett and her graduate student William Devane, scientists rushed to try to develop new medicines, and much of this research was introduced into the public domain. But when these drugs were plucked from the scientific literature, manufactured, and sold as products like K2 and Spice, the work of Huffman, more than anyone else, was implicated, in large part because his compounds carried his initials: JWH.
His most famous creation, made in 1993, was called JWH-018—the eighteenth compound he developed in his series. Four years later it was described in a publication, and soon made the leap from the academic world into the recreational one.
Head shops and bodegas in Europe and North America in the late 2000s and early 2010s often offered synthetic cannabinoids for sale—not under the counter or in a back room but right on the shelves, with bar codes.
At first glance, they might have appeared to be herbal smoking blends, the kind head shops have always sold, which tend to be made of benign chemicals that don’t really produce a high. Since their chemical structures didn’t resemble THC, they weren’t subject to the Federal Analogue Act of 1986, which stipulates that, to be illegal, drugs have to be not only “substantially similar” to already banned drugs but also intended for human consumption—hence the “not intended for human consumption” warning on the cannabinoids’ packaging.
Nobody selling the packages had any idea what was in them. They could have contained JWH-018 or CP 47,497 (a synthetic cannabinoid originally developed by Pfizer) or any number of the hundreds of different varieties. Even today, synthetic cannabinoids remain the fastest growing class of drugs. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime identified more than two hundred different varieties by 2015, and since then the numbers have continued accelerating. Some are twice as potent as marijuana; some are one hundred times as potent or more. And since there is little formal testing, almost nobody knows how safe each blend is, not even the scientists who invented them, including Huffman.
THC “is not terribly potent,” Huffman said. But synthetic cannabinoids have no THC. The chemicals in synthetic cannabinoids and THC both bind to cannabinoid receptors but in different ways. THC is only a “partial agonist” of these receptors—meaning it doesn’t fully activate them. The synthetic cannabinoids, on the other hand, tend to be “full agonists,” making them supercharged and unpredictable. While marijuana works almost immediately, some synthetic versions take a while to kick in, instigating users to smoke more and then overdose.
“THC will lower your blood pressure,” Huffman said. “But these synthetic cannabinoids will increase your blood pressure, to the point where some of the young people who have taken it have had strokes.” In the early 2010s poison-control centers were flooded with calls, and stories of overdoses began to emerge, including, in January, 2012, one apparently suffered by actress Demi Moore. She was taken to a Los Angeles hospital after smoking what friends described, in a 911 call, as “not marijuana, it’s similar to incense.” They added that her body temperature rose dramatically, and she went into convulsions and nearly lost consciousness.
Moore made a full recovery, and a spate of local and federal laws took aim at the JWH drugs and others. In 2012, President Obama signed the Synthetic Drug Abuse Prevention Act, which outlawed twenty-six varieties of synthetic cannabinoids and cathinones. Owing to the speed of innovation in the drugs culture, however, the law “was obsolete before the ink of his signature dried,” in the words of Wired. “Drug formulations not covered by the law’s language, and almost certainly synthesized in direct response to legal pressure, are already on sale.”
In the ensuing years synthetic cannabinoids started disappearing from bodegas and head shops and were instead sold in traditional street deals. Along the way they became even more popular. In 2015 the DEA said that, among high school seniors, synthetic cannabinoids were the second-most-popular drug after marijuana. “I think if we talk to a lot of kids five, ten years from now and ask, ‘How did your drug use start?’ they might say K2,” said Courtney Pero, a narcotics sergeant in Plano, Texas. Now, synthetic cannabinoids are turning up in oils sold for vaporizers and e-cigarettes. One popular vaping liquid, CBD oil, is purported to have health benefits; it can be derived from both marijuana and hemp plants, but it’s not psychoactive. A November 2018 study by Virginia Commonwealth University researchers, however, showed that legally sold, hemp-derived CBD products from a company called Diamond CBD contained a synthetic cannabinoid called 5F-ADB, despite claims on its website that its oils are “100% natural.” Kevin Hagen, CEO of Diamond CBD’s publicly traded, Fort Lauderdale–based parent company, said the company did its own independent testing and did not find any synthetic cannabinoids, adding that their formulas had changed since the study was undertaken.
The American and European demand for synthetic cannabinoids set into motion a huge manufacturing industry, which sprouted up in China and, to a lesser extent, in India. The industry created millionaires who could hardly keep up with demand, and whom American law enforcement began targeting. One alleged kingpin was a Chinese national named Haijun Tian, who after arriving on a flight from China to Los Angeles International Airport on March 4, 2015, was arrested by agents from the DEA and the IRS’s Office of Criminal Investigation.
Trumpeting the news in a press release, the DEA called Tian “the highest-level synthetic designer drug trafficker apprehended to date in the United States.” Federal prosecutors charged him with importing a synthetic cannabinoid called AB-FUBINACA, and said his Chinese factory was making two tons of fake marijuana per month. They asked that he receive a seventeen-year sentence, but a judge gave him only thirty months. Ironically, Tian benefited because his manufacturing plant had exploded in 2013, in the midst of the American investigation against him. At this time the United States hadn’t yet banned AB-FUBINACA—which was patented by Pfizer in 2009 as a potential analgesic—and there was no evidence he synthesized it after the explosion, though he did admit to importing it.
The United States has had a difficult time prosecuting sellers of synthetic cannabinoids. Laws prohibiting the drugs began sprouting up early in the 2010s—not just federal laws but a patchwork of city and state laws—from New York City to Illinois and Texas. There are hundreds of different varieties of synthetic cannabinoids, and they don’t all have similar structures, making prosecution under the analogue act difficult. Further, many different players are involved in the process, from the synthesis to the packaging to the distribution. “It’s not like there’s one K2 distributor,” said Christopher Rosenbaum, University of Massachusetts assistant professor of toxicology. “Everybody is making their own stuff, calling it K2 and selling it, which is the most unnerving aspect.”
“It’s being shipped in raw form to [vendors] in Europe and North America, and there you have the second step of the manufacturing process, mixing, dissolving, and spraying the material on herbal matter,” said Martin Raithelhuber, an illicit-synthetic-drug expert with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. “Then they package and label it in a way that appeals to people in that country. And even then, maybe it’s shipped to another distributor who would offer it on an online platform.”
The raw compounds are easily available from Chinese or Indian manufacturers for as little as $1,000 a kilogram, and then vendors mix up the batches using techniques such as soaking dried plant leaves in kiddie pools full of the chemicals or combining them inside spinning cement mixers.
The profit margins are astronomical, but these crude techniques mean that some batches are much more potent than others and cause immediate overdoses. In March, 2016, in the Florida town of Clearwater, reports emerged of drugged-out citizens stumbling around or slumped over in parks. Police responded to dozens of calls involving people who had consumed what they called Spice. “The spike that we’re seeing and my personnel are dealing with on the road are unprecedented,” Clearwater policeman Eric Gandy told news station WFLA. “Looked like one of our zombie movies…. I had fifteen people walking around in various states of incapacitation.”
New York became a crisis zone as well, and over three days in July 2016 the city experienced a rash of 130 suspected K2 overdoses. Many victims were believed to have purchased their drugs at a deli located near the border of the Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick neighborhoods, an area of Brooklyn that some began referring to as “zombieland” because of all the synthetic-cannabinoid users staggering around or passed out. In September, an NYPD raid turned up more than thirty thousand packages of the drug at a storage facility rented by an employee of the deli. A subsequent New England Journal of Medicine report examined the drug that many of the victims had consumed. It was packaged under the over-the-top name “AK-47 24 Karat Gold,” and contained the synthetic cannabinoid known as AB-FUBINACA. This analogue, the report noted, was fifty times stronger than JWH-018.
During one August 2018 week more than one hundred people overdosed on synthetic cannabinoids in and around a New Haven, Connecticut, park. Some threw up or convulsed, while others collapsed. “Even while we were trying to return [emergency workers] to service, they were passing victims on the ground,” said fire chief John Alston. Compared to fentanyl, deaths are not as common with synthetic cannabinoids, and no deaths were reported in these incidents, though Washington, DC, saw at least a handful of synthetic-cannabinoid deaths in 2018, along with more than three thousand overdoses. The homeless are particularly at risk, because of K2’s inexpensive price, said a DC outreach worker. In late 2018 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a warning that some synthetic cannabinoids are tainted with the chemical brodifacoum, which is used in rat poison.
As all this was happening, from Demi Moore’s overdose to the “zombie” outbreaks in Florida and New York, John William Huffman was easing into retirement. He had worked in relative obscurity almost his entire career, until, in 2008, he learned that JWH-018 had been identified in a Spice packet that was being sold in Germany. It was the first recreational synthetic-cannabinoid strain to be pinpointed in that country and the first time Huffman heard about people smoking his creations. Initially, he was bemused. “Gee it took these people a long time to put one and two together,” he said.
For the first time in his career, the media sought Huffman out. Most reporters kept the focus on his science, but in 2010 a BBC radio host named John Humphrys aggressively questioned him. “Are you ashamed that you made it, now it has been banned?”
“Not at all,” answered Huffman.
He nonetheless admitted he had opened a “Pandora’s box” and lamented the destruction his creations and the other fake marijuana strains have caused. Even he didn’t understand synthetic cannabinoids’ effects on the body. Huffman remained unclear whether people die because they take too much, or if the drugs could be unsafe at any dosage.
Legalization of marijuana is the solution, he believes, so long as it’s sold only to adults and highly taxed. The research is still inconclusive whether or not full marijuana legalization would substantially reduce synthetic-cannabinoid consumption—though a 2011 study of twenty-five hundred users of both synthetic cannabinoids and marijuana found that 93 percent preferred traditional marijuana. An August 2016 report from the New York City Department of Health speculated that marijuana legalization could be a preferable alternative from a public-health perspective.
Huffman said that while much is still unknown about synthetic cannabinoids, they are, inherently, an extremely risky substitute for marijuana. “Synthetic cannabinoids do not belong to the same structural group as THC,” he said. “They are really dangerous compounds.”
People started using synthetic cannabinoids because they were cheap, potent, and didn’t show up on drug tests. But another dangerous new drug that gained traction around the same time—a psychedelic—was simply filling a hole in the marketplace.