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Marine’s spice use almost killed him, dad says
The father of a Camp Pendleton-based Marine says smoking “spice” sent his son to the ER, and nearly to the grave. “If we had not discovered our son was using it, he would have eventually died,” said Bill Brown, a former Marine corporal who served in the 1980s. Brown declined to name his son for fear punitive action would be taken, but said he is a lance corporal. He added that if his son ever was caught smoking spice again, he’d turn the Marine in himself. At first, the cause of the young man’s deteriorating health was a mystery. In a six-month period, the Marine lost 20 to 25 pounds, couldn’t keep food down and made several trips to the emergency room. Doctors, confounded by his symptoms, diagnosed him with severe gastritis and anxiety attacks. On Aug. 1, he suffered the last in a string of attacks that landed him in the hospital. That day, Brown’s niece told him she thought the Marine had been smoking marijuana the night before. Brown searched his son’s bags and came across a substance in a small packet labeled “Armageddon.” “The stuff looked like pot, but it said, ‘not for human consumption,’” Brown said. “I was horrified. I went online to try and look this stuff up, and that was the first I heard of spice.” Armageddon is among the many brands of chemically treated herbal blends, commonly referred to as spice. When confronted, the son said he had been smoking Armageddon for about eight months and defended his drug use, claiming the product was natural and legal. After an intervention that included his family and civilian and Marine friends, he promised never to use it again. “I just told him this stuff is killing you,” Brown said. “The doctor said there have been anxiety attacks so bad that people can’t breathe. They don’t get enough oxygen to their brain and they get swelling.” “I told him if he had another outbreak, I’d know why and I’d go straight to his command,” Brown said. A month since his last attack, Brown’s son is recovering weight, seems more alert, and is smiling again, but his father worries other Marines might not be so lucky. For that reason, he hopes to see more educational outreach and a Corps-wide ban on the drug that would remove all ambiguity. “I can’t tell you how big of a problem this is at Camp Pendleton. I can’t tell you how many Marines are doing this,” Brown said, adding that his son learned about spice from another junior Marine. — James K. Sanborn
Marines across the Corps are getting high on unregulated, legally obtained and potentially deadly drugs that mimic the effects of marijuana but cannot be detected by standard screening methods.
Having seen only limited success from a series of localized bans on substances marketed as Spice, Armageddon and K2, among several others, Marine officials are now preparing to tackle the problem from the top, saying a Corps-wide crackdown is imminent.
“The commandant is well aware of the spice issue and the hazard it represents to the health of our Marines,” said Maj. Joe Plenzler, a spokesman for Gen. James T. Conway. “He has discussed the issue with his senior commanders and is currently working through the legal, policy and communications issues.”
The chemical blends used to make spice and other designer drugs typically include various combinations of more than 10 synthetic cannabinoids, man-made versions of the active ingredient found in marijuana. They don’t register on urinalysis screens because their chemical makeup doesn’t match that of the drugs such tests are designed to detect, presenting a significant challenge to any initiative aimed at snuffing spice use among Marines.
Like marijuana, spice is smoked, often in pipes or joints. Users describe its effects as ranging from a mild marijuanalike euphoria that lasts a few hours to intense, hallucinogenic, or even scary trips lasting well into the next day. That is a product of the blends’ inconsistent manufacturing process. Different batches can contain varying amounts of different chemicals, some of which are hundreds of times more potent than the active ingredient in marijuana.
It’s unclear how many Marines consume synthetic cannabinoids, but junior troops on the East and West coasts say their popularity is widespread. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service doesn’t maintain statistics on spice-related violations, although the surge in use has prompted the agency to step up work with commands across the globe to enforce their anti-spice regulations, said Ed Buice, an NCIS spokesman.
It seems to be most popular among young people and those who are worried about regular drug tests, said a researcher at the National Institutes of Health. “It’s anecdotal, but … a lot of police, firemen and military consume it,” said Dr. Marilyn A. Huestis. “But there is still no good epidemiological data to track that.”
Increasingly, health experts such as Huestis warn that smoking spice comes with serious health risks. A study produced last year by the European Union suggests the drug has potential to be highly addictive. Even though the products are marketed as marijuana alternatives, doctors say the chemicals used to make them can be carcinogenic and now account for an alarming number of emergency room visits.
Many emergency room patients admitted for synthetic cannabinoid intoxication exhibit life-threatening symptoms, said Dr. Christopher Rosenbaum, a toxicologist and instructor of emergency medicine at the University of Massachusetts.
“Agitation, anxiety, vomiting, some seizures — these are things we are seeing,” he said. “Some patients are so agitated they have to be sedated multiple times.”
Rosenbaum has studied the drugs’ growing popularity in the Midwest, where people have been admitted to hospitals with racing heart rates and spikes in blood pressure after consuming synthetic cannabinoids. In recent months, media outlets across the U.S. have reported on deaths that doctors have linked to Spice and K2.
In August, Dominique Darrell Tate, 19, from Dallas, died in the ER at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas after smoking K2. A coroner’s toxicology report is pending, but doctors suspect K2 is to blame, WFAA-TV reported.
In Iowa, K2 is suspected in three deaths, including that of a teenager who suffered a severe anxiety attack after smoking it and later shot himself. Rosenbaum, the toxicologist, is convinced K2 triggered the psychotic episode that lead to the teen’s suicide.
Skirting the law
Though popular in Europe since at least 2004, spice has caught U.S. authorities off guard. It isn’t yet tracked in national drug abuse or emergency room databases, according to Huestis, and there are no federal laws regulating most of the substances. To stem the drugs’ rising popularity, some states and local governments have taken their own actions to ban them.
Federal regulations will likely catch up with spice, but that could take two or more years, said Gary Boggs, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration’s diversion department. The DEA now lists five synthetic cannabinoids as “drugs of concern.” Just one, HU-210, is illegal in the U.S., but DEA scientists are investigating the others to determine how they affect a person’s mind and body.
Marine leaders have been moving against the drugs since at least 2008, when they were banned by Marine Corps Bases Japan. Since then, other commands have issued similar orders, including one in January from Marine Corps Forces Command that applies to Marines at major East Coast installations. Marine Forces Pacific also has a spice ban on its books.
More recently, officials at Camp Lejeune, N.C., asked local business owners to stop selling spice and similar products to Marines. In March, Col. R.P. Flatau Jr., then the base’s commanding officer, sent a letter to Jacksonville-area smoke shops and referred to the use of Spice and similar drugs as “a disturbing trend seriously undermining the readiness of our young service members.”
So far, none of the smoke shops selling spice are listed on the base’s off-limits list, but a base spokesman said those lists are constantly revised and did not rule out the possibility that some could be added.
These piecemeal policies mean that most Marines are explicitly prohibited from taking the drug, but some commands, such as Marine Forces Europe, still lack spice-specific orders. MARFOREUR, based in Böblingen, Germany, never issued a policy because German law has banned spice since 2009, a command spokesman said. But because there are many types of synthetic cannabinoids, some Marines may still skirt German law, which bans only five specific chemicals.
It’s too confusing, some say. There is a general lack of understanding about the rules among Marines, prompting critics to say the Corps needs to set clear, all-encompassing guidelines and do a better job reaching out to Marines and educating them.
Busted in the barracks
Among those critics is former Pfc. Dijon Lawless, 20, who was busted for smoking Spice in his barracks room at Camp Lejeune last December. Lawless, who was booted from the Corps in March, said he didn’t know Spice was banned when he and another Marine decided to smoke it.
“I had no clue what it was,” said Lawless, who lives in Newport News, Va. “I had never heard of it until then.”
Lawless and his buddy, another private first class who also was kicked out of the Corps, learned about Spice from a corporal at the Marine Corps Combat Support Service School aboard Camp Johnson, he said. They bought it out in town and thought they were OK to smoke it because the substance is legal for civilians.
Marine officials don’t buy that defense, saying an existing Secretary of the Navy instruction bars anyone within the Navy Department from taking substances to get high — even if they are legal.
After Lawless was caught Dec. 19, the day before he was scheduled to take leave for the Christmas holiday, he thought he’d receive nonjudicial punishment for smoking in his room — not for consuming drugs. He was put into isolation for three days and eventually expelled.
Both Marines spent a month and a half in the brig and were charged with violating Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, failure to obey an order or regulation. Each accepted separation in lieu of going to court-martial, Lawless said. That could have put the equivalent of a felony conviction on each of their records. Lawless received an other than honorable discharge.
The Marine Corps was unnecessarily harsh, Lawless said, especially because there wasn’t a clear-cut policy at the base until weeks after he was busted. He is working with an attorney to change his re-enlistment code, a code that determines a prior service member’s eligibility to go Navy.
‘Russian roulette’
Lawless didn’t experience any ill effects from smoking Spice, the effects of which lasted a few hours, he said. The store employee who sold it to him, though, pitched a very specific line of Spice, telling Lawless he should trust only that brand.
Therein lies another of spice’s dangers: The combination of chemicals used to make it can vary from batch to batch, even from the same brand, meaning an overdose or “bad trip” is an ever present danger.
Spice producers skirt scrutiny by the federal Food and Drug Administration by selling their products as incense and labeling them as, “Not for human consumption.” For drug users, that means they have no idea what they are ingesting.
“You can’t paint spice with a broad brush,” said Boggs, with the DEA. “There are different chemicals depending on the product line. … What is on spice today might not be what is on spice tomorrow. … You are playing Russian roulette.”
Authorities have trouble pinning down where spice is produced. Some of it may originate in Europe or China. Attempts to contact one distributor of synthetic cannabinoid incense, K2Incense.org, were unsuccessful, as were attempts to reach the manufacturer. A note on K2’s website reads “the real, original and sole K2 Manufacturer does not deal directly with anyone, except the master distributors. Due to contractual agreement between the Master K2 Distributor and the K2 Manufacturer, the location and company name of the K2 Manufacturer is kept strictly confidential.”
“Nobody is really sure where it is coming from,” said Huestis, of the National Institute of Health. “It can be hundreds of times more potent than cannabis. I think it is a big concern because we know that cannibis affects the area of the brain that executes planning, decision making and response time. Now you take a drug 100 times more potent. It is obviously going to affect your ability to perform.”
The creator of one of the synthetic cannabinoids found in spice blends stressed that the chemical he created was never designed for human use. That means it could cause long-term psychological, cognitive or physical damage.
“Anybody that uses it is an idiot,” said John W. Huffman, a research professor at Clemson University who developed JWH-133, which he formulated in 1993 to study the way marijuana’s active ingredient, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, interacts with human tissue. He hoped his research would point to new medicines for nausea and glaucoma, but never tested it on people or primates.
He suspects somebody likely recreated the chemical after it was published in academic literature in 1998. Since then, his, and many other synthetic cannabinoids have gained traction among recreational drug users. But just because they are widely available and don’t register on drug tests doesn’t mean they can’t derail a military career in a heartbeat.
For Lawless, it only took once.
“I wanted to be a Marine since I was 7 years old,” he said. “Before I was even out of high school, I signed my poolee forms and I signed papers to join as soon as I was 18.”
His first experience with spice was also his last, and it got him booted from the Corps he loved.
Thinking back, while Lawless is ticked off about the way he was treated, he has some advice for Marines who smoke spice or have considered doing so.
“I’d just say stay clear of this stuff because of how much trouble it got me in,” he said.
