Former synthetic pot user shares story

WASILLA — A year later, Jessica is still recovering from four months she describes as the worst in her life.

Jessica is not her real name. She agreed to share her story on the condition she remain unidentified. Her story involves drug use and she’s not sure she wants everyone to know the details of what she believes that drug did to her.

The drug in question is synthetic marijuana. Often referred to by two of its myriad brand names as Spice or K2, the drug is one of a category becoming increasingly common in the Mat-Su Valley. Sold as incense to get around federal rules regarding products meant to be ingested, the substances are relatively easy to obtain. The so-called designer drugs can simulate everything from ecstasy to cocaine to LSD. And the bulk of them are perfectly legal. Lawmakers at the state and federal levels are struggling to find ways to regulate them.

Jessica said she smoked the synthetic marijuana for a month in July 2010.

“I smoked it a lot, I’m not going to lie,” she said.

She said she was drawn to it mainly because her husband had gotten a job that required him to pass a drug test. Synthetic marijuana didn’t show up on a drug test. A lot of people she knows do the same thing, she said.

Though the kind she used has since been outlawed, at the time it was legal.

“Part of what attracted me to it was that it was legal,” she said.

She said she read the list of plants on the back and knew what most of them were from her time as a gardener. She didn’t know that the plants are just a base. The drug is manufactured by dissolving the laboratory produced, marijuana-simulating compounds in acetone and spraying that mixture on the benign shredded plant matter to produce a product that can be smoked.

Jessica said she and her husband smoked the drug for that month, then quit. She said she smoked pot in the past, but had never used other drugs.

“It was just really expensive,” she said of why she eventually gave up the synthetic pot.

After that month-long fling, everything was fine for the rest of the summer and into the fall. In October 2010, though, she started suffering from insomnia. Jessica said she would sleep for 15-minute intervals and only rarely. The sleeplessness began taking a toll and people started to notice.

“They said, ‘you look like a drug addict. You look like you’re strung out on something,’” Jessica said.

Soon she started suffering severe anxiety.

“I started seeing counselors immediately,” she said, adding she also talked to pastors. Jessica grew up going to church and remains a believer. “It was literally like I lost my mind.”

She said she started to get paranoid, thinking her family members were trying to kill her. That made for a difficult situation because none of those family members felt safe leaving her alone.

“I was just like a lost little kid,” she said.

After the paranoia and anxiety gave way to talk of suicide she was briefly admitted to a psychiatric emergency center. At some point, her family put in a call and her husband was sent home from work early. Then, after a sleepless night, things took a turn.

“In the morning when I woke up I was asking him to kill me,” she said.

That prompted another, much longer stint in an institution. She said the experience wasn’t exactly positive, but she’s grateful the center’s staff managed to keep her alive for those nine days. At one point, she became convinced everyone was abandoning the state of Alaska. She made sure not to be left alone in a room for fear of being locked in and abandoned.

Eventually, she was sent home with sleeping pills, anti-anxiety medications and anti-depressants. When she grew suicidal again she took them all at once in an attempt to take her own life.

“Nothing happened,” she said. “I thought that I was like demonically possessed.”

Jessica was up front in saying that no doctor during any of this had told her for sure the synthetic marijuana she smoked three months prior was to blame. One doctor later on said her suspicion might be correct and tossed out the term “drug-induced psychosis.”

But Jessica is sure the drugs were to blame for a few reasons. First is that her delusions match up with some she’s read in accounts of other psychotic patients sent over the edge by the same set of drugs. Second is that her husband got a milder form of the insomnia and anxiety at around the same time. Third, she really has no other explanation. While doctors didn’t connect the drugs as the cause of her symptoms, they also didn’t diagnose her. She said she’s never felt that way before or since. The drugs were the only thing she’d done differently around that time.

At any rate, after four months her symptoms just disappeared. She said that, in retrospect, the best anyone could have done would have been to lock her away until she returned to normal. But there was no way anyone could have known that at the time.

Though she hasn’t had trouble sleeping since and the anxiety left, the experience isn’t over yet. She still has nightmares about that time, and her medical bills are through the roof. It will be some time before she’s paid them off.

Talking to Jessica, it seemed clear she was worried others might make the same choice she did to experiment with synthetic marijuana. Though that particular brand has been outlawed, drug manufacturers know that changing one small part of the active molecule — the same process used to turn natural marijuana into the synthetic kind — makes a new, legal molecule. A trip the Frontiersman made to a local shop Friday confirmed that similar smokeable products, presumably lacking the compounds state lawmakers banned last year, are readily available at retail stores in the core area.

Jessica said she knows the vast majority of people who use these drugs won’t have the same experience she did. She knows many people who use them without a problem, but she still wants people to know how bad it can get.

“Those four months caused a lot of damage in my life,” she said. “I was so naïve. I was like, ‘It’s pot, what’s the big deal? It’s legal.’”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.