Valley cops learn about popular synthetic drugs at workshop

WASILLA — A Mat-Su Borough medic reported a patient wandering through a neighborhood, naked, banging on doors, thinking he was God.

Wasilla Police Department encountered a gentleman running with his young child naked down Crusey Street.

Palmer police say they’ve had regular calls from a man worried that shadowy forces are out to get him. People are jumping from roof to roof in pursuit of him.

“This is what we’re dealing with daily,” said Officer Donna Anthony.

The common thread in all of these cases is an increasingly popular, and in some cases entirely legal, set of synthetic drugs. These new synthetic drugs can simulate the effects of everything from marijuana to cocaine to hallucinogenic mushrooms to methamphetamines.

Jennifer Messick, a traffic safety prosecutor with the Anchorage Municipal Prosecutor’s Office, gave a presentation to a crowd of mostly emergency responders Tuesday outlining what the drugs are, how they’re made and what law enforcement can do to handle them.

With so many horror stories — and more from out of state that involve homicide, suicide and even a few fatal overdoses with bizarre symptoms — one wonders why anyone would mess with these kinds of drugs. But Messick pointed out that those stories are the worst of the worst. Most users don’t have trouble with the stuff.

“It’s not always a bad trip,” she said to her audience of first responders. “But, if you’re involved, it probably is.”

In short — nobody’s going to call the cops when they’ve had a good experience getting high.

The drugs are sold in a variety of packaging. The synthetic marijuana — products labeled things like Spice or K2 — are sold most commonly as incense. The raw form of the drug is actually a powder manufacturers dissolve in acetone and spray on some kind of plant matter. The result is a product that more closely resembles marijuana and can be smoked.

Those packets of “incense” are clearly labeled as “unfit for human consumption.” Messick said that if it was marketed as something a person was to ingest, the FDA would have to approve it. Selling it as incense gets around that.

This category is the one most in the room had experience with. The federal government has listed spice and K2 as controlled substances. State lawmakers in Juneau outlawed it last winter.

Those synthetic marijuana compounds are the only ones Messick talked about that have received that kind of treatment from the state. But lawmakers have already started making moves to ban another set of drugs sold as bath salts that are, to judge by the reaction in the room Tuesday, likely the second most common in Alaska of the list Messick described.

The “bath salts” simulate drugs like methampethamine or cocaine. Anchorage Sen. Kevin Meyer has pre-field a bill outlawing them that should be coming up in Juneau in the upcoming 2012 legislative session.

The nudity seemed to mostly come up with this class of drugs. Messick shared a story from Anchorage of yet another naked suspect wearing nothing but a sock.

“Yes, it was on his foot,” she said.

Nudity denotes a state medical professionals refer to as “excited delirium.” Messick said that when officers and medics encounter this they need to be wary, because when a suspect freaks out he or she can often turn violent.

“When you go to a call and someone is acting very, very crazy and he doesn’t have any clothes on that should be ringing a bell,” she said.

When things go wrong with bath salts, one of the symptoms is usually a wildly increased body temperature.

“What they’re finding is they’re basically burning up,” Messick said.

Other products are sold as “room freshener” and some as “plant food.”

In a lot of cases, the federal government has outlawed the drugs. State laws are trying to catch up.

Except for Spice and K2, Alaska doesn’t have an analogous state law, which means that if the FBI and federal prosecutors were busting low-level users in Alaska there could be jail time attached to possessing the drugs.

Of course, the FBI is not doing that.

But since the drugs are listed as controlled substances, if a person is using one or the other of them and driving, state driving under the influence laws can come into play.

But the drug manufacturers are smart and know that changing just one little piece of the molecule of the drug’s active ingredient — making what is known in chemistry as an analogue or a homologue — is enough in most cases to avoid those laws. Lawmakers are wary of passing laws outlawing all analogues and homologues for fear of running into constitutional questions if the law is deemed too broad.

Sgt. Rob Langendorfer with the Mat-Su Narcotics Team said at Tuesday’s meeting that his guys have even found packages of the drugs with stickers on them proclaiming they do not contain any of the illegal compounds.

Whether that’s false advertising is a question it would take chemists at an out of state laboratory to answer.

All of this leads to a pretty confusing set of circumstances for cops walking the beat.

Anthony, the Palmer cop who talked about dealing daily with a paranoid delusional man using synthetic drugs, asked what she should do. Without criminal charges, it’s essentially a medical problem.

“We do what we can to help them but the hospital just releases them again,” Anthony said.

“Your ER, all they’re going to do is stabilize them and kick them to the curb,” Messick said, suggesting that Anthony try some kind of non-criminal holding cell at the jail. This type of thing is more commonly known as a drunk-tank or sleep-off room.

“We’ve done that and then three or four hours later they’re climbing the walls and they’re pepper spraying them in the jail.”

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