As the Lubbock Police Homeless Outreach Team approaches the one-year anniversary since the launch of their team they’ve identified one drug that is prevalent throughout Lubbock’s homeless population: synthetic marijuana.
“When we first started, we knew there had been synthetic problems within the city or we caught people with synthetic, but we didn’t really notice [how much] until we started working the ground with these individuals,” said Sergeant Steven Bergen of the HOT unit. “We would find individuals passed out in parks roadways– you name it– still with the substances in their hand or just the packages laying beside them.”
Synthetic marijuana is an illegal drug made from a plant based substance covered in a mix of chemicals that produce a high for users.
“Just like any narcotic, it’s extremely dangerous. The packages clearly state on them not for human consumption, but there’s no regulation on them,” Bergen said. “Businesses are able to sell them citing that they are incense and people are able to purchase them for that reason, but the chemicals in them are extremely harmful. We have several instances of individuals who’ve gone into cardiac arrest for just taking one hit of the substance.”
Bergen explained that as the HOT Unit has forged relationships with Lubbock’s homeless, many homeless individuals have been honest with officers about their use of synthetic marijuana and where they get it. He added that synthetic marijuana is the most popular drug for the homeless people his team works with.
Bergen explained that the information his team learned working with the homeless led them to conduct a raid alongside the Lubbock County District Attorney’s office on January 6 at the “Another Tobacco Road” smoke shop on Avenue Q. Several bags of Synthetic Marijuana were seized that day. While the smoke shop was back open the following week, the investigation continues into what may have been sold there.
“At that time we had enough probable cause to make a search,” Bergen explained. “So what we’re going to do is we’re going to examine the evidence we have, so if a charge could be brought forward with the laws that are in the books, then we’ll move forward with that.”
Mandi Say, Narcotics Chief with the Lubbock County District Attorney’s Office, said that for these types of raids to happen, law enforcement has to collect enough evidence to have probable cause.
“On drug cases, its usually happens when you’ve had buys– someone who goes down and buys that drug for you in an undercover capacity,” she said speaking generally about drug raids. Synthetic marijuana in those stores is often hidden, Say explained
“With smoke shops, a lot of times they know who their customers are, kind of like a specialty store,” she explained. This makes raids challenging because many store owners won’t sell to undercover buyers they don’t recognize.
Mandi agreed that the homeless community is a “huge part” of the clientele of businesses and individuals selling synthetic marijuana in Lubbock.
Vern Pharr,RN Director of Surgical/Anesthesia Services at University Medical Center, works with UMC NEIDS (Nurses Educating on Illegal Drugs & Synthetics) and also sees synthetic marijuana harming people all across Lubbock. Pharr works with NEIDS to speak all over Texas about the medical consequences of the drug. Pharr said that in his work, he has seen very little change in the numbers of people being admitted to the hospital for synthetic related medical problems since the Texas laws banning and further penalizing the drug went into effect in 2015.
UMC NEIDS estimates that UMC sees five to eight patients a day with some type of symptoms related to synthetic marijuana, ranging from very minor to life threatening. Pharr added that those are just the numbers at UMC, and that even more individuals are admitted to hospitals when you consider other hospitals in the area.
“You can die from this from the first time or the 100th time, it doesn’t matter,” Pharr said. “It can be as minimal as nausea or vomiting, it can be as people having seizures, chest pain, or breathing problems. They’ll start having mental changes to the point of unconsciousness, they’ll be looking at you like they’re looking a thousand miles away.”
Though the drug is commonly referred to as synthetic marijuana, Pharr explains that synthetic materials are nothing like actual marijuana.
“All these chemicals [in synthetic] are poison, nothing is natural about it at all,” Pharr said. “All these chemicals are very harmful to the body in any fashion and they’re dumping several together to make this drug.”
He said that the drug makers have been known to combine chemicals like paint thinner, acetone, and drain cleaning fluid in making synthetics. Pharr added that it is difficult for medical providers to treat symptoms from synthetic pot because there can be a huge variance in the impacts between one package of the drug and another.
“If we get patients who are thrashing uncontrollably and not focusing, a lot of times they deteriorate until they go into cardiac arrest, and very few times after that are we able to resuscitate them,” he said.
One of the aspects of synthetic marijuana that concerns Pharr most is that the drug can prevent users from working or functioning normally, which he sees as a cost to the community.
“It’s a public health crisis, these numbers are growing every single day,” he said.
Back at the Lubbock Police Department, while Sgt. Bergen While Bergen works with the homeless, he was adamant that anyone can get addicted to synthetic marijuana.
He hopes that getting information to the public about the damage that synthetic marijuana can cause will make the community more aware of the drug. Bergen also hopes that these messages may encourage stores and individuals to stop selling it.
“We want them to succeed in life, there are a lot of them that have an addiction and they want to get out of that, get a job and be a productive member of that community,” he said. “So that’s ultimately our end goal: helping people get to where they’d like to be.”
