Double homicide and LE response

[Nephrology]

It doesn't have to be bath salts. 100% THC will achieve the same thing. THC extract, known as ear wax, is extracted from marijuana by boiling. The resultant paste is where the "ear wax" moniker comes from. Smoking it pure, or putting it into edibles like brownies, cookies, etc., is becoming very common. Ingest too much of it and you become a delusional paranoid psychotic. This is not your dad's marijuana, ala Cheech and Chong, that turns you into a apathetic couch potato. That stuff has, on average, five to seven percent THC content. That's why the last face eater only had THC in his system. Of course, the tree hugging tokers want to promote the mental illness angle of the situation. Heaven forbid the majic weed would do anything other than makes us love one another and cure every disease known to man. Politicians who push for marijuana legalisation still think of it as the weed they smoked in their college dorm, which it's far from these days.

If anything ever qualified for face shooting you think it would be face eating.

Respectfully, I am not so sure ... here in Colorado, most of the marijuana sold in dispensaries is between 17-24% THC by mass (as confirmed by mass spec) and many smoke it in large quantities. The highly potent THC extracts (known colloquially as "glass" or "shatter" or "dabs") are also for sale legally here as well and likewise are sold in large quantities on a daily basis. We also have marijuana edibles that provided standardized and regulated doses of THC and cannabinoids which are clearly marked; 10 milligrams is a standard dose and the amount recommended to tourists, but I've seen/heard of people eating >200mg in a sitting.

With that said, I've never seen marijuana in any of these forms cause anyone to become violent, ever, either through my preceptorship or just through living life in the Mile High City. We do get a decent amount of ER patients who come in because of weed.... usually because they are tourists or otherwise cannabis-naive and eat/smoke WAY too much. Usually one of 3 things happens:

1) They freak out and have a panic attack and win themselves some xanax and a healthy ER bill.
2) They have a syncopal episode (pass out) and/or vomit and sometimes hurt themselves in the process (fall and hit their head, etc)
3) They get behind the wheel of a car and do something stupid and come in with new best friends from the Denver Police Dept.

More or less in descending order of frequency.

However, one thing I have heard of - but never really seen or heard of in Colorado at least - are synthetic cannabis analogs (so-called "Spice" or "K2", among a million other names). These substances are usually some harmless plant matter that's been sprayed down with a liquid suspension of one of hundreds of possible laboratory synthesized cannabis analogs that have names like JWH-073, WIN 55,212-2, and CP 55,940, among others. These analogs are usually manufactured overseas in labs, put into a liquid suspension sprayed onto potpurri or whatever garbage smokable stuff manufacturers have on hand, and are sold in head shops under a lot of different names. They exist in a weird quasi-legal state and are very poorly regulated here in the US.

These substances have a much higher "affinity" for the cannabis receptors in the human body than regular THC. To use an analogy, if regular THC sticks to the cannabinoid receptor with the strength of a fridge magnet, these synthetic analogs would have the strength of an electromagnet used to lift and move cars. Because of this high affinity, they have lots of adverse effects, including inducing states of psychosis, causing seizures, strokes, vomiting, panic attacks, heart attacks, hypertensive crises, etc etc... they are in sum really terrible for you, and for sale at your local head shop in all 50 US states. Because they aren't really regulated because they aren't really illegal, the quantity and identity of the synthetic cannabinoid analogs in each bag of "Spice" or whatever varies from brand to brand and even from packet to packet within the same brand.

Here are a couple good articles couple articles from the UK perspective on synthetic cannabis analogs and a good rundown in Slate on the same topic.

Hope that was informative... sorry if it was too rambly or off topic.

[Trooper224]

Recent case from your own Rocky Mountain Higher State: A woman called 911 stating her husband was threatening to kill them all when, "all he'd done was smoke a joint." As it turns out, he'd smoked that joint, but he'd also eaten an entire THC laced cookie he'd bought from one of your completely safe and organic head shops. Now of course, he'd been told by the tree hugging hipster fuckwad who sold him the thing, that he should only eat an eighth of the cookie at a time for safety reasons. Rae Rae had gone home to the hood Colfax, smoked his joint then ate part of the cookie. He wasn't satisfied with the result so he ate the whole thing.

Denver Metro arrived on scene six minutes after the wife had called 911. Only problem was he'd shot her in the head five minutes after she made the call. THC was the only thing in his system.

[Nephrology]

Recent case from your own Rocky Mountain Higher State: A woman called 911 stating her husband was threatening to kill them all when, "all he'd done was smoke a joint." As it turns out, he'd smoked that joint, but he'd also eaten an entire THC laced cookie he'd bought from one of your completely safe and organic head shops. Now of course, he'd been told by the tree hugging hipster fuckwad who sold him the thing, that he should only eat an eighth of the cookie at a time for safety reasons. Rae Rae had gone home to the hood Colfax, smoked his joint then ate part of the cookie. He wasn't satisfied with the result so he ate the whole thing.

Denver Metro arrived on scene six minutes after the wife had called 911. Only problem was he'd shot her in the head five minutes after she made the call. THC was the only thing in his system.

That's interesting, and certainly not the norm from my experience, though I don't doubt for a minute that it occurred. I would be curious to know if he had any history of psychiatric illness and to generally know more about his demeanor and the history of his relationship with his wife for further context.. Good old fashioned regular THC + cannabinoids are known to induce psychosis in people who are either have a confirmed past medical history of schizophrenia, bipolar, etc. and its ability to do so seems to track with the potency of the cannabis product used.

Unfortunately like all this pot-related there really is very little well done research out there about it, so we're only left with anecdotes like yours and mine to piece together the truth.

[BehindBlueI's]

I think the formaldehyde bit is an urban legend... smoking dried formaledyde residue (or any similar non-polar solvent/fixative) would probably just give you a really irritated airway and maybe later on cancer. Doesn't have psychoactive properties I am aware of.

edit: in anatomy lab when I would get really, ah.... intimately acquainted ... with the deeper bits of my cadaver's thorax/viscera, or when I had to do a lot of blunt dissection of fat + muscle with my fingers, my fingers would very quickly get tingly and then go totally numb. It was a little concerning. I started doubling up on gloves and eventually buying the expensive 0.7mm ones but even that didn't totally solve the problem. Definitely would not advise ingesting it in any form.

double edit: looks like we are BOTH right...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_...mbalming_fluid

"A commonly held misconception is that phencyclidine (PCP, angel dust) is the same as (or is synthesized from) embalming fluid. Some people, believing this myth, have actually attempted to smoke cigarettes or cannabis dipped in real embalming fluid (i.e. formaldehyde), which is highly toxic. Conversely, some users of PCP-laced cannabis believe (and are often told) that it contains embalming fluid proper and not PCP, or that the slang term "dust" really means embalming fluid proper. Sometimes, the two substances are even mixed together, in a further ostension of this legend.[102][103] Such concoctions are often called "fry," "wet," "illy," "sherm," "worm," "water-water," "amp," "dust(ed)," or other names."

I've personally confiscated joints dipped in formaldehyde. If it works or not, I've no idea, but I guarantee it's been tried. The fellow who tried it in that particular case had severe medical issues afterward. I don't know the extent, but he was certainly not living a normal live several months later, the last I heard of him.

[Nephrology]

I've personally confiscated joints dipped in formaldehyde. If it works or not, I've no idea, but I guarantee it's been tried. The fellow who tried it in that particular case had severe medical issues afterward. I don't know the extent, but he was certainly not living a normal live several months later, the last I heard of him.

Yeah, I guess I was optimistically thinking that nobody would actually try to smoke formaldehyde. I shouldn't have given our species that much credit.

That the user had serious medical problems after attempting it is not surprising in the slightest. What an idiot.

[Chuck Haggard]

A very real issue is that amatuer pharmacology has such shitty quality control.......

[txdpd]

A lot of officers don't know the legal standards for using force. They are trained and programmed to use a force off a "if he does this, I can do that" model and progress through the use of force in a linear manner. There's very little done to teach officers how to quickly asses a situation and based off of that assessment react in a reasonable manner. Things tend to go awry when the something happens that wasn't expected. Like someone getting his face chewed off by someone on drugs. It's also how we end up with the gross over reactions by officers where the suspect did something that fell at a certain place in their force continuum, but given the totality of the circumstances the force used was not warranted. One of the more extreme examples of that is the Seattle officer who shot the Indian carving wood with a pocket knife.

I got stuck in the thigh with an uncapped needle in a heroin addicts back pocket while putting him to sleep with an LVNR. If the needle hadn't of broken off under the skin, I probably wouldn't have even realized that I had been stuck. Talk about a terrible 6 months. Going hands on with drug users is just risky business and needles tend to not get recognized as a risk factor.

[voodoo_man]

A very real issue is that amatuer pharmacology has such shitty quality control.......

But the internet makes an expert out of anyone.

[rob_s]

A very real issue is that amatuer pharmacology has such shitty quality control.......

Sounds like natural selection to me.

Except, obviously, when it turns college kids into face-eating zombies.

[Chuck Haggard]

Sounds like natural selection to me.

Except, obviously, when it turns college kids into face-eating zombies.

Yeah, or decent people are otherwise caught up in some doper's bullshit....

Right before I retired we had a murder in the early morning hours on my shift, male half was doing meth and who knows what else, ends up naked and armed with a knife, the crime scene and body of the female half made me think of what the aftermath of a werewolf attack must look like. I've seen a lot or murders, attended two active-shooters in my career, but that crime scene was so bad it was fucking surreal.

Images when you google the "Miami zombie attack" from a few years ago;
https://www.google.com/search?q=miam...RSCv4Q_AUIBigB