WASHINGTON — Synthetic drug use is on the rise in the nation’s capital, and D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier talked in detail about them at a community meeting this week.
“People that refer to it as synthetic marijuana, that’s a misnomer. It’s nothing like marijuana at all. It is extremely, extremely dangerous,” Lanier told a gathering of residents at the Forest Hills Senior Living home in Northwest.
The chief says the drugs, which can be bought legally online, can have a powerful effect.
“They raise the person’s core body temperature very high, which is why we (get) a lot of the taking the clothes off. They accelerate the heart rate and adrenaline, and these folks have what they call excited delirium. So they have extra strength, they are delirious, they are hallucinating.”
Lanier says police are doing what they can to stop their distribution, but there’s a problem.
“We’ve made about 65 arrests in a couple of months now of people that are selling this stuff and buying this stuff on the street, and we can’t prosecute any of them,” she said.
One of the reasons is no field test has been created that can detect if a substance found by police — in someone’s pocket or car, for example — actually is synthetic drugs.
“Once we make the arrest, all the drugs have to be sent off to a lab that has a huge backlog, to be tested to see if any of the precursor chemicals are there,” said the chief.
Also hampering their efforts is the fact that synthetic drug makers are constantly changing the names and chemical recipes of their products to stay ahead of the law.
Lanier says drug tests given to people on probation or parole cannot detect synthetic drugs, and that has to change.
“In one hour I had to call an ambulance for three separate people that overdosed on the stuff riding around the other day. And one of them said to me, he said ‘I’m an addict, I hate using this stuff, I hate the way it makes me feel,’ he says, ‘but it’s the only drug I can use and keep my freedom because I’m on probation.’”
Chief Lanier says the man she spoke with is a heroin addict.
She says honing on the sales of certain chemicals may be a way to fight the synthetic drug trade.
“There’s a lot of things being explored, but we’ve got to come up with a solution sooner or later because this stuff is spreading quickly,” she said.
