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Saturday, August 18, 2018

Overdose Alert, New Haven, Connecticut

Police respond to overdose cases at New Haven Green park

Bill Sikes/AP/REX/Shutterstock

"Bodies are literally dropping all around me from suspected drug overdoses."
"I've never seen anything quite this bad happening at once."
Mario Boone, TV journalist, New Haven Green, Connecticut

"The message has to be very clear to people that any time you are taking a synthetic drug, you have really no idea, as we've seen today what you're taking and how that drug is going to affect you."
New Haven Police Officer David Hartman

"New Haven is a place where we really are trying to help people."
"Someone ... with malice in their heart took advantage of that, took advantage of this vulnerable [lower-income, homeless] population."
"But that will not stop this city from reaching its hand out to those who are in need and treating them and providing those services [to those addicted to drugs]."
Police Chief Anthony Campbell, New Haven

"This is happening nationwide. We're eager to raise awareness at the highest levels of the federal government for a better sense of what happened and the challenges that urban centres face in terms of combating a persistent, vexing presence of people with substance abuse disorder."
Mayor Toni Harp, New Haven

Police and legislators are starting to crack down on synthetic marijuana. Photo: Synthetic marijuana

How ironic that synthetic marijuana has been named K2. For the high, presumably. Did some wit think of K2, the second highest, toughest peak in the Himalayan mountain range second only to Mount Everest, when naming synthetic marijuana? People get their highs in different ways, obviously. And whether it's on an ascent to K2, said to be a more technically difficult summit than Everest, to achieve a conquest of human endurance, energy and physical stamina, gambling with one's life, or choosing a mind-altering chemical instead with the chance that an overdose and death could occur, it's debatable that the latter enriches anyone's life experience.

Close to Yale University, the park known as New Haven Green saw 90 people overdosing on a batch of synthetic marijuana, sending local hospitals into emergency mode. On Wednesday, social workers and mental health professionals flooded to the park to what was desribed as a chaotic scene, utter bedlam, as people dropped insensate to the ground, while others vomited and others still simply became unresponsively lethargic. Some 76 people involved in overdoses on Wednesday and an additional six on Thursday, from what is presumed to be the same batch of "K2" synthetic dope.

Also called "spice", synthetic marijuana is vegetable material that has been sprayed with chemicals to mimic cannabis. Along with those seem-alike chemicals other, unknown substances could be involved, since some of the victims tested positive for the opioid fentanyl, another laboratory-produced drug posing as a more potent danger to public health entirely. Last month, federal officials issued warnings of the spread of synthetic marijuana across the nation.

Paramedics and EMT members respond to one of three simultaneous drug overdose victims on the New Haven Green, a city park in New Haven, Conn., Thursday, Aug. 16, 2018. Investigators try to determine exactly what sickened them and tens of other victims. People started falling ill Wednesday morning, mostly on the New Haven Green. No deaths were reported. Police have arrested a man who they say may have passed out free samples of synthetic marijuana. (Brian A. Pounds/Hearst Connecticut Media via AP)

Authorities described there chaotic scenes as 76 people collapsed on Wednesday and another 17 fell ill yesterday (Picture: AP)

K2 has caused hundreds of people in a dozen states to be hospitalized in recent months, sometimes accompanied with severe bleeding, while several people have experienced complications sufficiently severe to cause their death. The drug's unpredictability and the tendency of pushers to cut it with opioids, even an anticoagulant used in rat poison, representing the dangerous, unknown factor. Despite which, even with the distribution of warnings, people still seek out these street drugs.

For the most part, those afflicted by overdose in New Haven were those of low income and people that were homeless, leading authorities to assume that "somebody was giving these drugs out", free of charge, in the hope they would create a larger clientele of those hooked and thus expand their business, one that comes free of moral conscience. Several suspects have been arrested, connected to the overdoses. Fortunately everyone who was treated survived their ordeal; whether they will be more cautious in future is another thing altogether.

The park itself is a heritage area, dating to 1638, one of the oldest in New England, surrounded by Yale University outbuildings, shops, churches and government buildings, all 16 acres of it. That the green has been associated with a shocking mass overdose event reveals the insidious spirit and outreach of the drug problem plaguing present-day society. Toxicology tests have not yet been completed to determine the full extent of the problem inherent in the constituents of the product in question.