33 people hospitalized after taking a bad batch of marijuana

It was like a scene from an episode of The Walking Dead. But it wasn’t zombies who could barely walk, it was New Yorkers.
And it wasn’t an infection they were suffering from – but the same bad batch of drugs.
Thirty-three people were hospitalized for a possible overdose on K2, a type of synthetic marijuana, in Brooklyn on Tuesday morning.
Witnesses reported seeing more than a dozen people passing out, vomiting, urinating and twitching in the middle of the street around 9.30am in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.
They reportedly reacted to the drug almost simultaneously near Broadway and Myrtle Ave, an intersection that has become known as ‘ground zero’ for K2 addicts in the city.


‘It was a horrible scene,’ resident Brian Arthur told the New York Daily News.

‘Some of them were motionless. This is nothing you’d want your kids to see.’

Arthur, 38, filmed the incredible scene and posted it on his Facebook, showing people who couldn’t stand up straight and had to be held up by officers as they waited for a stretcher.
‘This is no joke over here right now, this is tragic,’ Arthur says as his camera moves from one passed-out New Yorker to the next.

‘This is crazy. Tell your kids, tell your family, stay off of that man.’
Arthur said it was mostly young, teenage boys who he saw overdosing in the street.
Police first received a report of multiple people with an ‘altered mental status’ outside a Brooklyn community garden on Stockton Street.
Officers found eight intoxicated individuals before discovering nine more, according to the New York Post.

‘Obviously it was a bad batch, a source told the Post. ‘They are lucky they didn’t die.’
Authorities said all of the hospitalized patients were expected to survive.
K2 contains man-made chemicals that act on the same cell receptors in the brain that THC does in natural marijuana. It is dirt cheap, often sold for one to five dollars for a stick or package.
 
Researchers have found instances in which chemicals in synthetic marijuana can bind much more strongly to cell receptors than THC, producing stronger effects.

Because the chemicals vary from packet to packet, the effects of K2 are unpredictable and can change from use to use, according to the New York City Health Department.
Effects of K2, which is packaged under names like Spice, AK-47, Smacked, and Dank, can include extreme anxiety, confusion, paranoia, and hallucinations.
More than 6,000 people have been sent to the emergency room in New York because of K2 since 2015 and there have been two confirmed deaths caused by the drug.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio signed a bill in October that made it illegal to sell or produce K2, making it a crime punishable by up to a year in jail and fines of more than $100,000.
In May he announced that there had been an 85 percent decline in K2-related emergency visits in the last 10 months.
But on Stockton Street the drug remains a constant problem for residents, who had taken to putting up handwritten signs that read ‘No Smoking K2’.