First in a two-part series

The man in the cellphone video walks in an awkward pattern across a tree-lined main road in the Griffing Park area of town.

Behind him, a second man stops walking suddenly. His head drops to his chest and his shoulders slump. He is awake but not aware.

Later, in the same area, a young man falls off his bike at the end of a driveway. He has no significant injuries but rests crumbled in the bicycle as if sleeping.

A Griffing Park area resident who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation captured the video and photo from his front door and posted them to a community Facebook page.

“We see this every single day literally. It’s not an isolated incident. I deemed them the walking dead,” the man said via phone. “It seems to affect everybody different. Some are like they are in an extreme downer like the guy stuck (who stood motionless in the video) then another guy was dancing in the middle of Griffing Drive.”

The resident wasn’t really fazed when he first noticed the behavior of the drug users, which began with an influx of new transients in the area not long after Tropical Storm Harvey.

“It’s Port Arthur and it’s pretty common around here,” he said of drug activity. “But that (drug) one in particular, seems to really intoxicate the people.”

With this particular batch of drugs, the user will only be under its effects for 10, maybe 15 minutes in a high called “planking” because of the way the body reacts.

The drug

The drug itself is not new — it emerged as a substitute for marijuana but is nothing like marijuana, which is increasingly being legalized for both medicinal and recreational use across the U.S. and is a natural plant.

This drug is synthetic marijuana and has names like K2 or Spice or Ren, short for Serenity, according to a local narcotics officer.

“This drug is more potent because of the different additives. I’m not a chemist or a doctor but most people on marijuana are not in a stupor, either it’s the potency or the chemical additives they put into it,” the officer, who asked not to be named, said. “It’s an epidemic. The thing that people don’t understand is it’s very dangerous with all they (manufacturer) put into it.”

The veteran narcotics officer described the behavior of someone under the influence of this drug that is not just a Port Arthur problem but also a national problem.

He likens the quickness of the high to that of a person having a diabetic episode where, after receiving insulin, he returns to normal.

How it’s made

“You don’t set your watch to it,” he said of the 10-minute high, adding that the user just “wakes up.”

“It’s addictive and there’s a chemical they put in there that is damaging your body. There are synthetic chemicals that mimic cannabinoids but has nothing to do with marijuana.”

The drug is created with an inert, or chemically inactive, plant material spread out on a tarp. Chemicals, some of which may include rat poison or turpentine, are sprayed on the plant material and left to dry. Then the plant material is raked and turned over and sprayed and dried again.

The chemical itself comes out of China and Homeland Security intercepts a lot of it as it reaches the U.S. borders. Packaging, sometimes colorful, can also be bought and shipped in.

Port Arthur Police Det. Mike Hebert shared some photos taken from a major sting that linked China to New York to the area. Some of the photos show the “weed” spread out on a tarp; other pictures show baggies with packages of the final product that was taken during a traffic stop in Port Arthur several years ago. The investigation, Hebert said, lasted from 2014 to 2016.

 

The toll it takes on the body

The officer said he spoke with a former user of the drug who told him he had holes in his lungs and his organs were shutting down.

“That’s how volatile on the human body this is,” he said.

Dr. Emily Kidd, Texas medical director for Acadian Ambulance, said the drug is harmful. Anecdotally, emergency medical personnel are seeing fewer patients recently but have noticed patients who are more lethargic than usual as opposed to a few years ago when users experience an excited delirium.

“It is harmful,” Kidd said. “It’s a synthetic marijuana with a manmade chemical synthesized.”

In addition, there are more than 170 known substances associated with synthetic marijuana.

“Some people can have symptoms days to weeks later and it’s even been reported months afterward where people were having psychosis,” she said.

In speaking about the drugs in other areas of the nation, there was a bad batch where rat poison was used in making the drug. This caused severe bleeding in some patients and death in others.

“I can’t stress enough how dangerous this is,” she said. “That’s not the only effects of the drugs. There is psychosis, (zombie like) behavior, some people have extreme agitation, and some have hallucinations and seizures and go into comas. There are cases of people with kidney failure who end up on dialysis, with heart arrhythmia, extreme fast or slow heart rate, bleeding in the brain.”

Some of the most serious cases she spoke of occurred in the Midwest but can happen anywhere — you just never know what’s mixed in this stuff.

“People don’t realize just one time of using this stuff can cause a lifetime of chronic issues, physical and mental health issues. They just don’t think of getting a brain bleed from trying it once, seizures, and cardiac arrest leading to death. It’s not work the risk. You don’t know what’s in the next batch.”

Tuesday: How are police combating this epidemic?