New case studies link smoking synthetic marijuana with stroke in healthy, young adults

Add stroke to the list of severe health hazards that may be associated with smoking synthetic marijuana, popularly known as spice or K2, a University of South Florida neurology team reports.

An advance online article in the journal Neurology details case studies by the USF neurologists of two healthy, young siblings who experienced acute ischemic strokes soon after smoking the street drug spice. Ischemic strokes occur when an artery to the brain is blocked.

Seizures, abnormal heart rhythms, heart attacks, psychosis, hallucinations and other serious adverse effects have been associated with smoking synthetic pot. Medical journals have also begun to report a growing number of strokes potentially related to the use of natural (non-synthetic) marijuana.

“Since the two patients were siblings, we wondered whether they might have any undiagnosed genetic conditions that predisposed them to strokes at a young age. We rigorously looked for those and didn’t come up with anything,” said senior author W. Scott Burgin, MD, professor of neurology at the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine and director of the Comprehensive Stroke Center at Tampa General Hospital.

"To the best of our knowledge, what appeared to be heart-derived strokes occurred in two people with otherwise healthy hearts. So more study is needed."

USF vascular neurology fellow Melissa Freeman, MD, was lead author of the paper.

What Is Synthetic Marijuana And How Does It Compare To Traditional Marijuana? Much like Frankenstein's monster, synthetic marijuana was created in a lab and resulted in a perversion of its original subject: the effects of THC, the component of marijuana that provides the "high" sensation. Like marijuana, the drug is smoked, though unlike marijuana it comes in small packets usually labeled "not for human consumption" and has names like "Spice," "Black Mamba," "K2," "Fake Marijuana," "Sexy Monkey" and hundreds of others.

The chemicals in synthetic marijuana are also harder to detect than marijuana in drug tests, and the drug is the second most used illicit drug among high school seniors, behind marijuana itself according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. While certain chemical compounds of synthetic marijuana were banned in Colorado in 2011, there are possibly hundreds more anonymous compounds that haven't been identified yet and thus, aren't illegal.

Just being known as "synthetic marijuana" has angered pot activists because, it's effects are nothing like that of marijuana. Synthetic marijuana's non-cannabis herbs sprayed with lab-created chemicals which are said to give users a stronger high than THC can lead to seizures, hallucinations and convulsions as well as profoundly negative psychological effects.

Even John W. Huffman, the scientist who is often credited with creating synthetic marijuana on a federal drug grant to study the effects of drugs on receptors in the brain on lab animals, has recommended that people don't ingest the compounds.