�鶹Ů��

Almost as soon as the young man crouching on a trash-strewed street in Brooklyn pulled out a crumpled dollar bill from his pocket and emptied its contents of dried leaves into a wrapper, he had company. A half-dozen disheveled men and women walked swiftly to where the young man was rolling a cigarette of a synthetic drug known as K2 to wait for a chance to share. The drug has been the source of an alarming and sudden surge in overdoses — over three days this week, 130 people across New York City were treated in hospital emergency rooms after overdosing on K2, almost equaling the total for the entire month of June, according to the city’s health department. (Nir, 7/14)

Just two days after a suspected synthetic marijuana poisoning in New York City sent 33 people to the hospital, a new report finds that overdoses related to the street drug are rising across the country. Tuesday’s mass overdose in Brooklyn left dozens of people shaking, vomiting, and passed out in the streets around the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Its suspected cause was synthetic marijuana, and law enforcement officials raided a number of stores on Wednesday to search for its source. Commonly referred to by the street names K2 or Spice, synthetic marijuana encompasses a large group of lab-made chemicals designed to mimic the effects of marijuana. (Wessel, 7/14)