The NYPD Is Now Calling Synthetic Weed 'Weaponized Marijuana'

NYPD Police Commissioner Bill Bratton is touching on a little of everything at his much-hyped press conference this Tuesday afternoon, but a huge focus of the presser seems to be the rise of synthetic weed in NYC.

Or, as Bratton and his people are now calling it, “weaponized marijuana.”

According to Gothamist reporter Lauren Evans, who’s tweeting from the press conference, Bratton says a main challenge for officers trying to crack down on the synthetic marijuana epidemic is “the idea of trying to wrestle with a naked person.”

To prove his point, Bratton aired a ”disturbing” video apparently showing four or five NYPD officers trying to tackle a naked man high on spice.

VICE News ran an in-depth story last month on the cheap drug’s nasty effects on Brooklyn’s homeless population. In it, a young Brooklyn paramedic explained that synthetic weed “creates a deep central nervous system disconnect the same way PCP or ketamine does,” turning users into “zombies.”

From outside Kings County Hospital in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens:

Stand outside the emergency-room entrance to Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn any day of the week and you’ll see them. Sometimes alone, but more often in pairs, they get rolled through the sliding glass door and parked in the air-conditioned lobby with their mouths agape and gazes frozen somewhere in the middle distance, like some terrifying figures that sprang from Goya’s brush.

From outside the Clarkson Avenue homeless shelter, also in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens:

One of them called himself Czar. Sitting on a milk crate, he explained to me how he makes a meager living: Every day, he walks a block down the street to one of two bodegas where he picks up as many $5 bags of K2 as he can afford. Then he sits in front of 681 Clarkson and rolls them up into “sticks,” which he sells for a dollar a pop.

The other man, called Bless, sported a pineapple-shaped mass of hair, an orange goatee, and a litany of face tattoos, including the name of his dead brother and a tropical flower. The 22-year-old had only been at 681 Clarkson for a week and a half, and, leaning up against the shelter’s fence, he told me the extent of K2 use there was “ridiculous” and unlike anything he’d seen in years of homelessness.