Street drug is potent, cheap
in recent years, with addicts getting high and lolling along the sidewalks, neighbors and workers said.
Desperate residents have posted signs, reading “No Smoking K2,” around the area.
Jimmy Bravo, 28, a clerk at a bodega at Broadway and Stockton St., said he saw an ambulance take some of the overdosing people.
“Ambulances pick them up night and day, 24 hours,” he said. “Cops see them, but they don’t do nothing.”
He added that addicts sometimes have sex on the sidewalk.
“They don’t care,” he said. “They do it right in front of kids.”
One of the hubs for trouble, residents said, is a rehab center on Myrtle Ave. and Broadway.
“If it wasn’t around they wouldn’t be out here,” Henry Lopez, 35, who works at a hardware store across the street, said of the rehab center. “There’s always a lot of stuff going on out here. Two or three people have gotten stabbed. They rob delivery people at night, break windows. It’s really dangerous at night.”
In response to questions about enforcement Tuesday, the NYPD pointed to several major seizures of the drug, but would not provide the number of summonses issued.
It said cops have been issuing summonses and making arrests.
“Additionally, there has been targeted enforcement in the area that has resulted in multiple arrests and seizures of K2,” the NYPD said.
The city Health Department said it had recorded a spike in K2-related emergency room visits, and was watching ERs across the city. “We remind New Yorkers that K2 is extremely dangerous,” the agency said.
Mayor de Blasio signed a bill in October making it a crime to sell or produce K2, punishable by up to a year in jail and fines totalling $55,000.
“K2 is a poison,” de Blasio said then. “It is a poison that threatens public safety and public health, and it’s taken a toll on too many New Yorkers.”
The number of hospitalizations tied to the drug, also known as synthetic marijuana, peaked at 1,200 in July 2015 — nearly 40 a day — but dropped to 178 in March. THERE”S NOTHING natural about getting high on K2.
The man-made synthetic cannabinoid made in laboratories and sprayed on dry leaves is a cheap high — selling for as little as $7 per package.
But the unpredictable potpourri of chemicals can make users feel great one day and deathly ill the next — and there’s no way to judge its potency from batch to batch.
Packaged under brand names like Spice, AK-47, Geeked up, Smacked, Green Giant Scooby Snax, Red Giant, Mr. Bad Guy, iBlown, and Trippy, many are left in a zombielike haze after smoking it.
But it also causes extreme anxiety, paranoia and hallucinations — as well as vomiting, seizures, fainting, kidney failure and, over time, heart damage.