There’s a brand new synthetic marijuana hitting the streets and it is completely different than anything the experts have seen in the past. This new “batch” has shown up in other states, and when Five on Your Side Investigates started looking into it, we discovered the new version of this drug is also here in Missouri.
We met an 18-year-old from Granite City who smoked it and ended up in the hospital. The teen did not want his identity revealed, but his mother is helping tell his story to NewsChannel 5.
Onashay Haeffner describes the day she found her son after he overdosed.
“He was drawled up on the couch like a 3-year-old. He wouldn’t talk to me, was slobbering, and was crying really easy,” she said.
Soon Onashay’s son had a 106 degree fever and was having seizures, but that was tame compared to what hospital tests revealed.
“They rushed him here with renal failure and 85 percent of his muscle mass in his legs had been gone,” Onashay said.
The teen’s doctor, Dr. Anthony Scalzo of SSM Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center, said, “he had a muscle inflammation that was so severe it prevented him from walking for a while absolutely.”
Dr. Scalzo is one of the leading synthetic marijuana experts in the country. He was the first doctor in the country to discover “synthetic marijuana” and was assigned to this local teen’s case. But, these were symptoms even Dr. Scalzo had never seen.
“It’s back in Missouri with a vengeance in terms of the toxicity,” Dr. Scalzo said.