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Why Are Synthetic Drugs Legal?

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Why Are Synthetic Drugs Legal?
Husband, Father of four, hard-working man; addicted to potpourri. Many think it couldn’t happen to them, to be in the grips of a substance, unable to break free. My husband was one of those the first time he purchased a small three gram bag of “potpourri” he had heard about from people at his work. Fast forward six months later and he is hardly recognizable as the man he has always been. The effects of synthetic drugs are non-forgiving, robbing it’s users of any type of quality in life. What starts out as a cool high, turns to addiction, when it is time to quit the real problems start.
Forty-six days clean, and yet the effects of synthetic marijuana are still felt. Here he stands thirty pounds less with no appetite ever, it seems. His mind has times of feeling fuzzy, memory loss, forgetting things he never had before. Not to mention the awful black mucus he produces upon coughing. This isn’t the first time he has quit smoking these horrible “alternatives”, but hopefully it is his last. What started off as a fun legal high for my husband, slowly turned into a costly addiction that almost ripped our family apart. His story is one of many being heard throughout the United States. Although some states have banned synthetic drugs due to health concerns, it is still legal to sell them in others.
Synthetic drugs are man-made drugs which mimic the effects of popular illegal drugs. They are the result of numerous chemicals working together to achieve a “high” similar to cocaine and marijuana. Recently our nation has seen a spike in usage of these mind-altering stimulants as more people realize they can find them at the local tobacco shop. They continue to pop up in local convenience stores, gas stations, and liquor stores. Synthetic drugs fall into two separate categories: synthetic cannabinoid (Spice or K2) and substituted cathinones (bath salts), (Pound, 2012). Synthetic cannabinoid is a substance similar to marijuana. It carries the same chemical
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