Synthetic Marijuana Bust At Metro Gas Station

More and more teens are getting their hands on it, and more of them are ending up in the emergency room. It turns out the stuff that is sending them there is sold at gas stations.

Police have had their eye on several gas stations and just raided one of them.

"These children come in and they're hallucinating,” said OU Medical Center Dr. Dierke Verbrugge. “They're seeing things around them. They feel ants crawling all over them."

That part is called neuropsychiatric toxicity. The other part is just called "Mr. Nice Guy" or "Happy." It's synthetic marijuana and it is nothing new. It's been around for several years, but the chemicals inside it keep changing, keep having psychotic effects on people and keep finding loopholes around being illegal.

"They're coming up with new chemical structures that technically get around our law,” Mark Woodward with the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics said.

Doctors said they have seen an increase in younger patients under age 21, and three people in Oklahoma have died from synthetic marijuana. It's basically a lab produced liquid pot that's sprinkled on and sold as potpourri.

"You can have seizures,” said Verbrugge. "Hallucinations, delirious, very, very aggressive."

One of the most recent busts in the metro happened at KN Food Mart on N.W. 10th Street.

The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics is trying to make laws stronger than the drug and is in the process of writing a bill for this spring to include more chemicals.

"Some of them will fit under that nine chemical umbrella that took affect November 1. Some of them will not. We're already hearing from OSBI that they're getting some new things submitted to them by local police during traffic stops and other things, and they're saying these are brand new,” Woodward said.

The owner of that store is facing charges of distribution of imitation controlled dangerous substance and felony money laundering.