But not so with this batch, which police suspect was distributed by two men, including one accused of handing out it for nothing to lure in clients. It’s where hundreds of the city’s homeless spend their days, but the rest of the community doesn’t seem to linger.Ĭostello said on a normal day on the green, one or two people might need emergency medical care because of drug use. The green has a manicured lawn and is surrounded by nice restaurants and cute shops, but it is also where people shoot drugs in the daytime and don’t hesitate to ask the stranger sharing a bench with them where to buy K2. “Everybody knows each other and they try to take care of each other the best they can,” Costello said. “This is a much bigger problem and a much bigger threat to national security than other things.”Ĭostello, a nurse, is known as “Dr Phil” to the hundreds of homeless who frequent the green and when not treating patients this week, he was constantly greeted by people he has helped in the past. “It’s just a daunting, daunting thought for the future,” said Costello. But K2 is much more potent and is an unpredictable mix of differing concentrations of different chemicals that are poured or sprayed on plant material.ĭespite the mystery of each batch, K2 is appealing to drug users because its cost is low, its chemicals aren’t detected on standard drug tests and its changing mixtures make law enforcement efforts more complicated than with purer drugs such as marijuana.Ī man prepares to smoke K2 on 5 August 2015 in New York City. K2 is also known as synthetic marijuana because it interacts with cannabinoid receptors in the central nervous system to produce psychoactive effects. Officials said there have not been any deaths from this batch of K2, but they fear the long-term consequences of a drug that causes hallucinations, vomiting and a rapid heart rate. Sometimes K2 is laced with the powerful opioid fentanyl, but investigators including the federal Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) said they have not yet found any in the New Haven sample. About 56 people overdosed from K2 in Brooklyn in May 100 people overdosed in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, in July 2017 and 40 people overdosed in Dallas, Texas, in May 2014. Since K2 was first detected in the US in 2008, clusters of overdose outbreaks have become more and more common. In 2017, drug overdoses killed nearly 200 people per day, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data released this week, a new record driven by the deadly opioid epidemic. “I think it’s frustrating because for the team, because we don’t really have narcan that can fix it ,” Costello said. He and a team of other nurses and addiction counselors stood by cots, ready with bottled water and the overdose reversal agent narcan, which has proved largely ineffective against synthetic cannabinoids. “That batch that came in yesterday, with all the people falling out, has just made this basically a mass casualty incident,” Costello said. Phil Costello, the clinical director for homeless care at Cornell Scott-Hill health center, works often in the Green from his temporary office under a tent. This mass, rapid-fire overdose event was a sped-up version of what is happening across the US as local and federal governments struggle to reduce the colliding impacts of opioid, methamphetamine, cocaine and other addictions.
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