As a Michigan company, Western Slope Laboratory tends to follow local news and headlines. Like many areas in the United States, there has been such an impact on parents, schools, and health systems by designer drugs like Spice, K2, and bath salts. Western Slope has tested for these compounds in urine and oral fluid for a few years now–and like most, are constantly updating our arsenal.
In recent communications, Western Slope Laboratory warned about new designer drugs like krokodil. As new data on the prevalence of synthetic drug use among middle and high school age children, Western Slope Laboratory will continue to update and add information. The Monitoring the Future 2013 report was recently released and happily, there is some good news.
The use of both synthetic cannabinoids and synthetic cathinones is decreasing with 8% of 12th and 10th grade student and 4% of 8th graders reporting use of synthetic marijuanas and under 2% for all grade levels for bath salts.
Bath Salt (Synthetic Cathinones)
Synthetic Cannabinoids (Marijuanas)
From the graphs, courtesy of Monitoring the Future, you can see that though the use of the drugs have decreased in most cases, the level of perceived risk has not increased for the synthetic cannabinoids. The perceived level of risk for the synthetic cathinones, however, has increased significantly.
These designer drugs are menaces and it behooves all stakeholders to take an active role in educaitng our youth about the dangers of use and the risks associated with drug use.
As a parent of a young adult male, who is in college I am glad to see that the trends on this appear to be going down in younger kids. However, through selective eavesdropping when the “boys” are hanging out I am certain that many young adults who remember when it was legal, are still finding a way to get and use these compounds.