The end of the school year could mean the start of trouble for local teenagers.
Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett expects that teens and young adults will use synthetic drugs, like NBomb.
NBomb is a synthetic version of LSD, and its use has swept the country recently. The products are marketed for a younger demographic.
“You see something like this, you know, Casper the ghost or a picture of SpongeBob and you think ‘how bad could it be,” he asked. “Last thing I want to do is get called out in the middle of the night to an unintended death, standing there with the homicide guys trying to determine if this was a murder or an inadvertent overdose.”
The State of Kansas recently passed a ban on some versions of NBomb, and the law will go into effect this summer. Though, Bennett said he can enforce the law earlier due to an analog statute.
The big challenge with synthetic LSD is that the drug makers will continue to change the chemicals in the product, so they aren’t breaking the law, said Dr. Timothy Rohrig, director of the Sedgwick County Regional Forensic Science Center.
NBomb has chemicals that are different from Synthetic marijuana like K2, Rohrig said. The chemicals in NBomb are toxic to the body.
“These are different chemicals that bind, again, to the same receptor and will cause a similar types of activity as LSD does,” Rohrig said. “One big difference between the Nbomb compounds and some of these synthetic cannabinoids is synthetic cannabinoids can put you in hazardous situations where you might run out in front of a car and get hit or something like that, the NBomb compounds can cause overt lethal toxicity. The chemical itself can cause death.”
At least 19 people have died from use of NBomb this past year in the United States, Rohrig said.