The great national drug panic du jour is a stinky stepsister to marijuana that, depending on who you ask, is a second-rate incense or a threat so dangerous lawmakers must ban it.

At least six states in the South and Midwest have banned the sale of brands of heady that claim to deliver marijuana-like highs. These products, sold under names including Spice, K2 and Yucatan Fire incense, claim to be undetectable by most drug tests and legal to buy — though their legality is a tricky question. Smoking the incense has sent dozens of people to the hospital nationwide. The

has logged 20 calls about the weed wannabe since January.

But hard data is scarce on just who uses the drugs or how popular they are. Outside of the score of toxicology cases, the substance has made barely a blip on the radar in Oregon.

“We have not had any reports of it on our lines yet,” says Tom Parker, spokesman for the

, which runs substance abuse hotlines.

The few calls may show that Oregon has little need for imitations. Pacific coast pot is potent and plentiful — Oregon, California and Washington are generally ranked among the Top 10 marijuana growing states. And the tweed is cheaper: Spice, for instance, sells for around $35 for a 3-gram pouch.

Or the lack of calls could reflect generally tame experiences with the product. It’s possible that the packets contain mostly benign herbs with no effect. Or they could have effects much like marijuana, which causes relatively few emergency medical calls.

Tests have turned up marijuana-like chemicals in some samples of the incense. The

last year tested samples of Spice, Genie and Yucatan Fire shipped through a DHL center in Ohio and found — in addition to lots of Vitamin E — “very small but verifiable amounts” of the psychoactive chemical

. The DEA scientists declared the products “stealth marijuana.”

, associate medical director of the Oregon Poison Center, says HU-210 is a synthetic “cannabinoid,” a chemical that affects the same molecules in the brain as THC, one of marijuana’s main psychoactive components. The chemical mostly is used by lab scientists to study how these parts of the brain work, he says.

“Basically, somebody took these chemicals from a lab and sprayed in on potpourri,” says Hendrickson, a toxicologist at Oregon Health & Science University.

Tests of the incense have also found “a whole bunch of other things,” he says. Since the product is sold as incense, it’s not regulated like a food or drug, so “there’s nothing to stop a manufacturer from putting anything they want in there.”

That uncertainty is what worries many people.

“The labels don’t say what it has in it,” Hendrickson says. “And we have no idea how it’s going to affect the individual.”

Without a standard composition, it’s hard to say how the drug would affect someone. But most patients who have showed up in Oregon emergency rooms seem to have symptoms similar to taking too many stimulants, including high blood pressure and tremors. “There’s even been a couple of seizures reported,” Hendrickson says.

Doctors generally find out about the fake marijuana when the patients admit to having used it, he says. Health workers usually sedate the patient for a couple of hours while the drug works through the system. So far, Hendrickson says, he hasn’t seen any long-term problems.

What legal problems Spice smokers might suffer is unclear. It’s legal buy incense or products made of legal herbs that claim to have marijuana-like effects, such as

. But THC and related chemicals, including HU-210, are schedule I controlled substances in the United States alongside heroin, ecstasy and LSD.

Several European and Asian nations have passed laws against the drug or its main marijuana-like chemical components. And several more U.S. states are considering a ban. Spokespeople for Oregon’s departments of justice and human services say they are not focusing on the incense now.