It’s fairly common for people selling and using black market street drugs to lace them with a variety of other substances. This often creates dangerous scenarios, as it’s hard to predict exactly how people will react to different additives. Recently, reports from around the country show that people are now lacing drugs with bug spray. This new trend runs the gamut, from weed spiked with bug spray to injecting crystallized bug spray.

Lacing Drugs with Bug Spray

Over the past few months, it’s become increasingly common to hear about people lacing drugs with bug spray. For example, a man in Tennessee smoked a combination of meth and bug spray before breaking into a home and attempting to cut his throat in front of a mother and her children.

Similarly, sources in Mississippi reported that people were making “hotshots” by covering metal mesh screens with bug spray and then heating the metal until the spray crystallizes. Then, people melt it down and inject it.

Additionally, there are numerous stories of people spraying their weed with bug spray, letting it dry, then smoking it. Other times, people soak synthetic marijuana in bug spray, or sometimes even regular cigarettes.

Regardless of the method of consumption, smoking or injecting bug spray produces some really dangerous effects. According to the Indy Star, it gives users an intense high that typically lasts for as long as 45 minutes, leaving users in a zombie-like state of catatonia.

Often times, people end up experiencing something very close to a seizure and have severe difficulty breathing.

Making It Hard For Medics

Lacing drugs with other chemicals and substances is a fairly common practice. It gives users new highs and provides sellers a cheap way to stretch their product and make it more potent.

“You’re looking at people who will mix [a chemical] with a drug as a way to try to make more profit,” Indiana Poison Center doctor Daniel Rusyniak told the Indy Star.

“Cutting your drug with ingredients has been a longtime thing that drug dealers have done to increase profits.”

But it also makes it very hard for medics trying to treat negative side effects and overdoses. In many cases, when a person has a bad reaction, first responders don’t know what is causing the harm because it’s unclear what the person actually consumed.

Similarly, when people start adding new substances to drugs, as is the case with bug spray, nobody knows beforehand how it will end up affecting users.

Final Hit: Are People Really Smoking Weed Spiked With Bug Spray?

Clearly, there’s nothing new about lacing drugs with other ingredients. This is also true when it comes to cannabis. Bug spray isn’t the first chemical people have laced their weed with. For example, “wet” is essentially weed that’s soaked in PCP.

Similarly, people often lace synthetic marijuana with formaldehyde. This is especially dangerous since synthetic marijuana can do serious damage all on its own.

But it gets even worse when it’s laced with other chemicals, whether it’s formaldehyde, bug spray, or anything else.