Paul Bass Photos
Roger Weeks, who said he continued smoking K2 after the hospital released him: “It’s like Russian Roulette.”
Medics loading a K2 user into an ambulance for one of 72 trips to the hospital last Wednesday.
“Bridgeport K2” — a particularly potent variety from a formula hatched in a Pfizer pharmaceutical lab — had returned to town. Zombie-like, smokers were collapsing, vomiting, going to the hospital, then stumbling back downtown … to repeat the routine.
For a day or two, the New Haven Green became a scene out of the Night of the Living Dead.
It was clear something unusual, something new at least in its scope, was happening. Firefighters, cops, medics worked feverishly to save lives as people throughout the nation and beyond watched.
But it wasn’t clear what exactly had happened, why exactly crews ferried victims to the hospital from the New Haven Green more than 100 times last Wednesday and Thursday.
A clearer picture now emerges, drawn from interviews with medical workers, cops, users, and others involved in the frantic events of the past week. They want New Haven to know what really happened. Not to point fingers at those who with limited information at the time scrambled to save lives. But to help the city figure out how to prevent or to handle future episodes. Because the challenge has only begun.
Oblivion For $2
First responders seek to revive victims passed out on the Upper Green mid-afternoon on Wednesday.
The first three bodies dropped on the Green shortly before the polls closed Tuesday night for a statewide primary election. Those three overdoses weren’t news: The fire department and AMR ambulance service will handle as many as 20 drug overdoses stretched out across any given day in New Haven.
The calls came more frequently Wednesday morning, all but a few from the Green. People were losing consciousness, falling on benches or the ground, vomiting. Eyes were rolling in the back of their heads. They were often incoherent. By a little after noon, the number had reached 22.
As word spread, the governor offered to help. The state sent extra supplies of Narcan, which is sprayed into the nostrils of opiate overdose victims to revive them.
But Narcan wasn’t reviving the victims. As cops and firefighters worked with AMR medics to transport the smokers, they gleaned that the victims had been smoking K2. Known somewhat misleadingly as “synthetic marijuana,” K2 sells for as little as $2 to $5 for a small bag.
I don’t need to go the hospital, numerous victims insisted — some, it would turn out correctly, others not. At that point, first responders had no way to know.
“We had overdoses where people died” in the past (such as this 2016 episode), noted Lt. Karl Jacobson, who heads the police department’s narcotics and intelligence unit. “I think that creates a situation where they feel they have to transport.”
Also known as “potpourri” and “spice,” K2 has been around in various forms for years in cities like New Haven. It used to sell in convenience stores as packaged flora (grass clippings, for instance) mixed with the psychoactive chemicals. It takes many forms, as its manufacturers alter chemical ingredients to stay ahead of federal bans. Usually it contains chemicals that produce reactions to the same parts of the brain marijuana does, but at 75 to 100 times the impact.
The drug has become popular for several reasons, according to Phil Costello, a Hill Health Center nurse practitioner. As a street outreach worker to the homeless, he checks up on the users on the Green days times a week, offers medical help, hears them out, tries to steer them toward treatment if they’re amenable. The drug is cheap, Costello noted. The $2-$5 single mini-pouch with a batch like last week’s can last for repeated highs, because it takes only one hit to zonk out. Also, K2 rarely shows up in drug tests, he said. “People on parole feel it’s a drug they can get away with taking.” Because the chemical make-up varies, in effect creating a “new” drug with regularity, it’s more expensive for a company to test for it, and it often takes longer to receive results.
The police had responded in recent months to a couple of episodes of concentrated collapses like this from K2, but on a much smaller scale, according to Assistant Chief Herb Johnson.
The word on the street, according to others, was that those batches came from Bridgeport or Philadelphia.
Yale-New Haven’s Dr. Sandy Bogucki during a break between emergencies on the Green Wednesday afternoon.
But K2 doesn’t usually cause dozens of people within hours to drop in a public place. So officials struggled to figure out why Wednesday was different.
At least one victim did respond to a higher dose of Narcan administered intravenously at Yale-New Haven Hospital. So they theorized that maybe someone had laced the K2 with fentanyl; within hours a state Republican legislative leader was calling for stiffer criminal policies against fentanyl use as a response.
At the hospital, according to Sandy Bogucki, Yale-New Haven’s emergency services director, a couple of victims “were intubated, admitted to ICU for respiratory depression.” Some of them were treated for tachycardia and hypertension, some for vomiting. “Most were observed for variable lengths of time to confirm they remained clinically stable once resuscitated, and then discharged from the” emergency department, she said.
Patients were reviving within 15 to 90 minutes. Many simply walked out, back to the Green, lit up again — and collapsed again.
“Like A PCP High”
Weeks back on the Upper Green Monday, next to a man furtively smoking, two benches away from where Donald Trump’s drug czar was at that moment visiting.
Roger Weeks said he was one of those return patients.
“That’s just what I do. That’s my drug of choice,” he said while sitting on a bench on the upper Green, where K2 users tend to congregate (as opposed to clusters of alcoholics and opioid users, who tend to occupy areas of the lower Green nearer to bus stops).
Weeks, who’s 55, said he started smoking pot regularly at 13. In recent years he found he liked K2 better. It’s cheaper than marijuana. And while it attacks similar parts of the brain, it produces a different kind of high.
“It’s like a PCP high,” Weeks said. “And LSD a little bit, because you have hallucinations. It’s an acquired thing; the more you do it, the more you like it.”
“Sometimes you get a freak batch, a couple of times a year,” Weeks noted. “I OD’d. It’s like Russian Roulette.”
Why did he return to the Green for more after his release from the hospital? “I didn’t feel it was that serious,” he said. “The addiction draws you back.”
M*A*S*H* Up
Sgt. David Guliuzza, at left, keeps onlookers back as medics place a victim on stretcher.
While first responders hustled victims to the hospital, cops gleaned from some of them the names of the distributors of what was clearly a bad batch of K2, whatever was in it. The cops recognized the alleged distributors’ names. They’d arrested these guys before for dealing K2.
By late afternoon, with the help of the probation department, they arrested one of the men near the Green. A second arrest followed.
Cops swarmed the Green, joined by late afternoon by regional and national TV news crews filing live reports. And yet … somehow people were still obtaining and smoking K2 without being noticed, and collapsing.
The cops had forwarded a sample of recovered K2 to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. The DEA reported back by late afternoon that it contained no traces of fentanyl.
Now people were as confused than ever.
Outreach workers from Hill Health Center came on the scene to help. By evening they realized that not all of these people needed to go to the hospital, said Phil Costello.
K2, especially this kind of batch, can indeed potentially kill people, especially if they have heart problems or high blood pressure, Costello said. Also, some of them use other drugs as well, which in combination with a particularly potent dose of K2 can potentially lead to death. So those people do need to go to the hospital.
But others simply need to lie still for the half hour or hour and a half until it wears off, he said.
So when the collapses continued on the Green Thursday, albeit at a slower pace, Hill Health set up a M*A*S*H*-style triage center on the Green. Costello and others checked victims to make sure that they were breathing, that their blood pressure wasn’t dangerously high, and led some of them to cots where doctors could monitor them through recovery. But the scene on the Green was still chaotic enough that the Hill Health crew couldn’t make it to each collapse before the victims ended up on a stretcher in an ambulance.
At a City Hall press conference, Police Chief Anthony Campbell announced that it appeared that one of the two arrested alleged dealers of the bad-batch K2 was giving out samples free — in order, Campbell said, to hook new customers.
By Friday afternoon, the overdoses linked to this “Bridgeport” batch of K2 had apparently ended. Police annoucned a third arrest of a man suspected of being involved in the distribution.
A bag of the bad K2 batch on the Green.
Officials also finally learned from the DEA what ingredient made this K2 batch so devastating: AMB-FUBINACA. It has been found in K2 that produced similar mass collapses in other cities, as well.
Pfizer researchers developed the drug in 2009, one of several hatched in labs in the search for synthetic pain relieving drugs that could mimic the effect cannabis has on the brain. Like other similar drugs, it was never taken to market by its manufacturers. (After someone died from a trial of another synthetic cannabinoid, manufacturers may have grown skittish.) Because Pfizer trademarked AMB-FUBINACA, anyone could access its formula. An illicit chemist in, say, Mexico or China, may be able to produce K2 to distribute to a middleman in, say, Bridgeport.
In any case, once AMB-FUBINACA found its way to K2, K2 became at least 50 times more potent. As New Haven learned last week.
Health professionals debated whether “overdose” was in fact the right word for what happened to the K2 smokers, or whether “poisonings” would more accurately describe it.
Whatever the correct term, by the weekend, New Haven officials had a tally: first responders transported victims of the K2 batch to the hospital about 120 times over three days.
Here’s the kicker: Because so many had repeat visits, the total number of victims who made those trips was 47, Lt. Jacobson reported on Sunday. “When we interviewed the victims, most stated they were transported more than once, one even six times.”
According to Mayor Toni Harp, the first responders managed to reach all the victims within two minutes of their collapses.
Return To “Normal”
Phil Costello and Emily Pinto-Taylor on the Green Monday.
On Monday, officials returned to the Green, ushering around Donald Trump’s visiting drug czar, who had come to town to consult about last week’s incident. Mayor Harp spoke of a plan to have Hill Health Center open a drop-in center near the Green where overdose victims not needing hospitalization could rest and recover amid some medical supervision as well as access to drug treatment and recovery programs.
Phil Costello, meanwhile, was on his regular rounds checking up on homeless people and drug users on the Green. He was accompanied by Dr. Emily Pinto-Taylor, a Yale medical resident shadowing Costello for a two-week homeless medicine elective.
“You doing OK?” Costello asked people by name, who responded affectionately in return. “Anything I can help you with?”
Costello, who’s 55, used to work as an engineer for the Barnes Group. He made a mid-career switch in order to help people more directly. Now he’s on a mission to convince society to treat drug abuse as a disease rather than a crime. To convince users to enter treatment. And to convince everyone that K2 is serious business.
K2 is called “synthetic marijuana.” But it’s nothing like pot, he said. It has far more devastating effects on people. It’s addictive. “I’m not saying to use either drug,” he said. “But I don’t want people to use K2: It’s far more dangeorus.” And legalizing marijuana won’t help, he argued, because that’ll just jack up the price. K2 will remain cheaper.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said of last week’s zombie mini-pocalypse on the Green. “We need more info on it. How many people are doing K2 in their houses and we don’t see them collapse? We see the people down here because it’s visible.”
At the far eastern edge of the Green, across from Yale’s Phelps Gate, a man familiar to Costello from his rounds lay slumped over the edge of a bench. Costello roused him enough to get a response to “You OK?” The man said he was OK, and drooped back off to oblivion.
Costello checked his breathing. He decided the man didn’t need to go to the hospital.
“If that was the Bridgeport [batch], he probably would have fallen right off the bench,” Costello observed. “It would be hard to rouse him. He probably would have had convulsions.”
“You guys watch him?” he asked two others on the bench.
Donald Trump’s drug czar had driven off. Costello walked off, too, to check on other users.
The Green was back to normal.
Coverage of this week’s drug poisonings on the Green:
• OD Toll Hits 77; Cops Arrest Suspect
• Overdoses Put 911, Engine 4 To The Test
• Recovery Coaches. More Cops. Moved Bus Stops?
• Synthetic Cannabinoid Key Ingredient In Bad K2 Batch
• Fair Haven Doctors See Lesson In K2 Poisonings
• Stopping Suicide, Jesus Redeems Himself
• Dozens More Overdose; What’s In That K2?
• Bad K2 Went For Free
• Green Proprietors On Overdoses, Drug Scene: “We Cannot Wait”
• NORML: Legalization Would Have Prevented Overdoses
• “Place Of Despair”?
• Angel, Royce Find Refuge From Green ODs
• Trump’s Drug Czar: Solutions Begin At Home
Yes, the Green is quickly back to normal.
Active drug dealing, addicts doing drugs, litter galore, people passed out on benches or lying in the grass, and most people doing their best to avoid our embarrassment of a central park...