By: Jayne O’Donnell – usatoday.com –  September 23, 2019

Ricky D’Ambrosio bought his last cannabis oil cartridge last month at a California marijuana dispensary that “felt legitimate, but wasn’t in the best part of town.”

About a week after he finished it, the 21-year-old began vomiting so much his mother rushed him to the hospital. He spent 10 days there, four of them in a medically induced coma. A college student who loves to water ski and wakeboard, D’Ambrosio could barely walk down the driveway when he got home Sept. 10.

D’Ambrosio is one of at least 530 people — most of them young men — the CDC says are confirmed and probable cases of vaping-related lung illness. Eight people have died in six states with the first confirmed death in April. Federal and state investigators are focusing on vape cartridges that likely contained contaminated tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. But they are also looking at all substances used in electronic cigarettes, including those with nicotine.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration has warned consumers not to buy THC oil from street dealers. Both agencies also recommend against all vaping.

So why is this all happening right now?

The conditions were ripe for a crisis: Teen use of electronic nicotine cigarettes have soared as marijuana has become increasingly legal and accepted. Vaping became an increasingly popular, more discreet way to consume cannabis, especially by those already-primed young people. A black market has boomed in a regulatory void. That was thanks in part to the 2018 farm bill – signed by President Donald Trump in December – which allowed growing and sales of cannabis-based hemp in many states and created a mass market for THC-containing cannabidiol (CBD).

“If you ask what happened, there was a surge in popularity of CBD vapes by national brands this summer,” says former FDA commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb.

David Kurzfeld, whose California company removes contaminants from marijuana, says vaping has gone mainstream: “Kids don’t want to roll joints anymore.”

An expanding black market

Arizona’s Maricopa County sheriff provided more evidence last week when he announced the arrest of two men with more than $380,000 worth of illegal THC vape cartridges, including the Dank brand linked to most of the 53 vaping-related lung illnesses studied in Illinois and Wisconsin, along with guns and cash.

Even in California, where marijuana is legal for recreational and medical use, a black market thrives. Mendocino County Sheriff’s office seized $5 million worth of contaminated counterfeit THC oil bearing the brand CaliPiffs in March. It had 7,000 times the allowable level of a pesticide that turns into the poison cyanide when heated. The men arrested in July told agents half of their product was sold on the black market and the other half went to “legitimate dispensaries,” Christopher Davidson, a special agent with the Mendocino County major crimes task force said last week.

Recent testing by the Associated Press found synthetic marijuana – which is linked to deaths and effects including psychosis and violence in users – in 10 of 30 brands of CBD sold commercially and on the black market. Some also had no CBD.

“People want the product so bad in other states, it’s hard to keep people honest,” said Kurzfeld, who owns Modular Processing Systems in Willits, California, which tested the cannabis seized in Mendocino County. “They’re spraying all kinds of crazy substances on their plants, it’s going downstream and we’re seeing all the effects all over the country.”

‘Easier to hide from our parents’

D’Ambrosio started vaping at the end of his sophomore year in high school. By his senior year in 2017, he estimates about half his class vaped.  He and his friends tried cigarettes, but D’Ambrosio said, “this was easier to hide from our parents.”

D’Ambrosio made his own devices with coils they would “drip vape juice on” before he moved onto brands and devices including Juul and Nova he would get online or at any “fairly reputable” vape shop.

In his senior year, he and his friends vaped nicotine regularly and THC they bought from school dealers on the weekends. D’Ambrosio also had a medical marijuana card because he has epilepsy and vaped CBD to control seizures.

His activity foreshadowed what became a national pattern. Teen nicotine vaping rates this year are double that of 2017, the National Institute on Drug Abuse reported last week, and a study out last month found this more than triples the likelihood they will use marijuana. NIDA said 12% of high school seniors reported vaping nicotine daily and 20% of 10th graders used e-cigarettes in the last month, up from 16% last year.

D’Ambrosio could finally make legal purchases on his 21st birthday which was June 28. He and his friends bought a joint from a dispensary in Sacramento to celebrate that day. He bought his last cartridge of THC in August from a different dispensary in the county.

He spent the week of Aug. 18 helping a friend move despite the start of flu-like symptoms. By Tuesday, Aug. 27, he had trouble catching his breath, began throwing up, sweating and developed a fever. When he couldn’t stop throwing up that Saturday night, his mother took him to the emergency room, as they feared it was a risk for his blood sugar. He also has Type 1 diabetes.

A chest X-ray initially came back clear, but by early Monday morning, it was cloudy. “He went downhill and downhill very fast,” said his mother, Christy D’Ambrosio.

“There’s no protocol for his care,” said his mother. Doctors “can’t tell us what the future holds because he’s the only one they’ve seen with anything like this.”

Buying on the street

Every state requires consumers to be at least 18 to purchase vape supplies. So many teens buy the vape devices and cartridges illegally. Millions of students already had the devices so slipping in street-bought THC cartridges required little effort and eliminated the sticky, smelly task of preparing weed to smoke.

Dr. Sean Jorgensen Callahan is a pulmonologist and University of Utah professor who treated two of the six patients with vaping-induced lung illness whose cases were reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. He said his “suspicion is this is not cumulative, (but) something new that people are being exposed to.”

“The probability is very high it’s one agent causing this illness, but this could be a number of things, the hodgepodge of what people are using and combining,” Callahan said. “Young people are pretty nondiscriminatory in what they’re vaping.”

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Source: Vaping illnesses: Crisis mixes teens, black market THC, no regulation