'Fake marijuana' poison cases prevalent in Bay area

Mike Irwin says the hallucinations started within a half hour – and they were frightening.

"It wasn't a slight taper up to hallucinations, like seeing different colors or something, it was pretty immediate," he said. "I actually visualized people."

Irwin, 50, says his scary experience came after using an alternative to marijuana, a substance labeled as "aromatherapy incense," which he rolled up and smoked.

"I had used the real stuff in the past for stomach problems, and I thought that this would … do just about as good," the St. Petersburg resident said.

Poison control officials in Florida have been tracking the trend of "fake marijuana" for the past year. The first report came in June 2010 and since then about 300 incidents have been reported – about one-quarter of them in the Tampa Bay area, with Pinellas and Pasco counties seeing the greatest number of incidents.

Dr. Cynthia Lewis-Younger says that's really just the tip of the iceberg, though. The "exposures" list is compiled through calls to poison control and reports from hospitals.

Younger said this type of substance is "worse than some of the illegal drugs as far as health effects."

The substances have warnings of "not for human consumption" on the label, but users ignore that.

Irwin said he bought a small 1-gram container labeled "Red Magic" for $5.

"You tend to think when something is packaged and marketed that way, even though it says not for human consumption on the bottle itself, it also says it's used for aromatherapy, so I suppose you're supposed to inhale it one way or the other," he said.

Irwin said he ended up at a hospital, where doctors made the connection between bacteria in the substance and lung damage the size of a tennis ball.

"It just seeded in my lung and started eating my lung away, and what I thought was pneumonia and coughing up phlegm from that was actually my lung. It liquefied part of my lung," he said.

Irwin says he won't be trying the stuff again, and although he's a little embarrassed about the incident, he is willing to tell his story to help warn others about the dangers of a substance he thought was safe because he could buy it over the counter.

"If this could save one kid from having a reaction like I did or save one teenager from trying it, that's very worthwhile."