An Alaska village at the gateway to the Arctic Ocean also stands on the cusp of a major challenge confronting the nation: How to stop the steady flow of synthetic marijuana that's been specially crafted to escape the reach of state laws.
The movement of spice into Diomede, an outpost near the edge of Siberia that's one of the most isolated communities in the U.S., highlights the ingenuity of the designer drug industry and the challenges faced by authorities striving to combat it.
Like the first generation of synthetic dope reaching Alaska a few years ago, the reformulated, faux-pot still resembles old-school marijuana, with its olive-green tint and hoary flakes and buds. But to avoid conflict with a 2011 law passed in Alaska, manufacturers -- perhaps from the Middle East or China, investigators say -- have modified the drug compounds they spray on shredded plant material to create their wares.
Like its earlier chemical cousin, this next-gen drug is considered more sinister than natural pot, with symptoms that include seizures, unconsciousness, delusions, even death. "Synthetic marijuana" is a shrewd marketing euphemism for a drug that behaves more like felony-level hallucinogens like PCP or acid, with mind-blitzing properties so severe that users can sometimes barely move, officials said.
Worse yet, who knows exactly what the stuff is soaked in. "I'll tell any teenager in town it's the same as opening up their mom's kitchen cabinet and mixing up the Clorox, floor cleaner and other cleaners in there because you have no idea what this stuff will you do to you, but it will be bad," said Cynthia Franklin, municipal prosecutor for Anchorage.
Increasingly abused and sold in Alaska, Spice is easily available online or for purchase at head shops in urban areas like Anchorage, police say. It's aimed at kids and comes in flashy little packages with names like "WTF," "Mind Eraser" or "Scooby Snax" and emit sweet smells once opened, even like bubble gum. And it's lucrative. Sgt. Mark Rein with Anchorage police said a Fairbanks shop employee told him he made $2,000 to $3,000 a day selling the packages.
The drug is most prevalent in Alaska's big cities, and anti-drug agents and prosecutors who are increasingly aware of its scope are focusing their efforts on the state's more-populated road system.
That may offer hope in Diomede, a community of 70 residents on an island in the Bering Strait some 700 miles northwest of Anchorage. The drugs are apparently arriving by mail shipped through Fairbanks or Anchorage. The only access into the village is by helicopter or small plane in winter when an airstrip can be carved atop the frozen Bering Sea.
That the drugs reach such an isolated village is troubling, said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who recently visited Diomede and heard directly about its struggles.
"When you see a community like Diomede that's so geographically isolated and you hear from folks that live there and on the outside that there's a drug problem, you think wait, we ought to be able to address this, because the means in and out are pretty straight up," Murkowski said.
"But the problem is, if the drugs aren't illegal, then how do you intervene?"??
Legal gray area
Officials across Alaska wrestle with that very question. Several specific compounds used in spice are banned under federal law, as under the 2011 state law, but those laws can be circumvented by manufacturers changing their ingredients.
As a result, local and state lawmakers are increasingly eyeing language from the broader, federal Analog Act that allows drugs that are "substantially similar" to a controlled substance to be treated like a controlled substance, giving federal agents broader authority.
"If it looks like spice and acts like spice and kills people like spice, then for the purposes of the law, it is spice," is how Franklin puts the law's ability to stop new iterations of the drug, which are now often called "herbal potpourri" or "incense."
But state and local authorities are hamstrung because they don't enforce federal law unless they're part of a joint task force involving federal agents. There's currently no such program, but that's about to change.
Federal authorities are working with city police departments in Alaska to establish such an effort, said Frank Russo, assistant attorney with the U.S. District Attorney's Office in Anchorage.
The $30 packages of the drug also attempt to skirt the law through labeling. They claim the stuff isn't for human consumption, and that it's legal in all 50 states.
But it is in fact meant to be consumed by humans, and it's illegal under the federal Analog Act, Franklin said. If you ask a clerk at a head shop, he or she will tell you the package says one thing but that it's actually meant to be smoked or ingested by any means possible, she said.
Franklin said her office at the municipality is deep in the process of pursuing changes to municipal code that will help Anchorage police fight spice in Alaska's largest city.
Those and other efforts in the works might help stem the flow of drugs moving into Diomede.
"To the people who sell this junk, I would say, 'enjoy it while it lasts because we are going to stop you,'" Franklin said.
Unfamiliar demon
For all its known dangers, synthetic marijuana is generally considered less risky than bath salts, also known as synthetic cocaine or synthetic ecstasy. Sometimes peddled under the name "molly," bath salts led to the overdose and death of a young man last year and the guilty pleas of several members of a distribution ring. The organizer -- 20-year-old Robin Gattis, son of Rep. Lynn Gattis of Wasilla -- pled guilty to providing drugs to the victim.
Still, synthetic marijuana is dangerous in its own right and has led to bizarre, violent outbursts. Health officials and police say they're seeing more of that behavior in patients and suspects believed to have used the stuff.
Recently, officers arrested a man from the small Southcentral Alaska town of Houston who ran out of spice after a night of smoking it, then embarked on a rampage that included beating a puppy to death after slamming it against walls, the ceiling and smashing it through a window.
And during the day in Anchorage's busy Town Square Park last summer, 42-year-old Earl Vrooman Jr. raped an 18-year-old woman after they'd smoked half a joint of spice, police said. Reportedly, her brain was so gone she couldn't move to stop him.
The village of Diomede had its own spice-related violence in early 2011, when 43-year-old Vincent Ahkinga was arrested for arson and firing shots into the air after he'd used the drug, said Anne Sears, a state drug enforcement investigator based in Nome.
"He lost his mind and decided he'd burn someone's house down," Sears said.
Sears said troopers have intercepted spice headed into Diomede. It's a "huge problem" there, but not in the dozen or so other villages that she regularly visits. Those communities fight the Bush's more familiar demons, such as bootlegged whisky and homebrew, which are also a problem in Diomede.
But there's little Sears can do about the spice in Diomede because the state law is largely ineffective for today's version. "It's a very difficult situation and I don't know what the solution is," said Sears.
Residents in Diomede said people as young as 14 are getting visibly trashed, stumbling as they walk along the boardwalk, and in some cases showing up at work when they can barely function.
As the problem has worsened in recent months, people in the impoverished community have stopped applying for jobs at the city, the tribe and the school -- such as three recently open teacher aide positions.
An odd visit
Sen. Murkowski heard first-hand about Diomede's spice problem during a Sept. 5 day visit to the island, as part of her ongoing effort to learn about issues faced by Alaska communities.
Traveling with her in a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter were Tom Ostebo, commander of the Coast Guard district in Alaska, Maj. Gen. Tom Katkus, commissioner of Alaska's Department of Military and Veteran Affairs.
The reception was unusual compared to others she's gotten in rural Alaska, Murkowski said, because the village largely ignored its guests.
"There was not the same, 'Hey we got visitors from out of town, a senator, an admiral, let's show them the school, the health clinic, the issues we have and maybe have a dance or a potluck,'" she said.
The delegation talked to students gathered in the school, which has recently dwindled from about 30 to only 17 because people are leaving the island for the larger city of Nome on the mainland, Murkowski said.
During an impromptu meeting in a hallway with some of the village's leaders, she heard about the drugs.
"There was a real hesitation to talk, but they were honest in their statements because they're worried about their community," she said. "But I tell you when we were talking about the issue of drugs, some of those who had walked up and heard what was being discussed immediately left and that was last we saw of them, which was a little disturbing."
Shrinking village
The 50-mile-wide Bering Strait that's home to Diomede has become an increasingly busy crossroads as international freighters, research vessels and energy interests take advantage of melting ice and increased travel opportunities in the Arctic Ocean.
But except for a pair of adventure-cruise ships that ferried guests to the island this summer, those ships aren't visiting Diomede, where there's no dock to handle them.
Isaac Ahkvaluk, the mayor, fills in at the post office when there's no postmaster. He sees what he believes are packages of spice arriving in the mail from Anchorage or from out of state, as far away as Florida. But he's helpless to stop them. "I need a warrant or something," he said.
People have left the village because of the drugs and the homebrew parties, said Ahkvaluk. The population has dropped from more than 100 to around 70 in just over a year.
Gone is the health aide, who grew tired of dealing with people high on spice, he said. Also, the city council has dropped from five members to two, too small for a quorum to make decisions.
"The village is gonna shrink even more because I'm moving and I'm taking with my sisters with me," Akvaluk said, referring to two siblings who work at the city and the school.
He's in the process of securing a loan for a mortgage, and hopes he can borrow enough so they can all move into a house in Nome.
"There's too much home-brewing, and the thought of another shooting" like the one in 2011 has him on edge, he said. And he's worried about his sisters, who live near a house where people make homebrew.
"I was up all night, standing by, making sure they don't do anything stupid," he said of one recent episode, worried the partiers would stumble into the wrong house as they've done before, or perhaps threaten his sisters.
The village has no police officer -- state troopers based in Nome must fly into the village -- so Ahkvaluk also serves as a watchman, keeping in touch with troopers but unable to stop the drug abuse.
"I don't think there's anything we do about that," he said of the spice.
Solutions proposed
That's the same frustration shared across the nation as states such as Indiana and Minnesota also grapple with stopping synthetic drugs. Alaska state lawmakers have had more success banning bath salts -- accomplished by a 2012 state law introduced by Sen. Kevin Meyer, R-Anchorage. But the chemical makeup of bath salts makes them easier to stop, said Orin Dym, director of the Alaska crime lab.
Rep. Cathy Munoz, a Juneau Republican, pushed through the 2011 law to stop synthetic marijuana. It outlawed several chemical compounds in use at the time, many derivatives of JWH, such as JWH-018 or JWH-073.
But about 90 percent of the new spice no longer contains those compounds, according to dozens of samples seized by authorities this year and sent to the state crime lab for testing. Today, most samples contain compounds such as XLR-11.
It's no fault of the law that chemists were able to work around it, said Dym. "It's not that it's poorly written. This is simply a class of compounds that is difficult to legislate."
But state officials are hopeful. The attorney's office hasn't yet prosecuted anyone in Alaska for illegally distributing synthetic marijuana, Russo said. But he and others have said federal investigations are under way, including in one case involving a large seizure of spice from head shops in Fairbanks. Russo wouldn't provide additional details.
"What I can tell you though is we have been meeting with our local law enforcement partners and we're developing a strategy to combat (spice) proliferation in Alaska," he said.
That effort includes a budding task force with Anchorage police, said Franklin, the municipal prosecutor. Her office is also working on an effort to incorporate language of the federal Analog Act into city law.
"The Feds are successfully using it all over the nation to assist local prosecutors like myself in shutting this down, so we'll be going to the assembly and asking for a revision to our municipal criminal ordinance," Franklin said.
She expected to bring the proposal to the assembly early next month. It will include an effort to seize the assets of spice distributors, such as head shops, that don't pull the "herbal potpourri" off their shelves.
"We are going to get this passed and we will shut them down," if they don't comply, she said.
Rep. Munoz, who created her 2011 legislation after a parent in Juneau told her that her son ended up in the emergency room with heart-attack like symptoms after using spice, said she'd like to try again in the next legislative session in January, including possibly incorporating the federal language into state law.
That change, above all, might make the most difference in Diomede, giving state troopers patrolling the Bush the tools they need to stop spice.
Contact Alex DeMarban alex(at)alaskadispatch.com