Board Bans Synthetic Drug Use | Video

Retha Colclasure | 11/30/2012

North Dakota has been facing an epidemic of drug use. They involve products marketed as legal alternatives to drugs like marijuana, methamphetamine, and cocaine, among others. Today, law enforcers gained a big tool to fight back with: the law.

The State Board of Pharmacy met this morning in an emergency rules hearing to ban known synthetic drug compounds and any derivative of them. The board had passed a similar law two years ago, banning certain substances, but crime lab workers say within weeks of that law going into effect, they were already seeing new compounds.

Before they took action today, the board heard from law enforcement about the effects of these drugs. They also heard from families affected by them, including testimony from the parents of a Grand Forks teenager who died last summer after taking a synthetic drug.

"We have an emergency situation here in North Dakota with these synthetics, and so I`m asking this Board to adopt emergency rules to add these synthetic substances to the Schedule of Controlled Substances," said North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem.

"You never know what`s in this stuff. You never know how it`s going to affect your body because everybody`s body is different. These are industrial grade chemicals that have never been tested on humans that were being sold by a chemical company to a college kid in Grand Forks," said Debbie Bjerk, who lost her son to synthetic drug use.

The board also heard from a teenage girl who had used synthetic drugs and from her father, who said he supported doing what had to be done to get them off the market.

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