Despite serious health risks related to smoking synthetic marijuana, the drug still has its fans -- and it continues to cause trouble. In a new report, researchers describe a case of a man and his dog that both experienced seizures after exposure to a synthetic cannabis variety called "Crazy Monkey."
The 22-year-old man brought his dog to a veterinary clinic after the animal suffered a seizure, but while the vet was evaluating the dog, the owner himself had a seizure too. When the man arrived at the emergency department of a local hospital, he was very agitated and violent, to the point that he had to be restrained by several people and sedated, Dr. Hallam Melville Gugelmann, a medical toxicology fellow at the University of San Francisco, California, who treated the patient, told CBS News.
Both the man and the dog recovered after receiving treatment, and the doctors concluded that exposure to synthetic cannabis was the likely source of the two poisoning cases.
"The man later endorsed smoking three containers of a substance called 'Crazy Monkey' daily for several weeks, but would not disclose how his dog had been exposed," the researchers wrote in the case report, published in the July issue of the journal Clinical Toxicology.
The investigators suspected that the dog had been poisoned as a result of eating the drug rather than inhaling second-hand smoke, Gugelmann said.
