33 pounds is a hefty amount of synthetic marijuana. Hefty enough, in fact, that the Durham Police Department said it was a record amount for the city, as the News Observer reports, meaning that a 36-year-old man now faces what the News Observer characterizes as the “highest-level trafficking charges possible” for synthetic marijuana.
Police stopped the man on I-85 but it’s not clear what led to the traffic stop nor how officers came to find the synthetic marijuana inside the man’s vehicle.
Synthetic marijuana, according to Wikipedia, is a psychoactive designer drug that came to market originally as a way to circumvent marijuana prohibition. In other words, because it was illegal in many states (and continues to be, including in North Carolina) synthetic marijuana – before it became illegal, too – was the work-around.
Due to safety concerns, the federal Synthetic Drug Abuse Prevention Act of 2012 placed synthetic marijuana on the Schedule I list of controlled substances, categorizing it as having a high potential for abuse.