Vape cartridges aren’t just for THC, CBD, and nicotine any more. These days, people are finding ways to make even the strongest of psychedelics compatible with vapes.
According to concurrent reports from the Raleigh News & Observer and ABC 11 News, that’s what North Carolina police officers found when they raided a DMT lab in Wake Forest county late last week. After the bust, Wake Forest sheriff’s department said they found $4 million worth of narcotics, which could make the seizure one of the country’s biggest single-day drug interdictions ever.
DMT, short for Dimethyltryptamine, is a strong hallucinogen found in plants and other living things, that can be isolated to produce a short, but incredibly strong psychedelic high.
“It was pretty potent stuff,” a Wake Forest sheriff’s officer told ABC 11. “We backed out immediately because we knew the precursors that were used to manufacture it. It looks like soy sauce, but it’s definitely not soy sauce, and it’s made up of a lot of chemicals. It’s a good idea to stay away from it.”
At the suburban drug lab, cops said they found large quantities of DMT in liquid form, as well as large amounts of vape hardware. In interviews with the laboratory operators, cops said that the men admitted to putting DMT into vape pens.
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Over the past few months, the emergence of a mysterious lung illness caused by vaping has drawn huge amounts of attention to both the legal and black market vape industries. And while the vape crisis has largely been drawn back to black market THC cartridges, cops have also seized vape products that actually contain potentially dangerous narcotics like synthetic cannabis, or spice.
Because it is hard to synthesize, DMT is not an easily-accessible drug. In fact, the drug is so rare that last week’s bust was only the third DMT lab discovery in North Carolina’s history.
Both of the men arrested in the bust have been jailed on charges of Manufacture of a Schedule I, Maintaining a Dwelling, Possession of Precursors and Possession of Firearm by a Convicted Felon.
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