Pentagon launches anti-spice campaign - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Pentagon launches anti-spice campaign

High-level military officials are sounding the alarm about the dangers of synthetic marijuana that is sold legally as “spice.”

The Pentagon Channel is promising “an in-depth look at spice” through October.

“One bad dose could cost you your life,” Marine Staff Sgt. Josh Hauser, an anchor for a Pentagon Channel news program, said during an Oct. 1 broadcast.

On the same day, the American Forces Press Service published an article warning about the health problems and disciplinary measures troops can suffer if they smoke spice or similar products.

A slew of official videos about spice are also popping up on Facebook, iTunes and YouTube.

The official message conveys an urgent health risk and warns troops that smoking the chemical-soaked herbal blend is punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice as a wrongful use of “any intoxicating substance not intended for human ingestion.”

One video refers to marijuana as “the devil you know” and spice as “the devil you don’t.”

“You may one day have a bag that gives you the effect of normal marijuana ... but then again you may have something that is 100 times more potent and could lead to death,” Capt. Kevin Klette, a Navy doctor and head of the Defense Department’s Drug Demand Reduction Program, said in a video posted on Facebook.

Military officials acknowledge that the drug is difficult, if not impossible, to catch in routine urinalysis tests.

“We have a difficulty detecting it,” Army Col. Timothy Lyons, chief of toxicology in the Defense Department’s medical examiner’s office, said in the same video.

Experts say spice is a blend of common herbs treated with synthetic cannabinoids, which are chemicals that affect the brain in a manner similar to the active ingredients in marijuana.

The DoD information campaign about spice comes about two years after military officials began identifying the problem.

Army criminal investigators first heard reports of soldiers using synthetic marijuana in 2008. In 2009, a top general issued an Army-wide warning flagging spice as a growing problem.

In the Marine Corps, early problems arose in Japan, prompting Marine commanders to issue a ban there in September 2008. Last July, the Marine base commander at Camp Lejeune, N.C., sent a letter to local merchants urging them to stop selling spice to people who may be Marines.

The Navy reported a large-scale bust in July 2009 on the Japan-based aircraft carrier George Washington, resulting in 15 sailors getting kicked out of the Navy for smoking spice.

The Navy issued a servicewide ban in March.

The Air Force has caught dozens of airmen smoking spice during the past year and explicitly banned it in June.