A woman in California who became a killer while gripped by psychosis says companies selling the drug legally are hiding the truth about its effects
When Bryn Spejcher watched the police bodycam footage, she did not recognise the woman she saw.
The 33-year-old saw herself, deranged and frenzied, stabbing her body and then her service dog, Arya, the police having to taser her four times and beating her nine times with a baton — breaking her arm — to make her stop. Then she saw her friend, Chad O’Melia, stabbed 108 times in his home in Thousand Oaks, northwest of Los Angeles, where the two had been hanging out and smoking weed. She had killed him.
“It’s still hard to believe something like this actually happened,” Spejcher said. “I am not a violent person. I would never harm anybody. And I’ve had to learn how to manage those feelings of guilt or regret or sorrow or, you know, remorse, depression, fear, disbelief.”
Kevin Sabet, a White House drug policy adviser to Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George W Bush, said: “Legalisation was not supposed to make it more dangerous, but it has.” He is chief executive of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, a policy group working on drug education and harm reduction.
“Communities are saturated with propaganda rather than a greater awareness of risk,” he said. “The industry has grown and grown, using their profits to lobby and become hugely powerful. It’s now very difficult to get any [regulatory changes] through.”
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