Description

Synthetic marijuana is cheap, readily available at convenience stores nationwide, and is leaving a trail of dead and severely injured teenagers in its wake, making it one of the most alarming new drugs available anywhere, according to medical experts and drug enforcement officials.

Emily Bauer, a high-school sophomore from Cypress, Texas, reportedly had violent outbursts, urinated on herself, and showed psychotic behaviors, after smoking some synthetic marijuana last December, according to CNN.com. Soon after, she was rushed to the emergency room at Northwest Cypress Hospital near Houston.

The following day, Emily was still behaving violently and injuring herself, according to the Daily Mail. Doctors decided to put the teenager in a medically induced coma to run tests on Emily’s brain. That’s when they discovered she had severe vasculitis — inflamed blood vessels in her head that had constricted, cutting off the supply of oxygen to her brain.

And when Emily’s blood vessels started expanding again, they greatly increased the pressure on her brain, forcing surgeons to cut a hole in the teenager’s skull and insert a tube to drain excess fluids and relieve the pressure.

Subsequent brain images showed the extent of damage the girl had suffered. “We met with [the] neurology team who showed us Emily’s brain images,” her mother, Tonya Bauer, said on a Facebook page, according to CNN. “They told us that all white areas on [the] images were dead. It looked to us at least 70 percent of the images were white.