New York City ended 2024 with a series of horrific subway incidents. Just days before Christmas, Debrina Kawam, a troubled New Jersey woman, was set on fire and burned to death by Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala. Kawam had apparently been sleeping on an F train at the Stillwell Avenue station in Coney Island—a common gathering place for the homeless—when Zapeta-Calil used a lighter to ignite her clothing. Afterward, he reportedly sat on a bench to watch the flames.
Zapeta-Calil was deported from the United States in 2018 but later returned and was living in a Brooklyn homeless shelter. His criminal history appears minimal. According to a shelter roommate, Zapeta-Calil was generally a normal, pleasant person who spoke with “good manners and respect”—unless he was drunk or high on K2, a synthetic cannabinoid. He was said to have a habit of chain-smoking K2, spending $30 daily on the illegal drug.
K2 became a scourge in New York City about a decade ago. This unregulated substance—composed of plant material sprayed with hallucinogenic chemicals—was associated with erratic, sometimes violent, behavior, in some cases reducing users to a “zombie-like” state. A notorious 2018 incident saw 56 people hospitalized after smoking a bad batch.
New York cracked down on K2 by making the production of synthetic cannabinoids illegal in 2012 and banning their sale entirely in 2015. The city’s health department launched an ad campaign warning users: “K2: 0% Marijuana; 100% Dangerous.” The message was clear: don’t mistake K2 for a harmless substance like marijuana. This unusual public health crusade may have inadvertently contributed to the decriminalization of marijuana in 2019. A 2012 study published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence found that “Users report a strong preference for natural over synthetic cannabis. The latter has a less desirable effect profile.” Similarly, a 2022 study in Clinical Toxicology led by Tracy Klein, assistant director for the Center for Cannabis Policy, Research, and Outreach at Washington State University, concluded that “Adoption of permissive cannabis law was associated with significant reductions in reported synthetic cannabinoid exposures. More permissive cannabis law may have the unintended benefit of reducing both motivation and harms associated with use of synthetic cannabis products.”
Pro-marijuana advocates have touted these and other studies to press for decriminalization or outright legalization of marijuana—with great success. However, as the case of Sebastian Zapeta-Calil shows, K2 has persistent appeal. The 2022 murder of Christina Yuna Lee in her Chinatown apartment shocked New Yorkers with its brutality. Her 25-year-old killer, Assamad Nash, had been arrested a few days before the murder for illegally selling Metrocard “swipes,” and was found with K2 in his pocket. “Can I get my K2 back?” he reportedly asked the arresting officer. “I love K2.” Jordan Neely, the homeless and mentally-ill man whose outburst on the subway led to his incapacitation and death in May 2023, was high on K2, which defense pathologists testified contributed to his demise.
The legalization of marijuana in New York may have increased K2’s availability. Following pot decriminalization, thousands of “smoke shops” sprang up throughout the city, sometimes several on a block, selling drug paraphernalia, unlicensed marijuana, and little bags of K2, labeled as “potpourri” or “incense.” A 2024 state law that permitted municipalities to close and padlock these stores without a warrant or means of appeal was quickly overturned as unconstitutional, so police must return to investigating each venue individually, making undercover purchases and painstakingly gathering evidence to bring a case before a judge. In practice, this allows the stores to keep selling illegal products—either unlicensed pot or synthetic products—under the counter.
It’s also unclear whether “100% marijuana,” without any K2, is entirely benign. Marijuana has been linked to the early onset of schizophrenia in young people and is widely recognized for intensifying serious mental illness in those already affected. While advocates often claim that pot has a calming effect on users, they overlook the fact that this mellowing typically gives way to irritability, crankiness, and anger as the drug’s effects wear off. Traffic fatalities in New York have risen sharply since marijuana was legalized. Pot advocates dispute this trend, but data from Canada reveal a similar surge in cannabis-related car crashes in the period immediately following national legalization.
Marijuana legalization in New York has coincided with a sharp rise in overdose deaths from stronger drugs. In 2019, the city saw 20.7 overdose deaths per 100,000 residents; by 2023, that number had more than doubled, to 44 per 100,000. This staggering increase in drug-induced morbidity far outpaces the national rise of 45 percent during the same period, suggesting that marijuana legalization may condition people to view the use of harder drugs as more acceptable and closer to the boundary of “safe” to consume. In this sense, pot may act as a societal “gateway drug.”
On the last day of 2024, New Yorkers were horrified to witness video of a man getting shoved directly into the path of a speeding Number 1 train at a subway station in the tony Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. The culprit, Kamel Hawkins, was arrested and charged with attempted murder. His father, who lives with him, told reporters that his son’s frequent pot smoking had affected his personality, which had changed recently. “We think somebody put something in his weed,” his father said. “About three weeks ago he was all right and then he started acting weird. We wanted to get him help but he refused.”
Maybe someone did put something in his weed, or maybe his weed was just weed. Linking any specific crime to the use of legal marijuana or illegal synthetic cannabinoids is hard enough, much less correlating legalization to broader crime trends. But there certainly seem to be enough pot-related incidents occurring on the streets and in the subways of New York to raise the question of whether our laissez-faire experiment with drug use is working.
Photo by Leonardo Munoz/VIEWpress