This petition is a personal appeal born from a tragic experience. My brother, Nathaniel John Hester of Ossining, NY, died January 8, 2025 due to an addiction to synthetic marijuana that he had battled since 2015. It's a substance that goes by many names - Spice, K-2, fake weed, Yucatan Fire, Bliss, Blaze, Skunk, Moon Rocks, JWH-018, -073, and more. Often found in gas stations and adorned with colorful wrappers, it's marketed towards kids. This poison is manufactured and sold legally because manufacturers adjust the ingredients to bypass legal restrictions. My brother's final years were consumed by loneliness and depression, fear and desolation. His sadness didn't only consume him, it affected our entire family and and ended in the most tragic way possible.  Our dear brother committed suicide on January 8, 2025.  We spent time with addiction teams, mental health experts, even the police.  It was so easy for him to get this drug because it’s in most gas stations colorfully displayed like a child’s candy.

But we can learn from Nathaniel's story. We must urge our Congress to pass a bill banning the manufacture and sale of all variants of synthetic marijuana in the United States, regardless of its ingredients. This is not only for Nathaniel, but for all families who could face this heartbreaking journey. Every signature carries us a step further away from another family suffering the same tragic loss that we did. Please help hold Congress accountable to their duty to protect us. Sign our petition.

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Synthetic weed in stores,, why?Synthetic pot also goes by hundreds of names: Spice, K-2, fake weed, Yucatan Fire, Bliss, Blaze, Skunk, Moon Rocks, and JWH-018, -073 (and other numerical suffixes), after Huffman’s initials. Synthetic cannabis, unlike pot, however, can cause a huge variety of symptoms, which can be severe: Agitation, vomiting, hallucination, paranoia, tremor, seizure, tachycardia, hypokalemia, chest pain, cardiac problems, stroke, kidney damage, acute psychosis, brain damage, and death.