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.”
Spejcher had suffered an episode of cannabis-induced psychosis. This was agreed in criminal court and she was convicted of involuntary manslaughter — lessened from murder — for which she received a non-custodial sentence in March.
She is one of thousands of victims of cannabis-induced psychosis in California, where a growing number of people are questioning legalisation, demanding further regulation of how it is marketed and worrying that companies are hiding the true risks of the drug.
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“When it happened I didn’t know what cannabis-induced psychosis was,” said Spejcher, who was an audiologist at the time. Today she lives with her parents in Chicago. “I thought, like everybody else, ‘Oh they’re making marijuana legal in California so it’s safe, harmless, it just makes you relax, hang out, eat snacks.’ ”
According to state hospital data, there were 1,053 visits to A&E in 2019 for cannabis-induced psychosis in California — a 54 per cent increase from 2016, the year that voters elected to legalise recreational use in the state for those aged 21 and over.
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Spejcher met O’Melia, a 26-year-old accountant, at a dog park in 2018, the year that legalisation came into effect. A few weeks later, in May, she went to his house, where he prepared a bong. An inexperienced smoker, she believes that if she had been aware of the risks and if it had been illegal, she would not have smoked it.
She took two “hits”, after which she said she felt like she was caught in a time loop and became convinced she was dead. Then she had a blackout, during which she the attack took place.
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After years of therapy, depression and periods of suicidal thoughts, Spejcher intends to commit her time to educating young people about the “very real danger” of cannabis. “I want the marijuana industry to regulate and show warnings about their products — Chad was a victim of that, too.”
A forensic psychologist, Dr Kris Mohandie, diagnosed Spejcher with cannabis-induced psychosis, a condition listed in the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. “Symptoms include hallucinations and often delusions, which are fixed and false beliefs,” Mohandie said. “There are also often ideas of reverence — seeing special messages, signals — and just grossly disorganised behaviour and speech. You then need to ensure there is no other explanation for it other than the ingestion of the cannabis subject.”
Mohandie has worked on more than half a dozen murder cases in which the perpetrator had cannabis-induced psychosis. “We didn’t used to see this prevalence, but since legalisation in California it has risen. Firstly this is because there are more people using it and secondly because it has lead to much higher potency.”
At a federal level, cannabis is still classified as a schedule 1 drug, the most extreme, meaning that it has a high potential for abuse, and no accepted medical use in treatment. President Biden said he intends to reduce it to schedule 3.
However, states are able to regulate its use, with 38 out of 50 having legalised the drug for medicinal use (which California did in 1996) and 24 legalising it recreationally. Packaging in California must warn against consumption or possession for those under 21 or pregnant, as well as impairing ability to drive. It does not, however, warn against specific health risks, as tobacco products must.
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“The momentum and enthusiasm for recreational marijuana meant there was a sloppiness, a disjunctured path, that let it slip [into the market] too fast,” said Dr Daniel Buffington, a clinical pharmacologist who is president of the American Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences. The US cannabis market was estimated at $15.8 billion last year and often involves gummy sweets, flavoured vapes and oils, some with up to 95 per cent THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, the chemical that makes people feel intoxicated,
“The problem is that the regulations were created when there was not enough clinical research,” Buffington said, “though there are now studies which show a causational link [between cannabis and psychosis].”
There is no national data on prevalence — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not track psychosis — and the exact reason why cannabis can lead to psychosis is not yet established. However, researchers understand that higher levels of THC increases the risk. According to statistics compiled by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the average THC content of cannabis seized by the Drug Enforcement Agency has more than tripled in the past 25 years, increasing from 4 per cent in 1995 to 15 per cent in 2021.
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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Many sufferers are seeking recourse through the civil courts. Sandra Ribera Speed, a California lawyer, is suing the cannabis company Stiiizy for negligence on behalf of a family whose 18-year-old son, then a minor, suffered psychosis after habitually vaping a Stiiizy product.
They claim that instead of warning about the risks of ingesting high-potency cannabis, the company markets its products to teenagers using bright colours, aspirational imagery and sexualised advertising. “Stiiizy’s conduct and products are causing young people to suffer cannabis-induced psychosis and driving an epidemic … among California’s youth,” the court documents read.
The 18-year-old, who wants to remain anonymous, began vaping the products at 15, while he was at school north of San Francisco. It is against the law to use cannabis under the age of 21. He was a high achiever and sports star, hoping to go to an Ivy League university. Then one Monday morning before school in August 2022, he had a psychotic episode. “Until that moment, I had no clue he was smoking marijuana,” his mother said.
Noticing him acting strangely, she suggested they go to the doctor, at which point he ran to the kitchen, pulled out a butcher’s knife, held it to his neck and threatened to kill himself if she did not take him to school instead. He had to be wrestled to the ground by his father, his mother calling 911, after which he was handcuffed and taken to hospital.
The mother said: “To believe that your golden child has lost their mind, literally, and is now a danger to themselves and other people, it was so deeply traumatising. You cannot imagine. He looked demonic.”
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There the boy was diagnosed with cannabis-induced psychosis. Hours later, hearing voices and convinced the nurses were trying to kill him, he escaped through a window and ran half-naked and barefoot to his old school, where he ranted to the head teacher that aliens were trying to murder him. He was taken to a specialist psychiatric hospital where, said his mother, “The nurse grabbed my hand and said: ‘You have no idea how many teenagers we are seeing like this.’ I thought, how the hell do we not know about this? How is no one talking about this?”
It took him months to recover, his school results plummeting and the psychotic symptoms continuing for months, according to his parents. Now 18, he is “not the same boy. He is much more withdrawn, confidence shattered, slower.”
A Stiiizy spokesman said the company did not market or sell its product to minors and that they followed all California-mandated packaging requirements, including marking the legal age limit. “The allegations in this lawsuit are false and inflammatory,” he said. “We intend to vigorously contest the baseless allegations set forth in the complaint.”
The family, and the lawsuit, want companies to change their marketing tactics and include further warnings on the packaging, specifying the health risks. The mother said: “I don’t want this to ever happen to another family.”
