Washington (AFP)
Burning in temperature, vomiting and diarrhea, Gregory Rodriguez was sure he had caught a virus when he went to a hospital in New York in September. Two days later he was unconscious, plugged into an artificial lung and a candidate for a double lung transplant.
"I thought it had nothing to do with vaping," says the 22-year-old computer science student at AFP, two months after an ordeal that brought him closer to death at a few hours, and attributed by doctors to intensive consumption of electronic cigarettes. US authorities have described the phenomenon, which has killed 47, epidemic.
Emergency physicians in this area of Queens have not made the link immediately with vaping. As often at the beginning of this outbreak, this summer, they first sent Gregory home with antibiotics, believing in an infection. Until Gregory came back to the hospital, out of breath, and confessed that he had been vaping cannabis for two years.
"I did not want to tell them initially because it's illegal in New York State," he says.
This September 18, his body collapses quickly. It is placed under an artificial respirator, but that is not enough. His lungs were filled with a viscous substance, like flan, the fruit of the extraordinary inflammation of his airways. Oxygen could no longer pass into the blood.
"It was a few hours to die," said Dr. Mangala Narasimhan, who treated him.
Gregory is connected to a machine of last resort, ECMO (oxygenation by extra-corporal membrane): the machine sucked its blood to oxygenate it out of the body, then reinject it into the veins. The young man is plunged into an artificial coma for three days to avoid suffering.
"When I woke up, I had a tube in my mouth that went into my lungs," recalls Gregory. His mother shows him photos of him unconscious.
His lungs took advantage of the break to recover, while the machine replaced them. It saved him, he did not need a transplant. 12 days after his hospitalization, he returned home, a relatively short time compared to other patients.
His case is nevertheless typical of the most severe situations. At Long Island Jewish Medical Center, out of 40 patients, five were as serious as Gregory.
- The cannabis flaw -
"The first days were very, very hard, it was really hard, hard to climb the stairs," recalls Gregory of returning to the family apartment.
Two months later, he is no longer out of breath. But his lung capacity remains reduced to 60%, says his doctor.
"Physically, I feel normal, but mentally, I'll take a long time to recover," says Gregory. He misses cannabis. "I do not want to say addiction, but there are days when I only think about it".
What he hesitated to call an addiction cost him about $ 16 a carton of THC, the staggering ingredient in cannabis. He bought them in packs of 25, from dubious sources on the dark web, the hidden side of the internet where criminals hide, by paying in Bitcoins. A more complicated method but less expensive than the 40 dollars a cartridge requested by dealers in New York.
"It's a bit like Amazon but for drugs."
Last summer, depressed, he began to vapot more, until an entire cartridge every two days.
"Since THC is illegal, the problem is that you have to go to the black market," he says.
"If it were legal it would be safer because you would buy it in an official clinic," he said. An assertion not necessarily right, since cannabis is heavily taxed and more expensive than the black market in the states where it has been legalized.
The student points nevertheless a contradiction of the American regulation: the federal authorities discuss a prohibition of flavored electronic cigarettes, to prevent the vaping of the young people ...
But since cannabis is banned at the federal level, they do not regulate and control cannabis e-liquids that are allowed locally.
A ban on flavors "would not change anything" to the epidemic of patients, concludes Gregory. "But the THC cartridges are the ones that kill people."
© 2019 AFP