Ohio Alert: 24 People Hospitalized After Attending Music Festival

Ohio Dreams turned nightmarish on Saturday when 24 people suffered bad reactions to candy passed along at a music festival on Saturday. The festival, called "The Last Weekend on Earth" is one bad trip after another when people started having bad reactions to candy laced with THC, which was passed around since 11AM. According to the New York Daily News, each piece of the "medibles" contained "very, very high dose of THC (Tetrahydrocannabinol)," the mild-altering chemical in marijuana.

Concertgoers started getting sick around 4PM, with ambulances being packed to the Ohio Health Hospital in Mansfield, where patients were treated with Narcan, a drug used to counteract overdoses of opiates like heroin and oxycodone, which, according to Time, is the initial diagnosis of paramedics. However, when victims did not respond to the drug, the hospital had the candies tested, and the results came back positive for high doses of THC.

These synthetic cannabinoids, which the candies are laced with, can be anywhere from two to a hundred times more potent than natural THC that is found in natural marijuana, and its general unpredictability is due to its unknown chemical composition. CNN noted that the drug is especially dangerous because there are fifteen types of synthetic cannabinoids that are classified as Schedule I controlled substances. These substances, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, are drugs that have no accepted medical use, and are at a high potential risk for abuse.

The 24 victims on Saturday, fortunately did not have anything more than stomachaches, as there were no deaths or serious injuries reported, and all of them are expected to fully recover from their drugged haze. Still, the victims were treated with naloxone, which blocks the effects of opioid overdoses. No criminal charges were announced, as it remains unclear where the victims got the drugs, and the two-day festival went on as planned through Sunday.