It was around 5:30 p.m. on a Monday in early February last year. Helen Hudson had just gotten home from work when she heard a knock on her door.

“Ms. Helen, Karreem is down on Newell and Midland, and he’s in the middle of the street doing push-ups,” she remembered her neighbor’s 13-year-old daughter tell her.

She took a deep breath. Karreem, who was 28, was her only baby. And they were tight. ‘What the hell is going on?’ she thought.

Helen got in her car and drove to where Karreem was in the middle of the street heatedly pacing around, his face distorted, hair uncombed, “looking like a crazy person,” she said.

Karreem’s eyes were empty.

“He looked at me and didn’t realize that I was his mother — like I didn’t even matter,” Helen said. “He wasn’t there. That was not my son. Period. I did not know him.”

“What the f*ck are you doing here?” he asked her. “Get the f*ck out of my face.”

He called her his demon. Karreem had never talked to her like that. Normally, Helen would’ve grabbed Karreem, but she feared he would become violent. It didn’t matter who she really was.

After a short while, Helen coerced Karreem into the passenger seat of her car and began to drive home. While in the car, he started pounding on the dashboard. His mouth foamed. Helen called 911 to tell them to get the police to her street. She needed to get him out of her car and to the hospital. Several police cars awaited Helen when she got home, where they told her that Karreem had been smoking “water.”

—

Although water has been around Syracuse’s South Side for approximately a decade, its popularity has increased greatly over the past year. Christine Stork, the clinical director of the Upstate New York Poison Center, told a group of concerned community members at a drug awareness meeting March 19 the center has seen a large increase in episodes coming into the emergency department.

“This was not the case about a year ago,” Stork said. “We’re seeing a huge increase in that number.”

For the meeting, Helen assembled a panel of experts, including Stork, to tell the community about water’s medical effects, the crime it causes and the greater danger it poses for the community, and to brainstorm how to stop it from spreading.

Water is made by dipping cigarettes, marijuana joints or, in some instances, mint or tea leaves into liquid PCP — known among drug dealers and users as “embalming fluid.” It’s known by a variety of names around the country: wet-wet, amp and illie, among others.

Sometime since the drug first became popular, though, some dealers started confusing the slang with actual embalming fluid — the substance funeral homes use to preserve dead bodies — which contains numerous other toxins such as formaldehyde and emits a distinct, noxious odor. The mistaken but now popular use of actual embalming fluid has increased the medical dangers of using water but adds little to the high, according to Brian Johnson, director of the addiction psychiatry program at Upstate Medical University Hospital.

People on water hear things, see things and feel things that aren’t real, Johnson explained. Sometimes their hallucinations make them paranoid, driving them into confused, violent rages they can’t remember once the drug’s effects wear off. In these rages, they feel all-powerful and possess incredible strength. Their body temperatures go up, too, often causing them to shamelessly undress, he said.

Syracuse Police Chief Frank Fowler told the group about two recent incidences of people driving while intoxicated by the drug. One driver got a car up to such speed that it flipped and wedged itself between two other cars. Another car was estimated to be going faster than 100 mph down South Salina Street, a popular city road that has a 30 mph speed limit.

The director of one local funeral home told the group how an employee of his home was scammed into giving embalming fluid to an anonymous man two times before he alerted him to what was going on. Another funeral home owner said hers has been burglarized twice.

Bridget Scholl, an assistant district attorney, told the group that cases involving water “are coming in every week.”

The use of actual embalming fluid has provided a convenient cover for water dealers. Although PCP is an illegal drug under New York state law, embalming fluid is legal. It can be found in funeral homes, hospitals and high school science labs. Dealers can hide the PCP in the embalming fluid containers, and without enough probable cause to test the fluid for drugs, police officers cannot arrest them.

One proposed solution to this problem is to regulate who can purchase and possess embalming fluid. But Johnson, who calls the combination of PCP and the fluid a marketing plan devised by drug dealers to entice customers into trying something new, said he is unconvinced that will solve anything. Liquid PCP can be put in any liquid — not just embalming fluid — and still get people just as high.

“I’m afraid if we start to regulate formaldehyde then they’d just find another way to market it,” Johnson said.

The danger of the psychotic illusions water induces is compounded by the painkilling effects of PCP, which doctors originally tested as an anesthetic in World War II but discontinued because of its side effects.

“They feel as though they could do anything — they feel like nothing can stop them — and they have no pain,” Stork said. “They really have nothing to restrain the degree of destruction they can do.”

Rapper Antron Singleton, better known as “Big Lurch,” killed his friend’s girlfriend by cutting her open with a 3-inch paring knife and then began to eat some of her flesh because of a paranoid hallucination from smoking water.

“All I can remember, you know, the world was going to end. And I had to find the devil and kill the devil before the world ended,” Singleton said in an interview from prison on FOX News. “That’s the last thought that I had.”

The police found him naked, covered in blood, in the middle of a street.

—

Back on her street, Helen begged the police to take Karreem to St. Joseph’s Hospital’s psychiatric health center. They refused. They couldn’t, they told her. Although he was intoxicated, Karreem had not committed a crime; he had not injured anyone, he was not driving, and he was not in possession of or intending to sell the drugs he was on. Without a crime to arrest him for, the police couldn’t do anything. Kareem was legally psychotic.

Police warned Helen that because of the drug Karreem was on, she should not take him into her home, Helen said. Helen asked her neighbor to drive Karreem to the hospital because she couldn’t handle another ride with him. Her neighbor agreed, and she watched the two of them get in his car. But Karreem never got there. The neighbor told her that he escaped when they stopped at a store on the way over. Helen doesn’t buy it.

At around 5 a.m. the next day, Karreem called Helen. He asked her to take him to the hospital so they could give him something that’d help him sleep.

“I was mortified,” Helen said. But she got up and drove Karreem over to the ER anyway. “He was reaching for help. I was going to help him.”

Twelve hours after that night, Karreem was still psychotic. When they arrived at the hospital, two security guards came out with a “babysitter,” as Helen called her, to watch over him. In the main waiting area, he put his headphones on and started screaming and cursing along to his music. Some of Helen’s family was there, along with her pastor, offering support.

In the waiting room, a lady mouthed “I’m so sorry” to Helen.

When Kareem was taken to the ward, Helen explained to the psychiatrist that he was having a psychotic episode because of the drug and begged her to give him a shot to sedate him.

“I just couldn’t take it anymore,” she said.

Kareem spent five days in the psychiatric ward. The day after he was released, a Sunday, he asked Helen to drive him around to four churches. At one, Helen put her arm around him, but she was repulsed away by an overwhelming odor. She asked Karreem what it was and he said to her, “It’s me, Mom.” Helen said she thinks it was still water sweating out of his body.

Karreem stayed mostly distant from Helen for about eight months after the episode, which makes her think he kept using the drug, she said.

“He’s always said when he’s doing wrong he doesn’t come around me,” Helen said.

But he eventually called Helen, after being told more about the drug by Helen’s niece.

“Mom — why didn’t you tell me about all this stuff?” he asked her.

So they met up. Helen showed him a pamphlet, they talked and he learned. Soon after, she overheard him telling his friends about what’s in the drug and how dangerous it is.

“He started, in turn, helping educate more people,” Helen said.

Helen said she believes that Karreem is now off water. For the past six months he has been close again, she said.

Helen said she is thankful she and her son are close again and thankful that nothing worse happened.

“I’m blessed, I’m lucky — I’m all of that — because a lot of homicides have come around from that drug,” she said. “I don’t know seriously how I, even though I didn’t do it, how I would be able to live with myself if my son took another person’s life. I really don’t. I really don’t.”

 

Published on April 7, 2010 at 12:00 pm