I haven’t heard anything about this situation before reading this, but our news did a story on the synthetic marijuana and it can be some horrible stuff! It is unregulated since it is just “herbs” and they can put acetone on it and/or any variety of crap - just awful.
Real marijuana is safer than that “synthetic” stuff. If on the real stuff, he would have been quite mellow and no threat to granny. All this synthetic garbage will kill you. It’ll take longer than a bullet, but dead is dead.