Yeah, "chems" have been around awhile. They play a game with legislators, who used to ban sustances uniquely. They'd simpler alter it in some likely insignificant way to have it skirt prohibition and continue with business as usual.
So media started calling them "bath salts", because it can be just about anything, and so there's a high degree of unpredictability with it. Fake marijuana falls into that category. With some marketed as "incence", and is widely known as Spice, marketed by self defeating hack activists/profiteers like 420 magazine. People have had some bad reactions on that shit.
It doesn't take long for them to become confused and associated. If someone who is a regular user of medical weed, like posters here, can be confused by it, or aren't aware of it enough to know already, then it's easy to see how quickly our cause can be flanked.
But we've also had reckless, bullshit activists send people to the hospital with more usual, completely questionable extracts, and the total abuse of them as marketing props. They do plenty to blur the lines of reason all by themselves. So have we got a legit argument left that allows us to say "hey.... we're not like those guys"?