My friend and I got ahold of some shit one time that did the crackling thing. It also looked almost dusted, and my buddy got it for his birthday from a guy who sells a lot of other shit. After the first hit, we sat around and debated the probability of it being laced, since it hit so fucking hard we were pretty much tripping. Then we decided we didn't care, and had an awesome night.
I bought some more later, and it went straight from the grower's hands to mine, and it was the same deal. The stuff was so fucking potent it was almost impossible to smoke if you had anything to do. I eventually realized if I took a hit a quarter the size of normal I'd just get really fucking stoned instead of feeling like I'd been eating tabs all morning. I never tested it or anything, so a synthetic cannabinoid is certainly possible, but it wasn't meth, since I could pass out.
It's probably just ridiculously strong weed, I can barely even consider that stuff to be the same drug. I wish I could get my hands on some more, but really it fucked my tolerance up to such an extreme degree I had to take a week long break (I don't really build tolerance, 24 hours and I'm usually back to my normal stoner tolerance, 48 and I get stoned like a noob again.) just to get stoned off non-ridiculous amounts of weed again, so it's probably for the better.