The powders often contain mephedrone and methylenedioxypyrovalerone, also known as MDPV, and can cause hallucinations, paranoia, rapid heart rates and suicidal thoughts, authorities say. The chemicals are in products sold legally at convenience stores and on the Internet as bath salts and even plant foods. However, they aren't necessarily being used for the purposes on the label.
Mississippi lawmakers this week began considering a proposal to ban the sale of the powders, and a similar step is being sought in Kentucky. In Louisiana, the bath salts were outlawed by an emergency order after the state's poison center received more than 125 calls in the last three months of 2010 involving exposure to the chemicals.
One man, Neil Brown, of Fulton, Miss., got high off the bath salts and then slashed his face and stomach. He survived, but authorities said other people have not been so lucky.
In Brown's case, he said he had tried every drug from heroin to crack and was so shaken by terrifying hallucinations that he wrote one Mississippi paper urging people to stay away from the advertised bath salts.
"I couldn't tell you why I did it," Brown said, pointing to his scars. "The psychological effects are still there."
While Brown survived, sheriff's authorities in one Mississippi county say they believe one woman overdosed on the powders there. In southern Louisiana, the family of a 21-year-old man says he cut his throat and ended his life with a gunshot. Authorities are investigating whether a man charged with capital murder in the December death of a Tippah County, Miss., sheriff's deputy was under the influence of the bath salts.
Gary Boggs, an executive assistant at the DEA, said there's a lengthy process to restrict these types of designer chemicals, including reviewing the abuse data. But it's a process that can take years.
Dr. Mark Ryan, director of Louisiana's poison control center, said he thinks state bans on the chemicals can be effective. He said calls about the chemicals have dropped sharply since Louisiana banned their sale in January.
Ryan said cathinone, the parent substance of the drugs, comes from a plant grown in Africa and is regulated. He said MDPV and mephedrone are made in a lab, and they aren't regulated because they're not marketed for human consumption. The stimulants affect neurotransmitters in the brain, he said.
"It causes intense cravings for it. They'll binge on it three or four days before they show up in an ER. Even though it's a horrible trip, they want to do it again and again," Ryan said.
Ryan said at least 25 states have received calls about exposure, including Nevada and California. He said Louisiana leads with the greatest number of cases at 165, or 48 percent of the U.S. total, followed by Florida with at least 38 calls to its poison center.
Dr. Rick Gellar, medical director for the California Poison Control System, said the first call about the substances came in Oct. 5, and a handful of calls have followed since. But he warned: "The only way this won't become a problem in California is if federal regulatory agencies get ahead of the curve. This is a brand new thing."
In the Midwest, the Missouri Poison Center at Cardinal Glennon Children's Medical Center received at least 12 calls in the first two weeks of January about teenagers and young adults abusing such chemicals, said Julie Weber, the center's director. The center received eight calls about the powders all of last year.
Dr. Richard Sanders, a general practitioner working in Covington, La., said his son, Dickie, snorted some of the chemicals and endured three days of intermittent delirium. Dickie Sanders missed major arteries when he cut his throat. As he continued to have visions, his physician father tried to calm him. But the elder Sanders said that as he slept, his son went into another room and shot himself.
"If you could see the contortions on his face. It just made him crazy," said Sanders. He added that the coroner's office confirmed the chemicals were detected in his son's blood and urine.
Sanders warns the substances are far more dangerous than some of their brand names imply.
"I think everybody is taking this extremely lightly. As much as we outlawed it in Louisiana, all these kids cross over to Mississippi and buy whatever they want," he said.
A small packet of the chemicals typically costs as little as $20.
In northern Mississippi's Itawamba County, Sheriff Chris Dickinson said his office has handled about 30 encounters with users of the advertised bath salts in the past two months alone. He said the problem grew last year in his rural area after a Mississippi law began restricting the sale of pseudoephedrine, a key ingredient in making methamphetamine.
Dickinson said most of the bath salt users there have been meth addicts and can be dangerous when using them.
"We had a deputy injured a week ago. They were fighting with a guy who thought they were two devils. That's what makes this drug so dangerous," he said.
But Dickinson said the chemicals are legal for now, leaving him no choice but to slap users with a charge of disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor.
Kentucky state lawmaker John Tilley said he's moving to block the drug's sale there, preparing a bill for consideration when his legislature convenes shortly. Angry that the powders can be bought legally, he said: "If my 12-year-old can go in a store and buy it, that concerns me."
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/01/24/americas-new-drug-problem-snorting-bath-salts/
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Hallucinogens Legally Sold as 'Bath Salts' a New Threat These products can spur self-destructive 'highs' but are legal in most states, experts warn
by Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter
FRIDAY, Feb. 4 (HealthDay News) -- An influx of highly hallucinogenic, potentially lethal but -- in most states -- fully legal drugs sold as "bath salts" has law enforcement and drug abuse experts very concerned.
According to Mark Ryan, director of the Louisiana Poison Center, in the first month of 2011, there have already been 248 bath salts-linked calls nationwide from at least 25 states, compared to 234 calls during the whole of 2010.
The $20 packets are available in corner stores, truck stops and on the Internet, and marketed as bath salts or sometimes plant food and come with the (often-ignored) disclaimer, "not for human consumption." They're not subject to regulation even though they contain various potent chemicals, including mephedrone, which is a stimulant.
"It's a derivative that's very similar to amphetamines, and its side effects are largely the same side effects we see with amphetamines in large dose," said Jeffrey Baldwin, professor of pharmacy practice and pediatrics at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, which seems not to have experienced this scourge -- at least not yet. "[Those side effects] would be increased heart rate and blood pressure, not sleeping, not eating and eventually becoming paranoid."
The "salts" come with gentle-sounding names like Ivory Wave and Vanilla Sky and are typically snorted, smoked, injected and even mixed with water as a beverage.
"If you take the very worst of some of the other drugs -- LSD and Ecstasy with their hallucinogenic-delusional type properties, PCP with extreme agitation, superhuman strength and combativeness, as well as the stimulant properties of cocaine and meth -- if you take all the worst of those and put them all together this is what you get. It's ugly," added Ryan, who recounted some harrowing stories.
"The psychosis is impressive," he said.
One man barricaded himself in an attic with a rifle, Ryan said, vowing to "kill the monsters before they kill me," while another user vowed to remove their own liver with a mechanical pencil.
The products have also been linked to suicides, not to mention hospitalizations, and on Tuesday investigators confirmed the presence of bath salt drugs in the blood of a man who killed a sheriff's deputy in Tippah County, Miss., ABC News reported.
Once an addled user gets to the emergency room, they're not controllable with normal sedatives such as valium, even in high doses, Ryan noted.
And when doctors try to wean patients off stronger sedatives or even antipsychotic medications, they just become uncontrollable again. "The longest I heard was someone who was sedated for 12 days and the psychosis came right back," Ryan said. "The huge concern is the possibility that some of these effects could be permanent. We don't know because we've never tested it on humans."
At least with older drugs, sedation works and the patient returns to "normal," at least until they hit the streets again.
Also worrisome is the fact that while all of the products "have the same basic chemical structure," small changes in the chemical composition give you different side effects, which clinicians then have to learn how to deal with.
Despite these trips -- which users readily admit are horrible -- the cravings are so intense they often go back to the drug.
Louisiana has already banned the products, via a decree from the governor's office that recently made them a Schedule 1 substance, putting them in the same class as heroin. Now law enforcement officials in that state -- and Florida, which enacted a similar decree -- can do more than just charge people with a misdemeanor for using or selling the fake bath salts.
Federal regulation of the products could take much longer. "We are actively studying and researching the abuse data to see if [the compounds in 'bath salts'] warrant scheduling. We evaluate the addictive potential and the harm to the user," explained Rusty Payne, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). "But we are not the only agency involved -- the Department of Health and Human Services is also involved. It can take years, though it may not."
The agency is also looking into whether it should try to get a 12-month emergency rule to control the substances, he said.
In the meantime, lawmakers in Mississippi are close to enacting a ban on the bath salt drugs there, and this week a measure to outlaw the products neared passage in Kentucky, according to the AP.
New York Senator Charles Schumer has also called for a ban on the products and White House Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske spoke out against the products earlier this week.
But officials and doctors may still be facing an uphill battle.
When the ban in Louisiana went into effect, "calls dropped off the cliff but in the last four days we've had one each day, so it's starting again," Ryan said. In part, people are getting around the ban by ordering the products off the Internet and having them shipped to neighboring Mississippi, which has not yet outlawed them.
More information
There's more on dangerous drugs at the
U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse.
http://www.businessweek.com/print/lifestyle/content/healthday/649596.html
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Florida Bans Cocaine-Like 'Bath Salts' Sold In Stores
The "bath salts," which are being snorted and smoked to produce a cocaine- and meth-like high, have sent dozens of users to emergency rooms after violent behavior and hallucinations. Florida and Louisiana have banned the sale of the product. by Greg Allen
February 8, 2011
Across the country, packets of white powder with names like Vanilla Sky, Ivory Wave and White Rush are being sold in convenience stores and gas stations. The packets are labeled and sold as "bath salts," but they are actually a drug that produces a meth-like high and sometimes violent behavior in users. Law enforcement has caught on, and Florida recently joined Louisiana in banning the sale of the powders.
Mark Ryan, the director of the Louisiana Poison Center, first heard of a new, legal drug being sold throughout the Southeast in September. Ryan says bath salts are just one way the drug is labeled and sold.
It's almost like a psychotic break. They're extremely anxious and combative, they think there's stuff trying to get them, they're paranoid [and] they're having hallucinations.
- Mark Ryan, Louisiana Poison Center
They are usually snorted or smoked — not unlike cocaine or methamphetamine. But Ryan says the poison center has also seen it used differently.
"We've also seen it as growth stimulator, PH optimizer, pond scum remover, [and] not deodorizer but odorizer — quite a few different things, but they were never intended to be any of those things," he says.
Ryan says the bath salts are intended to be legal synthetic drugs.
In September, Ryan says, the poison center got its first call from an emergency room unsure about what it was dealing with. Soon, the center and poison control hotlines in Florida, California and all over the nation were seeing several cases a day.
Ryan says users high on this drug are not easy to deal with.
Sold Across The U.S.
The Justice Department says several brands of the bath salts are marketed in all 50 states and on the Internet.
A one-half gram packages cost $25-$30.
Brand names include:
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Bliss
Blue Silk
Charge Plus
Cloud 9
Ivory Snow
White Lightning
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Side Effects
The chemical MDPV, found in the bath salts, can cause paranoia, psychosis, intense panic attacks, hallucinations and addiction.
Health officials say the bath salts can cause kidney failure, seizures, muscle damage and loss of bowel control.
Expanding The Ban
Florida and Louisiana are the only two states that have banned the salts, but other states are considering it.
There are plans to introduce a bill in Congress to impose a nationwide ban.
The products have already been banned in the U.K.
- Sarah Gonzalez
High On Bath Salts
"For lack of a better term, they're flipped out. It's almost like a psychotic break. They're extremely anxious and combative, they think there's stuff trying to get them, they're paranoid, they're having hallucinations. So, the encounters are not pleasant," Ryan says. "And we were finding that some of these guys couldn't be sedated with the normal drugs that we would use with other stimulants."
In Panama City, Fla., two incidents alerted authorities to the drug's serious effects. In one case, several officers were needed to subdue a man who tore a radar unit out of a police car with his teeth.
In another incident, police say a woman attacked her mother with a machete, thinking she was a monster.
Those experiences alarmed Bay County Sheriff Frank McKeithen. He took his concerns to Florida's attorney general, who filed an emergency rule banning the sale of the bath salts.
At a news conference, McKeithen said the ban will help his department get a handle on what was developing into a significant problem.
"We were all, literally, just absolutely worried to death about what was going to happen in spring break," McKeithen said. "And we still may have issues, but it won't be because they're buying [the bath salts] in the local stores."
The Chemical
The active ingredient in the bath salts is a chemical called MDPV, which Ryan says is similar to cathinone, a compound found in a plant called khat that produces leaves that are chewed in Africa.
"It's a stimulant, much like the coca leaves found in Colombia and South America," Ryan says. But "these substances that we're dealing with aren't organic," he says. "They are designer drugs, synthetic drugs, made-in-the-lab drugs."
The ban was announced in Florida last week, and at least one county has already started seizing the bath salts from retailers, a move that angers store owner Randy Heine.
"These people are out to create crime," says Heine,who owns Rockin' Cards and Gifts in Pinellas Park, near St. Petersburg. "This product was legal yesterday. Today, it's illegal."
Fighting To Sell 'Legal Highs'
Heine says he's been forced to take his stock of the bath salts — worth thousands of dollars — off the shelves because of what he calls a hasty and wrong decision by the attorney general.
"There's no one who should have so much power as to be able to outlaw a product without due process," Heine says.
There's no one who should have so much power as to be able to outlaw a product without due process.
- Randy Heine, store owner
He is working with the Retail Compliance Association, which plans to file a lawsuit challenging the bans in Florida and Louisiana. Meanwhile, a ban is also being considered in several other states.
Heine says he believes many of the stories about the bath salts' effects are exaggerated. He says the product is "not more of a hazard than alcohol. How many people every day try to kill themselves doing alcohol? And that's still legal."
For Heine and for law enforcement authorities, this is just the latest round in what's becoming a familiar fight — one that in the past has involved synthetic marijuana, herbal ecstasy, salvia and other legal highs.
Bath salts, though, have gotten the attention of Washington. The White House drug czar has issued a warning to parents. In Congress, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) says he is introducing a bill that would impose a nationwide ban.
http://www.npr.org/2011/02/08/133399834/florida-bans-cocaine-like-bath-salts-sold-in-stores
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EDITOR'S NOTE: Here's an amazing "review" that openly discusses the effects these bath salts can have.
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Raving Dragon Bath Salts Review
January 13, 2011
by Bath Salts
Before I begin this review, I would like to point out that due to a few run ins with the police roughly 6 months back I am currently on probation for 5 years. With my probation sentence, came random drug screenings about once every month. These random screenings have eliminated my freedom to ingest whatever drug I would like so I started looking into legal alternatives. |
My search brought me right to these legal bath salts that are being sold in head shops and convenience stores all around the United States. These bath salts were the answer I had been looking for seeing as they were not only legal, but wouldn't be detectable when taking my drug tests. I also found that some of these were very dirty blends that contained harmful things that I definitely didn't want to ingest, so I made sure to do my research and find the best possible product for me. After asking my friends and the shops that held these mystical bath salts, I found that ‘Raving Dragon bath salts' was one of the highest rated from just about everyone I spoke with. So after eliminating the brands I felt weren't worth my time and money, I picked up a bag of the raving dragon bath salts from the store closest to my home.
Now, keepin in mind I had been clean of basically all substances besides the occasional alcoholic beverage you can understand how excited I was to try out this wonderful alternative. The package contained a single dime size baggie with 300 mg of an off white powder inside. I dumped the bag out and took a little taste of the bath salt with the leftover residue in the bag. The taste was not very welcoming but far from being intolerable which prompted me that my best method of ingestion for now would probably be if I dissolved it in a drink. I grabbed a light blue Gatorade and carefully poured in roughly half of the bag. Then I downed the bottle a matter of a few quick chugs and proceeded to go in my room and listen to music. Within 10 minutes of ingesting the spiked Gatorade I began to feel an amazing flush of euphoria coming over me. At first I thought it may be a placebo feeling, but 5 minutes later there was no doubt the bathsalt was working extremely well. The feelings continued to surge through my body, lights got brighter, and the music seemed as if the volume was cranked all the way up. In general all my senses seemed to be heightened to new levels.
My mind was swimming in a sea of euphoria and I felt a great urge to talk to friends and family members. The effects persisted pretty consistently for two hours, when I felt the effects slowly start to die off. I was very content with my come down and enjoyed the sense of happiness until I felt the effects had completely died off after 4 hours since I first began my experience. I was able to sleep merely 30 minutes after hitting my bed and slept very well. I absolutely LOVED this bath salt and was very glad I took the recommendations from my friends and shop owners. The bath salt left me with no nasty hangover or lingering symptoms. I will without a doubt be trying raving dragon again, next time maybe with a female friend to see what sensual properties it might hold. All in all the effects were very similar to MDMA, so much so that if taken to a club, it could definitely be passed off as MDMA with no question.
http://bathsaltsreviews.com/ |
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