Dr. Jeffrey J. Narmi could not believe what he was seeing this spring in the emergency room at Schuylkill Medical Center in Pottsville, Pa.: people arriving so agitated, violent and psychotic that a small army of medical workers was needed to hold them down.
They had taken new stimulant drugs that people are calling “bath salts,” and sometimes even large doses of sedatives failed to quiet them.
Poison control centers around the country received 3,470 calls about bath salts from January through June. At least 28 states have banned bath salts, which are typically sold for $25 to $50 per 50-milligram packet at convenience stores and head shops under names like Aura, Ivory Wave, Loco-Motion and Vanilla Sky.
Some of the recent incidents include a man in Indiana who climbed a roadside flagpole and jumped into traffic, a man in Pennsylvania who broke into a monastery and stabbed a priest, and a woman in West Virginia who scratched herself “to pieces” over several days because she thought there was something under her skin.
“She looked like she had been dragged through a briar bush for several miles,” said Dr. Owen M. Lander, an emergency room doctor.
Full article on bath salts making people crazy.
Designer drugs –- drug molecules that are tweaks of known chemical entities or untested drug molecules written up in academic journals — are increasingly common in the party scene. Some very ingenious chemists (many in Europe) are hard at work creating new entities as soon as earlier ones are declared illegal. Until a substance becomes widespread enough to attract the attention of authorities, it is in a legal gray area. Creating and trafficking designer drugs is far less risky than trafficking illegal drugs like cocaine and heroin. But many are (arguably) more dangerous because the side effects are largely unknown.
Government is too busy fighting relatively harmless (illegal)drugs to do anything about the very harmful (legal) ones.
I wonder if the people coming into the ER aren’t ones who abuse or are addicted to crystal meth. They might be ingesting or smoking doses larger than recommended in an attempt to get a high this substance does not provide.
Maybe they had a proclivity toward craziness before they took the drug.
Isn’t there a legal artificial THC substance you can guy at a lot of gas stations?
It proves that no matter how hard the DEA works, there will always be more drugs coming into the market.