From CNN, June 3, 2012: The man is strapped onto a gurney and restrained, yet he is singing, making faces and twitching.
“You know where you’re at?” a paramedic asks him, but Freddy Sharp can’t answer. He was, he explained later, off in his own world after overdosing on synthetic drugs known as “bath salts.”
“I’d never experienced anything like that,” Sharp told CNN’s Don Lemon. “It really actually scared me pretty bad.”
He said he was hallucinating about being in a mental hospital and being possessed by Jason Voorhees, the character from the “Friday the 13th” movies.
“I just felt all kinds of crazy,” said Sharp, now 27, of Tennessee, who says he hasn’t used bath salts in months.
“It felt so evil. It felt like the darkest, evilest thing imaginable.”
The drug made national headlines recently after a horrific crime in Miami, where a naked man chewed the face off a homeless man in what has been called a zombie-like attack.
Video footage captured by surveillance cameras on the nearby Miami Herald building shows the 18-minute attack, which ended when police shot and killed a man identified as Rudy Eugene, 31.
The footage shows a man walking along a sidewalk and stopping in a shaded area created by the tramway bridge. He apparently attacks the victim, dragging him out from the shade, stripping the victim’s clothes off and beating him as the victim kicks his legs in an apparent attempt to fight back. He then spends several minutes crouched over the victim.
“The guy just kept eating the other guy, like ripping his skin,” witness Larry Vega told CNN affiliate WSVN.
Police told CNN affiliate WPLG that when officers arrived and told him to stop, the man growled like an animal and continued eating the victim’s face. Authorities said they suspected the attacker was under the influence of bath salts. The victim is in critical condition at a Miami hospital.
This is one of the most horrific stories that I have read in quite a while. What could possibly make someone do such a thing? Bath salts. Not the typical salts you are familiar with that take a tub of hot water and turn it into a luxurious spa. This is the newest drug rage. It is a mixture of hallucinogenic amphetamine-like chemicals, such as methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV), that are sold as “cocaine substitutes” or “synthetic LSD.”
Users (and non-user scum just wanting to make a quick buck) make bath salts out of household products you can find in your kitchen.
“Ivory Wave,” “Purple Wave,” Vanilla Sky,” and “Bliss” are among the 50 or so street names of the drug, and a 50-milligram packet of the white powdery bath salts reportedly sells for $25 to $50. The DEA has released a statement citing the drug an “imminent threat to public safety,” and has made the possession and sale of three of the commonly used chemical ingredients illegal - at least until October 2012. After that date, they will decide what the next step will be.
The logic behind the name is to skirt the enforcement of bath salts being cataloged as illegal. By marketing them as bath salts and labeling them “not for human consumption”, vendors are able to put them on the counter. You can find them in smoke shops, liquor stores, truck stops and mini-marts. Some states have banned the sale of bath salts, but eventually, there will have to be a federal law that mandates them as a schedule one drug.
In Arkansas, Senate Bill 423, makes bath salts a schedule one drug just like methamphetamine. The new law was passed in early 2011. In May 2011, a similar law was passed in Tennessee.
Doctors and clinicians at poison centers have stated that ingesting or snorting the synthetic stimulants in bath salts can cause chest pain, increased blood pressure, increased heart rate, agitation, hallucinations, extreme paranoia, delusions, seizures, and high blood pressure. There is also the escalating end result of suicide after the drug is leaving the user’s system.
While the DEA and other law enforcement agencies try to get a grip on this newest rage, just be aware. Be aware of the many names. Be aware of what your neighborhood stores are selling. Watch your children and their friends closely. Teach your young children to be aware of anything someone might offer them and to avoid ingesting it.
Asked what he would say to avoid other users, Sharp said, “The only thing I can say to them is that if you value your life, you’ll stop it and you won’t do it anymore, because it will destroy your life. It will destroy your family. It will destroy everything.”