From The Examiner:

Miami’s Memorial Day weekend cannibal crime should make every person who ever considered using a synthetic drug, like those sold at gas stations for example, reevaluate that thought very very very quickly.

Rudy Eugene, a 31-year-old black man was allegedly so messed up on a tanked up version of bath salts (referred to by some as bad LSD or a new form of it) that he got naked and violent in such a way that police had to put him down like you would a rabid dog. And it may eventually lead to the death of his victim, if he doesn't survive the vicious attack.

Fatal shots had to be fired to save the victim's life, and one would suspect even the officers if truth be told. And the worst thing is that the Miami-Dade County brutality that occurred this Memorial Day weekend isn't the only such incident there or elsewhere that has occurred recently.

In fact, the use of bath salts like "Ivory Wave" or "Vanilla Sky," which are sold in gas stations and other convenience stores, are playing a role in violent crimes and deaths around the country.

In Muncie, Indiana police believe synthetic stimulate use may have been a factor in the death of a motorcyclist going at excessive speed before crashing. Their follow-up investigation suggests that these synthetic stimulants being sold as "bath salts" or "plant food" may have contributed to that fatality, as well as one other.

In Columbus, Ohio there have already been two police shootings due to "bath salts," with one resulting in the death of the 28-year-old man who held a knife to his girlfriend's neck before police had to shoot him in order to save her.

"These drugs, even on first use, can dramatically change a person's perception of reality," said Paul H. Coleman, who happens to be the president of a facility which treats drug and alcohol dependency in the state. The salts, according to Coleman can "make a person feel everyone is out to get them."

From NJ.com:

New Jersey’s recent battle with designer drugs has been a game of cat and-mouse.

Last year the state banned methamphetamine-like powders known as "bath salts."

But users moved to a similar, still-legal drug called "2CE."

And when chemicals used to make synthetic marijuana were banned, dealers found new ways to create the substances and sidestep the law.

Faced with a evolving problem that many are struggling to understand, Attorney General Jeff Chiesa today announced what he described as a sweeping solution to the designer drug problem:

Ban first. Ask questions later.

Under the new ban, Chiesa said, any chemicals that mimic the effects of marijuana are now illegal in New Jersey, according to an emergency order issued today by the state Division of Consumer Affairs.

The ban lists 10 classes of chemicals, outlawing hundreds of compounds that could be used to create synthetic marijuanas.

He said it also bars the sale of any substances that might be used to create the drug in the future, a provision to illegalize compounds not specified in the ban. No chemicals listed in the ban are used in other products, he said.

From WDTV.com:

From the Montgomery News:

With states and municipalities working to ban new forms of legal drugs and recent reports of Demi Moore inhaling “incense” that resulted in her recent hospital visit, scientist Robert Middleberg of NMS Labs in Willow Grove held a press conference hoping to spread the word to parents about these products.

Synthetic marijuana, often called designer drugs K2, Spice or incense, are legal herbal mixtures that are laced with chemical compounds that can cause a “legal high,” which is similar to the effects of smoking marijuana that are caused by substances called cannabinoids.

Middleberg said while the sensation can mimic that of being high, it is dangerous because it can cause anxiety, high blood pressure, hallucinations, paranoia and increased heart rate. In addition, he said these side effects and the high sensation can be exaggerated and last longer.

“Parents have to look out for these. They’re far from safe,” Middleberg said. “A lot of the people that end up in emergency rooms are children and they think they’re getting high or having fun with their friends without understanding the potential danger of using these substances.”

Besides synthetic marijuana, Middleberg said products called bath salts — which are more dangerous and cause effects like methamphetamines — are also popular with children and teenagers looking to have “legal highs.”

Middleberg warns parents to keep an eye out for packages of synthetic marijuana because of how dangerous it can be.

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From The Intelligencer:

Dr. Robert Middleburg, a forensic toxicologist with National Medical Services in Willow Grove, said the two main varieties of synthetic drugs (“bath salts” and synthetic marijuana) can be deadly, citing dangerous hallucinations or delusions that can result from synthetic cannabinoids and the potential for overdose with abuse of bath salts.

As director of NMS labs, which performs toxicology tests for police departments, Middleburg said they are finding these synthetic designer drugs are being used more and more.

In just the first five months of 2011, poison control centers nationwide received more than 2,200 bath salt-related emergency calls, up from 302 calls for all of 2010, according to a Department of Justice report.

To stay ahead of laws prohibiting the use, possession and sale of these drugs, manufacturers frequently alter their chemical formula slightly to keep their product legal. Middleburg said it is a challenge for forensic toxicologists to come up with testing methods that can detect the various metabolized compounds that are in the body after use of synthetic cannabinoids and bath salts. Middleburg said scientists at NMS have developed several different tests as the chemical compounds have changed.

He also said states have written laws vague enough to encompass changes in the synthetic drug formulas. But the challenge there is broadening the ban without affecting compounds that scientists may discover have legitimate uses, he said.

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From The Daily Sentinel:

As the list of synthetic drugs continues to grow each day, workers at Highlands Medical Center and the facility's Occupational Medicine Center want employers to be aware of the dangers and ways to check for them.

"For an employment drug test, many employers check for the basic drugs, like marijuana," said Johnny McCrary, director of Highlands Occupational Medicine Center. "We want employers to be just as aware of the synthetic drugs too."

Dr. Barry Logan, the National Director for Forensics and Toxicology Services at NMS Labs, recently spoke during a synthetic drug awareness seminar held at the Education Center of Highlands Medical Center.

During his discussion, Logan shared the similarities between marijuana and synthetic marijuana, and also bath salts and methamphetamines. While the drugs have many of the same side affects, their chemical makeups differ slightly, making it hard to distinguish on a regular drug test.

"Right now our labs are working to develop drug tests that will catch these synthetic drugs, however, there are so many different variations of them that it's been a difficult task," Logan said.

Toxicology patterns and information from drug to drug changes daily, Logan said.

From ABC News:

Flesh-eating bacteria devoured the muscle and skin on the arm of a New Orleans woman after she injected “bath salts,” an increasingly popular stimulant drug. Doctors say the infection is unusual, but might become more widespread as more users inject the drug to get high.

Dr. Robert Russo, an orthopedic resident at the hospital, said he’s uncertain how the flesh-eating bacteria got into the woman’s arm. It could have been lurking on the needle she used or in the bath salts themselves. But he said he worries that the drug’s growing popularity means more people will be at risk for infection.

“Just from people using more needles, you could see a rise in these kinds of cases,” he said. “And the risks of using this drug, it’s not just getting your arm taken off. The drug is crazy.”

Bath salts are a powder made of amphetamine-like chemicals, such as methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MPDV), mephedrone and pyrovalerone, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Once sold legally online and in drug paraphernalia stores, users mostly snorted or swallowed it to get high. Recently, injection has become a more popular route, because it delivers the drug’s effects faster and more powerfully. The Drug Enforcement Administration made the drug illegal in September.

From standardspeaker.com:

A surge in patients under the influence of a dangerous drug called Cloud 9 is being reported by one local hospital.

Cloud 9 is marketed as a fake insect repellent and it produces the same dangerous side effects as drugs sold as fake bath salts, said Geisinger spokesman Matthew Van Stone. The Plains Township facility's emergency room has seen an increase of patients under the drug's influence.

Side effects include paranoia, hallucinations, suicidal thoughts and physical effects such as rapid heartbeat and hypertension, said Dr. Sam Saylor, an emergency medical physician at Geisinger.

People sniff, inject or smoke Cloud 9, Saylor said. Fake bath salts and fake insect repellent contain stimulant drugs like mephedrone and MDPV, he said.

From NPR:

States across the country continue to fight the spread of a dangerous new drug: bath salts.

They aren't anything like those soothing crystals you pour into the tub — they're synthetic stimulants, so-called designer drugs that cause paranoid, psychotic, often violent behavior in users.

Bath salts can still be purchased legally in some states and, in some cases, over the Internet.

In Maine, use of the drug has reached epidemic proportions and is straining police departments and emergency rooms. So late last month, the state enacted tougher laws that make both possession and distribution of the drug felonies.

Shane Heathers, 34, injected it (bath salts), day and night, for nearly a week. He ended up at the hospital, where police were called in with tasers after he tried to break out to smoke a cigarette. Several more bath salts binges followed. The last one took place at the house in September.

Heathers' parents showed up with sheriff's deputies and an ambulance. They took him to an emergency room not unlike the trauma unit at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, where Dr. Jonnathan Busko sees as many as eight patients a day on bath salts, often behaving just like Heathers.

Busko, who oversees the ER, points over at a hallway where patients are lying on gurneys. A typical patient, says Busko, requires the care of one doctor and one nurse. But a bath salts patient like Heathers requires much more.

"They take three to four nurses, our techs, our security staff and a physician to care for them," Busko says. "And that's just for each of them. So if we're seeing four to five of those at any given time, that's a tremendous use of our resources and it really draws us away from our other patients."

At the beginning of the year, hardly anyone in Maine had even heard of the drug. By the end of September, Bangor's police department had responded to as many as 400 bath salts-related incidents.

Paranoid bath salts users have been picked up armed with knives and guns. Until recently, the drug could be purchased legally in most states. But that's begun to change, as the dangers posed by bath salts have become more widely understood.

Along with Maine, other states are fast-tracking laws banning the drug. And a temporary federal ban will soon take effect, outlawing the main ingredients in bath salts, as well as bath salts made with those ingredients.

From the Star Tribune:

Cheap to buy, easy to find and mistakenly seen by some users as a legal and mostly harmless alternative to cocaine and other stimulants, bath salts have become the source of a new wave of worried calls to poison control centers nationwide. Last year, those centers received about 300 calls about the synthetic drug.

Already this year, they have logged more than 4,700.

Emergency room doctors, meanwhile, are being forced to take extreme steps to treat some bath salt users who are showing up at hospitals intensely agitated, delusional and even violent. Law enforcement officers are also reporting struggles to subdue hallucinating users who are fighting imaginary people. Some bath salt users are ending up in psychiatric wards.

"It came on like a freight train," said Mark Ryan, long-time poison center director in Louisiana, where the bath salts craze hit early. Bath salts often seem to cause scarier hallucinations than LSD, Ryan said, and sometimes provide the super-human strength of PCP. Far more users experience severe effects compared to other drugs, he said.

Bath salts first appeared in the United States in 2009, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The drugs are so new that federal agencies are still analyzing their toll, but research conducted by the Star Tribune indicates the products have been confirmed or suspected in more than 15 deaths nationwide.

At least 30 states have banned certain bath salt chemicals, including Minnesota, but the products remain widely available on the Internet. Despite their name, the drugs are far different -- and far more expensive -- than ordinary bath products.

The products are typically sold in powder form in plastic or foil packages and sold under various names, including Bliss, Ivory Wave and Vanilla Sky. The drugs are usually snorted but can also be smoked, injected or swallowed, according to the DEA.

Like cocaine and other stimulants, bath salts initially might make people feel energized and happy longer than other drugs, experts said. When the initial high dies down, users take more and can end up addicted, hallucinating, panicked and violent.

From Guardian News (UK):

New "legal highs" are being discovered at the rate of one a week, outstripping attempts to control their availability and exposing what some experts claim is the "ridiculous and irrational" government policy of prohibition.

Officials monitoring the European drugs market identified 20 new synthetic psychoactive substances in the first four months of this year, according to Paolo Deluca, co-principal investigator at the Psychonaut Research Project, an EU-funded organisation based at King's College London, which studies trends in drug use. He said officials at the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), an early-warning unit, had detected 20 new substances for sale by May this year. In 2010 the agency had noted 41 new psychoactive substances, a record number, many of which were synthetic cathinone derivatives that can imitate the effects of cocaine, ecstasy or amphetamines.

Deluca said that, given the plethora of new substances, the government's attempts to ban legal highs is not a "feasible" solution. "It's also becoming very difficult to know exactly how many new compounds there are, because you have all these brand names and when you test the batch they are different from the following one." The UK, according to his reasearch, remains Europe's largest market for legal highs and synthetic compounds.

The EMCDDA favours generic bans that would cover entire groups of structurally related synthetic compounds, or chemical families, therefore removing the need to ban individual substances as they appear on the market. Deluca said: "It is impossible to implement a ban for every single new compound."

From The Patriot-News:

When horror stories about bath salts and synthetic marijuana began circulating, lawmakers in Pennsylvania acted swiftly to ban the so-called fake drugs.

But manufacturers are even quicker.

Today is the first day that brands of bath salts, synthetic pot and salvia are illegal in this state.

By Wednesday, a yet-to-be-named product will be on the shelves of at least one local head shop, promising to have the same effects of synthetic marijuana.

“It’s incredible,” said George Geisler of the Pennsylvania DUI Association. “But they say that as fast as these products are outlawed they will come up with new ones, so it will never end.”

That has some wondering whether this will continue as a cycle: more new drugs and more new laws.

Since Gov. Tom Corbett signed the ban into law last month, customers at Hemp’s Above in Mechanicsburg have been asking: “Are they coming out with anything else?”

Owner Brian Edmonson said about three-quarters of his sales came from synthetic pot while it was legal. Now he’ll sell a new mixture, but he said the stuff doesn’t have a name, and he’s not sure if he should call it incense, or potpourri — or something else.

Edmonson says he asks for identification from every customer, but most of his clients are over 30, and about half use synthetic marijuana for therapeutic reasons.

The forensic society might not be prepared for these drugs.

“They can’t test it like they test coke and marijuana,” said midstate attorney Justin McShane, who says he specializes in forensic science.

When you’re caught with an illegal drug — in your possession or in your blood — police have to confirm that the substance is actually the outlawed chemical compound.

For drugs that are familiar, there is an answer key. McShane says that isn’t down to a science for these newly banned synthetic drugs. He thinks it will cause problems in the courts.

Edmonson says his suppliers tell him Pennsylvania’s law is one of strictest of the 30 states that had banned the fake drugs by midsummer. But some fear the laws can’t keep up.