By Tony O'Neill, The Fix
Posted on June 22, 2012
Drug scares, like the seasons, are cyclical. Here in the US, we had
media firestorms over crack in the 80’s, meth in the 90’s, and
prescription painkillers in the 00’s. Right on schedule, the latest
demon drug that is supposedly tearing our society apart has entered
stage left:
bath salts.
Bath salts really just means a drug that is a combination of two stimulants —
MDPV and
mephedrone. Sold
online and via headshops as a cheap, legal alternative to cocaine and
ecstasy, mephedrone was first synthesized in 1929 while MDPV came along
in 1969. Both were rediscovered in 2003 and they were perfect drugs for
the Internet age—an ideal alternative to pricy illegal drugs that could
be obtained legally with nothing more than a credit card and the click
of a mouse.
The exact pharmacology of bath salts can vary, as compounds are
constantly tweaked by chemists to stay one step ahead of the law. “Most
of these substances seem to be cathinone derivatives, and as such are
central nervous system stimulants that act through interruptions of
dopamine, norepinephrine and—to a more limited extent—serotonin
function,” explains
Dr. Adi Jaffe,
an addiction specialist at UCLA. While noting that actual research on
these substances is in its early stages and reports are limited, Jaffe
says that “at low to moderate doses the most common effects for MDPV can
be thought of as meth-like: stimulation, euphoria and alertness.
Mephedrone seems to act more like MDMA than meth.”
While the chemistry may change, one thing that has remained consistent
is the ballooning popularity of this sector of the drug market.
After the explosion in use, the next phase of the drug scare comes in
the form of demonization, and the authorities have certainly wasted no
time in making some pretty wild allegations about the supposed effects
of bath salts; recently we’ve heard that these drugs can cause
cannibalism,
a la the infamous Miami face-eater,
pedophilia and even
cross-dressing goat abuse.
The third part of any good drug scare happens when the press, despite a
total lack of causal evidence, parrots these outlandish accusations. In
the Miami cannibal case, the link between bath salts originated from a
statement
made by someone with
no direct involvement with the case—the president of the Miami
Fraternal Order of Police, Armando Aguilar—despite the fact that an
autopsy and toxicology had yet to be performed on attacker Rudy Eugene.
In the case of Shane Shuyler, the Miami man accused of exposing himself
to children while “allegedly” under the influence of bath salts, the
evidence was no less hazy. The police said they found something that
“appeared” to be bath salts in his wallet (i.e. an unidentified white
powder). And then there was this
strange quote from
a detective giving evidence against Shuyler: "Upon talking to him, he
made some statements to me which led me to believe that he was cooling
off in a fountain by the tot-lot, because he was hot, which was
consistent with ingesting bath salts." The logic being that since bath
salts cause users body temperatures to rise, then cooling off by a water
fountain is evidence of bath salts use. Never mind the fact that the
incident took place in June, in Miami, where the average temperature is
88.1 degrees.
After the hype comes the
crackdown, which means that high-profile cases
like these have created a push from both the media and law enforcement
for a federal ban on the sale of bath salts.
Florida Republican Rep. Sandy Adams is one of the politicians who
helped push the Combating Dangerous Synthetic Stimulants Act of 2011
through the House last December. The bill would federally ban MDPV and
mephedrone, the two chemicals found in bath salts, as well as outlawing
dozens of other chemicals found in synthetic drugs. The reasoning?
"Looking at the Miami incident, we've seen people do some very bizarre
acts on bath salts," Adams told the
U.S. News and World Report. If he gets his way, bath salts would be categorized alongside heroin and LSD.
So can bath salts really cause ordinary normal people to cannibalize
strangers, expose themselves to children, or murder goats? And if they
can, why on earth would anybody take them? A drug that has been
described variously as “super powered LSD” and “PCP on crack” seems like
a confusing proposition. So which is it?
“The reason for the contrasting descriptions is most likely the small
but very significant difference in the specific chemicals involved,”
says Dr. Jaffe. “Meth and ecstasy are very close chemical cousins but
obviously cause very different effects for the user; the same is true
here.”
To better get a handle of what is happening here in the US, I looked
toward the United Kingdom, which has recently been through a similar
cycle of shock horror media coverage of the “bath salt epidemic,”
followed by a rush to ban. Bath salts were known under various aliases
in the UK, including M-Kat, Meow-Meow and Bubbles, so for the sake of
clarity, I’m going to use their chemical name of the most common
compound: mephedrone.
“The issues in the US and UK are very similar, except that, as in many
things, the US hype is even more over the top than that in the UK,” says
Danny Kushlick, founder of the
Transform Drug Policy Foundation,
a charitable think tank that attempts to draw public attention to the
fact that drug prohibition is the major cause of drug-related harm. “I
mean, we never got so far as cannibalism.”
Yet at its height, the mephedrone scare in the UK was still pretty
lurid; according to some of the coverage, it was linked to overdose,
patricide and at least one case of
self scrotum tearing.
Many of these stories would later be disproved (the scrotum story,
unsurprisingly was revealed as a hoax) and the two deaths that started
the whole media scare—that of Louis Wainwright, 18, and Nicholas Smith,
19—turned out to be totally unrelated to the use of the drug. By the
time the toxicology report on Wainwright and Smith had been published,
however, it was too late: the drug had been banned a month earlier by
the UK parliament, after a one-hour debate and no vote on the matter.
Kushlick, who is on the council of the
International Harm Reduction Association,
and is a member of the British Society of Criminology's Advisory
Council, was a vocal opponent of the rush to ban mephedrone in the UK.
In the months following the ban, he saw harm actually increase and not
reduce because, he said, “when mephedrone was banned, the price
increased and it was sold not by legitimate retailers but by non-tax
paying unregulated dealers. It was also immediately replaced by a more
potent compound and traded as
Ivory Wave, which users had little experience with so they were more likely to get into trouble.”
These sentiments are echoed by Dr. Fiona Measham, a senior lecturer on
Criminology at Lancaster University and the author of several books on
drug use in young people. Her groundbreaking research into the use of
mephedrone in the UK has provided some of the only hysteria-free data
into mephedrone and the people who use it. Her
paper,
“Tweaking, Bombing, Dabbing and Stockpiling; the emergence of
mephedrone and the Perversity of prohibition” (2010 Measham, et al), is
the definitive account of the UK’s experience with the drug from the
perspective of the people who actually use it.
“The government might claim that the ban was successful because
mephedrone use and deaths have fallen,” says Measham, “but for me the
question to ask is: what are users taking instead? In the UK, the rise
and fall of mephedrone in 2009 and 2010 tracked the fall and now rise in
the purity of cocaine, ecstasy pills and MDMA powder. [Since the ban],
pills are back, big time, and the legal highs—whether now banned or
not—just don’t compete for most recreational users.”
Despite the hazy evidence that it would have any effect at all on the
level of drug use among young people, a federal ban is something that
many in politics and law enforcement are in favor of here in the States.
All it really seems
guaranteed to do is
drive up prices, lower purity and criminalize young people who continue
to use the drug. At best, the use of the drug might be reduced as users
switch over wholesale to different drugs. But in the politics of the
drug war, no one ever let the truth get in the way of an expansion of
hostilities. The police, Drug Enforcement Agency and court system will
always welcome a new front in the war.
The big motivation, as always, is money. Local authorities want more
money to “fight the war on drugs” even if they are fighting against a
phantom menace. Already there are dark rumblings from the cops about
needing more resources to fight against this army of bath salts crazed
cannibals who are seemingly about to smash down your door and devour
your children.
“The cities are deeply involved [in banning synthetic drugs] because
the state can’t seem to get on top of it,” Pembroke Pines Commissioner
Angelo Castillo
said in
an illuminating interview with Inquisitir.com. “We see cities jumping
in to handle it because the state isn’t. Otherwise people die and
people’s faces get chewed off.” Castillo added, “This is the next
horizon in the war on drugs and we need to gear up and deal with it.”
Kushlick, who has seen firsthand the lack of effect that “gearing up to
deal with it” has had on levels of use, suggests a more pragmatic
approach. “The wiser move would have been to leave meph on the market
and monitor its effect in order to ascertain its costs and benefits,” he
tells me. “We know from experience that the Iron Law of Prohibition
means that milder drugs will be replaced by more potent ones. That's
what happened under alcohol prohibition in the US as bootlegged spirits
replaced beer. Conducting research on its effects and how people were
using it could have been used to provide information to current and
potential new users.”
The bottom line is this: more and more new users are trying bath salts,
at least in part because of the attention thrust on the drug by the
hysterical press coverage. When they discover that it doesn’t cause them
to chew off peoples’ faces or tear off their own genitals, then they
are more inclined to ignore all warnings about these drugs’ potential
dangers. Kushlick’s advice to users is less likely to get the press
excited but more likely to reduce harm. “As with any drug, if you are
not used to using meph, you should take a small amount to assess its
effects on you as an individual," he says. "Always take new drugs with
someone who is an experienced and trusted friend. Just because you have a
good effect from the dose you've taken, do not assume that you can
double the fun by doubling the dose.”
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