Post: #1

BATH SALTS
The Drug That Never Lets Go

By Jenny Marder

Dickie Sanders was not naturally prone to depression. The 21-year-old BMX rider was known for being sweet spirited and warm -- a hugger not a hand-shaker. The kind of guy who called on holidays. Who helped his father on the family farm. Who spent countless hours perfecting complicated tricks on his bike.

Yet on Nov. 12, 2010, Sanders was found dead on the floor of his childhood bedroom. He had shot himself in the head
with a .22 caliber youth rifle.

The suicide was the culmination of five days of strange behavior that began shortly after Sanders snorted a powdery substance he bought from a friend. Instead of the brief high he was seeking, he experienced days of insomnia, along with waves of terror and frightening delusions, including an incident where he “saw” 25 police cars outside his parents' kitchen window and then slit his own throat with a butcher knife. That incident landed Sanders in the hospital with stitches. For a few hours, the hallucinations subsided.

“I don't like the way this is making me feel," Sanders told his stepmother, Julie, as the two awaited his release from the hospital. "I promise I won't do anything again. I'm done.”

But the paranoia flared up with a vengeance that night, and back home, Dickie's father lay in bed with his son, arms wrapped around him, until he finally nodded off. It's unclear when Dickie woke up, made his way downstairs to his bedroom and found the rifle he had won in a shooting contest years before. No one heard the gunshot.

An autopsy revealed a powerful stimulant in his system: methylenedioxypyrovalerone, also known as MDPV.

MDPV is a common ingredient in a street drug known as "bath salts." Sanders' death occurred the month after Mark Ryan, director of the Louisiana Poison Center, began to receive the first string of calls from emergency rooms around the state about patients taking the drug. For such a benign name, the symptoms were dangerous and bizarre. People were showing up just like Sanders had -- paranoid, agitated, violent and hallucinating.

“These guys were seeing things like monsters, demons and aliens, and those were consistent terms,” Ryan said. “We didn't ask, ‘Are you seeing monsters and aliens?' They were telling us that.”

Soon after Dickie Sanders died, Ryan teamed with Kentucky's poison control center and began to build a database of every bath salts case recorded in the two states. In the report, they listed behaviors brought on by the drugs. One patient high on the substance repeatedly fired guns out of the house at strangers. Another broke all the windows in a house and then wandered barefoot through the broken glass. A third left her 2-year-old daughter in the middle of a highway because she “had demons.”

...

Cathleen Clancy is associate medical director at the National Capital Poison Center in Washington D.C., where they catalog the effects of bath salts on the area's emergency room cases. Users are often hyper-agitated, hot and sweating, she said. Their heart rate is dangerously high, their blood pressure is up, and seizures are common.

Often even high doses of common sedatives don't help them. Doctors instead must turn to antipsychotics or other powerful medications.

Early on, doctors began noticing something else that was strange. Compared with other drugs, bath salts didn't follow a normal dose-response pattern. With cocaine or methamphetamine, the drug entered the bloodstream, and, within hours, began to wear off. Not so for bath salts.

“Some patients were in the hospital for 5 days, 10 days, 14 days,” Ryan said. “In some cases, they were under heavy sedation. As you try to taper off the sedation, the paranoia came back and the delusions."

...

Also troubling is how little is known about what these drugs do to the brain long term. Understanding how bath salts work, DeFelice said, will not only help to explain the extreme length and potency of a bath salts high, it also will reveal the extent of cell death and damage to the brain. This could help researchers design better tests, treatment, even antidotes.

"MDPV is irreversible, it won't let go," De Felice said. "I don't know of any other drug that has that same feature of not allowing you to escape from it."

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/multimedia/bath-salts/

Post: #2

I tell ya, iv'e done ALOT of drugs in my youth,i drew the line at meths seeing tye damage it done to peope I know,
Stuff like bathsalts are just insane! Meth and pcp are bad enougth,we dont need a bathsalt epidemic on top of that shit,i wonder what rhe next ridiculously strong designer drug will be?
Who the hell wants to get that high anyway? Wasn't lsd and psilocybin enougth ffs!

Post: #3

I did a lot of stuff, too. Acid, peyote, weed. Considering LSD is lab made, I feel lucky to have survived the old days. I'm horrified that some naive kid could use bath salts and get a life sentence of insanity or end up dead.

Post: #4

Would someone explain the downside to meth other than the teeth and making regular life seem boring? I mean it takes being up for like four days and you start getting crazy and silly and some people can't handle it.

I am imagining this whole bath salts thing is more of the same. Based on what's been reported, it's like mixing coke and meth on your dopamine system. Having done that myself once without realizing the chemistry involved, you will crash so f*cking hard for about a week, so you might not be the same afterwards. It was like a 5-day coke hangover from doing a whole eight ball in less than eight hours.

It may be really bad, but the negative shit people may or may not being doing because of it just reflects back to them and isn't an effect of the drug.

Post: #5

A hugger, not a handshaker! The kind of guy who called on holidays "Hello Christmas, are you there?"

Who spent countless hours perfecting complicated tricks on his bike. *dark music starts as his crazy qualities become more and more apparent*

I guess he saw himself slit his throat with a butcher knife, rather than actually slitting his throat with a butcher knife before shooting himself (when I wrote the initial jokes above I didn't know this was a suicide thing).

Woah holy crap he did actually slit the throat with a butcher knife first haha I'm typing this as I read.

Dickie's father lay in bed with his son, arms wrapped around him..hmmm.

It's unclear when Dickie woke up, made his way downstairs to his bedroom and found the rifle he had won in a shooting contest years before. No one heard the gunshot.

“These guys were seeing things like monsters, demons and aliens, and those were consistent terms,” Ryan said. “We didn't ask, ‘Are you seeing monsters and aliens?' They were telling us that.”

That clarification made me laugh.

Well, I think I've heard even marijuana permanently influences brain chemistry or something too.

The government is the one probably behind making and funneling these drugs into society. They used to test this stuff on people back in the day, and are involved with all the drug industries like marijuana, cocaine, and whatever else.

Post: #6

Because of the high number of calls, Louisiana has asked the federal
DEA to investigate whether their state is a national distribution center
for the drugs.
However, in an online forum for law enforcement, officers have listed
Memphis, Tenn. as the epicenter of bath salt distribution. In addition,
youths age 18-21 are reporting to open-reporting news sources that with
the crackdown in Louisiana, bath salt users are heading north to Memphis.
The official report of Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (which outlawed
bath salts for 90 days through an emergency order) reported that
an Internet search on popular buy/sale Web sites revealed New York,
Utah, and Alaska as additional distributors within the United States.

http://info.publicintelligence.net/ROCIC-BathSalts.pdf

Post: #7

Adveser  Wrote:

Would someone explain the downside to meth other than the teeth and making regular life seem boring? I mean it takes being up for like four days and you start getting crazy and silly and some people can't handle it.

I am imagining this whole bath salts thing is more of the same. Based on what's been reported, it's like mixing coke and meth on your dopamine system. Having done that myself once without realizing the chemistry involved, you will crash so f*cking hard for about a week, so you might not be the same afterwards. It was like a 5-day coke hangover from doing a whole eight ball in less than eight hours.

It may be really bad, but the negative shit people may or may not being doing because of it just reflects back to them and isn't an effect of the drug.

Read the entire article in my OP for the answers. It explains the chemistry. Yes, the drug WILL make people insane, so your last statement is wrong.

Post: #8

How can someone say it isn't the drug that is causing these people to hallucinate and have manner of psychotic symptoms? Lol what the heck.

Post: #9

FreedomStands  Wrote:

How can someone say it isn't the drug that is causing these people to hallucinate and have manner of psychotic symptoms? Lol what the heck.

I'm saying they do not know how to handle it and do it anyway. You can act totally paranoid and crazy on coke and you can hallucinate your ass off on speed. You don't feel the need to remove your organs in the process.

Some people take a loaded gun and hide out in the closet for a week at a time on meth, but that doesn't mean the drug does that. Some people play scales on guitar all f*cking day and write songs. So we're supposed to throw the baby out with the bath water here?

Post: #10

Hysterical anti drug propaganda is as American as apple pie. I've used mdpv a handfull of times and this article is ridiculous horseshit.

Post: #11

That shit sounds as bad as scolopamine, but people actually wanna take this shit???

I suppose if people start taking it and shooting people its gonna do a lot for the anti gun lobbyists. The issue will be more on shootings than the actual drug.

Post: #12

Perhaps this drug allows the user to see demonic dimensions or hellish alternate universes. f*ck that.

Post: #13

The thing with meth is its potency compared to a traditional amphetamine,
Sure you can stay up for four days on speed,but meth is so much stronger that after being wired out your head for two days on a much,much stronger drug than normal speed you arnt making as informed decisions as to when you should stop,when sober you know its a bad idea to keep snortin meth,when your off ur tits on it you would think im ok,im going to keep racking them up.
Before u know it your naked,attacking yourself and others waking up in a secure unit! Same with pcp.
Now we have bathsalts,same/similar symptoms wirh over dose just dependant on an individuals own tolerance,which seems to vary greatly,too much of a gamble in my book tbh!

Post: #14

LoP Guest  Wrote:

Hysterical anti drug propaganda is as American as apple pie. I've used mdpv a handfull of times and this article is ridiculous horseshit.

So your keyboard has bite marks because?

Post: #15

LoP Guest  Wrote:

Hysterical anti drug propaganda is as American as apple pie. I've used mdpv a handfull of times and this article is ridiculous horseshit.

Keep.doing it now and then and let us know if you find your own tolerance level,we will prob read about you in the news lol