Bath Salts, Dangerous New Stimulant, Keep Popping Up In Different Forms

Doctors all over the United States are scrambling for ways to treat the unusually long-lasting and severe side effects of a new recreational drug commonly called bath salts, looking like the household product of the same name.

Many users of bath salts suffer violent, psychotic reactions to the drugs, which have other effects similar to methamphetamines and cocaine.

What Are Bath Salts?

Typically available as tablets that are swallowed or as powders that can be smoked or snorted or mixed with water for injection, bath salts are synthetic stimulants made usually made in illegal labs. Most often containing the chemical mephedrone, bath salts are known by a variety of street names, including arctic blast, ivory snow, loco-motion, vanilla sky, white knight, and white rush. Typically street dealers and head shops sell 50-mg packets of the drug for $25 to $50.

Bath salts have been around in Detroit since the early 1990's, but they only became common in the rest of the US and in Canada and the UK about 2010.

What Do Bath Salts Do?

Most users of bath salts report that they get a high similar to cocaine, ecstasy, or molly from the use of the drug. From a pharmacological point of view, bath salts are a sympathomimetic, meaning they stimulate the sympathetic nervous system, the part of the nervous system that is involved in "fight or flight" reactions. By stimulating the sympathetic nervous system, bath salts constrict the pupils, raise blood pressure, increase the strength of each heart beat and accelerate the pulse, and slow down the passage of food through the digestive tract.

Like other sympatomimetics, bath salts can hasten ejaculation from males during sexual intercourse. Many men who use the drug take it so they can attempt intercourse again and again while on the drug.

The problem with bath salts is that some of its users become psychotic after taking the drug. The hot flashes triggered by the drug causes some to strip off their clothes and run down the street, and others to scratch their skin raw. Some users become belligerent and aggressive and have to be restrained, even put under general anesthesia, until they calm down.

What Is the Downside of Using Bath Salts?

Bath salts got the attention of public health officials in March of 2011, after a four-month period during whch 35 users of bath salts wound up in emergency rooms in Michigan alone. Of the 35 users whose reactions were bad enough to require emergency room treatment, 17 had to be admitted to psychiatric wards, and one was dead on arrival.

The drug can cause pounding heartbeat, wheezing, asthma attacks so violent that ribs are cracked, fever, and chest pain. Heat exhaustion may quickly occur when the drug is used in overheated clubs or outdoors on hot summer nights. Although users who die of the drug typically already had severe atherosclerosis, the drug can cause heart attack and stroke even in teens and young adults.

But Aren't Bath Salts Legal?

The most common chemical used to make bath salts is known as mephedrone. Possession, sale, or distribution of mephedrone has been illegal in the United Kingdom since 2010 and in the United States since 2011, as has possession, sale, or distribution of the related chemicals methylone and methylenedioxypyrovalerone. 

However, bath salts are a designer drug. This means that there are dozens of closely related chemical compounds that have the same effect as the three chemicals banned by federal law that have similar effects. In 2010, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs in the UK banned over 50 different chemicals that are similar to mephedrone, methylone, and methylenedioxypyrovalerone, but it only took a few days for chemists to create dozens more drugs with similar effects that were not covered by British law.

Similarly, in the United States, dozens of alternatives to the banned drugs began to appear almost at the same time President Obama signed the law banning the three original drugs. Some started being sold as "synthetic marijuana," although they have the exact opposite effects of smoking marijuana, and some dealers started pushing the banned herbal drug khat.

Bath salts remain easy to get over the Internet, and chemists working for the drug labs can make their products legal by changing a single molecule over and over again, faster than the US and UK national governments and the American states can ban them.

One of the designer bath salts, MPVD, cannot be detected by drug sniffing dogs or by urine tests (although it is possible to detect the drug from hair samples). And in no small part because of sensationalist coverage, bath salts have become the fourth most commonly used street drug in the USA, after marijuana, cocaine, and MDMA/molly/ecstasy.

So if there is someone in your life you think might be getting into trouble with bath salts, what can you do? Here are a few suggestions:

• Even if it seems your advice is falling on deaf ears, ask that at the very least your loved one avoids situations where everyone is using the drug. Toxic reactions to the drug, when they occur, usually start about 2 hours after it is taken. Death can occur in six.  There needs to be someone around to get help if it is needed.

• By the same token, if someone you know is using bath salts, be careful. Dr. Mark Ryan, director of the Louisiana Poison Center, told the New York Times, "“If you take the worst attributes of meth, coke, PCP, LSD and ecstasy and put them together, that’s what we’re seeing sometimes." People on bath salts have become so agitated that they had to be put under general anesthesia to get calmed down.

• Be knowledgeable of the ruses dealers use to persuade users to buy their drugs. In the UK, it's not unheard of for bath salts to be sold as incredibly expensive "plant food." In the US, the product may be labeled as fertilizer or insecticide, or doses of bath salts far too small actually to use in the bath.

• Be aware that bath salts take a lot longer to wear off than cocaine or crystal meth. Even half a day after someone takes the drug, they may be easily provoked to violence.

• The effects of bath salts and khat may be especially severe in people who also take drugs for depression, aggravating the side effects of these drugs. Users of both bath salts and antidepressants may experience long-term or essentially permanent impotence (in men) or inability to have an orgasm (in women).

And be aware that the more someone uses bath salts, khat, or any drug in a class known as synthetic cathinones, the more of the drug will be needed to get high.

Long-term use of the drug interferes with the ability of the brain to make dopamine, the "fun chemical," so that anything that used to bring about a high, whether it's sex, drugs, or cheeseburgers, has to be consumed in ever increasing amounts.