The incident in Miami (where a homeless man ripped the face off another man and ate it) was blamed on the illegal use of so-called “bath salts”.
Was this ever proven? Or was the man just mentally ill, or under the influence of other drugs?
No, it was actually proven the only thing he had in his system was THC. No bath-salts at all.
The primary effects of “bath salts” are increased heart rate, excessive salivation and severe mental confusion in members of the media.
Scishow did a video about the science of this:
It’s very accessible and actually pretty entertaining. The short version of the answer seems to be “Maybe not every time, but yes, that can totally happen.”
Anecdotally - my son moonlights as a security guard at a local hospital. Has to deal with the occasional drunk, etc. Recently had someone come in for treatment who was on bath salts (nothing else found in blood test). He basically tried to disassemble the entire ER and the staff inside. Took 3 strong guys to subdue him. Video captured the entire event. After detoxing, he had no recollection of the entire event.
This is actually incorrect. We have simple tests to detect the presence of THC, or cocaine, or opiates, and a few other drugs. We don’t have tests for the dozens of varieties of designer drugs that are sometimes sold legally under the name “bath salts”.
There is no such drug as “bath salts”, there are lots of different drugs that are called that, and we haven’t got around to making them illegal yet.
So the face-eating guy tested positive for THC, but there isn’t a test for “bath salts”, so “bath salts” wasn’t ruled out. We have no idea what drugs he was taking, we just know that of the common drugs they can test for, THC was the only one he tested positive for.
According to this, there was an initial screening for typical drugs and then a second toxicology lab test for commonly-known “bath salt” ingredients. It doesn’t mention what they are, but I presume they’d test for synthetic cathinones like MDPV, Methylone and Mephedrone. Maybe he was on something they couldn’t test for, or maybe not.
Well, the media certainly gets things like this wrong, and does so because the more salacious & sensational the story the better. But so-called ‘bath slats’ *are *pretty nasty stuff, and I wouldn’t say that the media has gone totally overboard on them (à la ‘Refer Madness’). Except maybe overstating their popularity, which is very low compared to other drugs.
Can we please stop calling these drugs ‘bath salts’, except possibly in scare quotes as part of an explanation? I have a two-kilogram bag of magnesium sulphate that is getting very confused.
But the name does help to convey how they add spice to an ordinary bland face.
I always found it a little ironic that I was first made aware of the existence of ‘bath salts’ by the anti-drug A&E documentary series Intervention! I’d never ever heard of such a thing before seeing an episode about a guy doing them. When I was first watching it and the addict said, “I’m addicted to bath salts” I had to stop & back up my TiVo twice, cause I was like, “He’s addicted to what?!?”