UTICA - Bath salts have fizzed in the wake of federal, state and local government bans on the synthetic drugs and related crackdowns by law enforcement.
Bath salts-related calls to local police and the Upstate New York Poison Center have fallen sharply and emergency rooms are seeing fewer patients high on bath salts.
That doesn't mean synthetic drugs no longer are a threat, though.
"They're still experimenting and they're still using it," said Michele Caliva, administrative director of the poison center.
"They're just changing the chemical configuration and a new one is emerging."
Poison control calls about molly - a pure form of the chemical MDMA, which is used in ecstasy - are up, Caliva said. The St. Elizabeth Medical Center emergency room does get molly patients once in a while, said Dr. Tim Page, director of the emergency department. But they're not as hard to handle as bath salts patients, he said.
Although both are hallucinogens with similar symptoms, "it's like comparing a Yugo to a dump not the aggressive, faceeating, carnivore activities" such as those associated with bath salts.
But some local officials also have their eye on a new synthetic hallucinogen:
2C-1, which investigators believe actor Johnny Lewis of the FX series "Sons of Anarchy" might have taken before killing an 81-year-old woman and her cat, and falling to his death last month.
Although poison control hasn't received any calls about it yet and local police say they haven't seen any, 2C-1 - a federally controlled substance since July - has become a problem nationally and was linked to the deaths of two North Dakota teens over the summer.
"We're certainly concerned that that could be an issue in the future," said Detective Commander Tim Bates of the Rome Police Department.
Law enforcement and medical professionals were behind the curve when it came to bath salts, Utica Police Chief Mark Williams admitted.
But with collaboration, they came up with a strategy that worked, he said.
In the future, everyone will have to stay on top of new synthetic drugs, he said.
"I hate to say it, but today it's bath salts. Who knows what it's going to be tomorrow," Williams said.
Bath salts - a hallucinogen once sold legally in head shops, convenience stores and gas stations - started appearing nationally in late 2010.
But local use skyrocketed earlier this year, particularly in the Utica area, as calls to poison control rose sharply and hospital workers and police struggled to cope with hallucinating, paranoid users with racing hearts, overheated bodies and superhuman strength.
But a spate of legislative measures to ban the drugs, and raids by local police and a nationwide bust by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, followed.
Apparently they worked:
· Calls to poison control fell from a high of 112 in July to 20 last month, Caliva said.
· Rome police at one time fielded two or three bath salts calls a day but those have dropped to "virtually nothing," Bates said.
· Utica police also have seen a substantial decrease in bath salts incidents from an average as high as three calls a day over the summer, Williams said.
· Faxton-St. Luke's Healthcare's emergency room treated 32 bath salts patients in July and four in September, officials said.
"I think that getting them off the market and decreasing access has had a huge impact," Caliva said.
Part of the difficulty with controlling bath salts, molly or any synthetic drug and treating patients using them is that chemists keep tweaking formulas and there's never any guarantee that a particular drug contains certain ingredients, whatever its name might imply.
"We don't know what is in any of this stuff," Caliva said. "I gotta tell you. I don't think people know what they're taking."
BATH SALTS CALLS Bath salts-related calls to the Upstate New York Poison Center in 2012
· January: 8
· February: 22
· March: 22
· April: 30
· May: 41
· June: 87
· July: 112
· August: 33
· September: 20 Total: 375 DRUG TIMELINE December 2010: The American Association of Poison Control Centers raises the alarm about the synthetic drugs known as bath salts.
July 15, 2011: Chemicals most frequently found in bath salts are banned.
April 2012: Rome passes the area's first local ban on bath salts and fake pot.
Between June and August, Herkimer, Utica, Ilion and Oneida County all follow suit.
June 12: State troopers Taser a Munnsville woman who tried to choke her three-year old son. She dies minutes later. Over the next month, police respond to a number of bizarre incidents involving bath salts users who often are half dressed, hallucinating, paranoid and violent.
July 9: A federal ban on 31 designer drug chemicals, including two used is bath salts, is signed into law by the president.
July 10: The state attorney general announces lawsuits against head shops across the state, including one in New Hartford, for violating state labeling laws in their sales of bath salts and other synthetic drugs. This suit is followed by another in August against Tebb's Head Shops.
July 18: Utica police make their first bath salts arrest one week after the city ban passed.
July 25: The federal Drug Enforcement Administration conducts Operation Log Jam, a raid on synthetic drug sellers in more than 100 cities. The operation included Tebb's Head Shop in Utica, but Utica police already raided it five days earlier.
Aug. 7: The state health department issues tougher regulations, expanding the list of banned substances to include dozens of chemicals used to make synthetic drugs.
Copyright 2012 The Evening TimesDistributed by Newsbank, Inc. All Rights Reserved
