Amy Neff Roth
Gatehouse News Service
UTICA, N.Y. — 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 Up-state 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 truck,” Page said. “It’s just not the aggressive, face-eating, 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.
Copyright 2012 The Evening Telegram