View Correction. This Issue. Views , Citations 4. View Metrics. Anita Slomski. A dangerous drug that lingers. Illegal but easy to find. Confounding the clinician. See More About Addiction Medicine. Access your subscriptions.
Access through your institution. Add or change institution. Free access to newly published articles. Purchase access. Rent article Rent this article from DeepDyve. Access to free article PDF downloads. Save your search. These chemicals act in the brain like stimulant drugs indeed they are sometimes touted as cocaine substitutes ; thus they present a high abuse and addiction liability.
Consistent with this notion, these products have been reported to trigger intense cravings not unlike those experienced by methamphetamine users, and clinical reports from other countries appear to corroborate their addictiveness. They can also confer a high risk for other medical adverse effects.
Some of these may be linked to the fact that, beyond their known psychoactive ingredients, the contents of "bath salts" are largely unknown, which makes the practice of abusing them, by any route, that much more dangerous.
Unfortunately, "bath salts" have already been linked to an alarming number of ER visits across the country. Doctors and clinicians at U. It is noteworthy that, even though we are barely two months into , there have been calls related to "bath salts" to poison control centers so far this year.
This number already exceeds the calls received by poison control centers for all of It may also cause anxiety, vomiting or seizures. In all of there were 14 cases of synthetic marijuana reported to U. In that number was 2, You don't know how people are going to react to it," says Tony Scalzo of the Missouri Poison Center, who remains wary of the DEA's plan to ban five chemicals most common drug. So the DEA bans five of them, there are 50 of them that they could replace them with. Indeed, savvy pushers and chemists are often able to stay one step ahead of the law, says Barbara Carreno, a spokeswoman for the DEA.
By altering the molecular structure of a banned chemical, they can create a new compound that does more or less the same thing and isn't covered by a ban. We picked five because we don't have the resources to study This is a first step," says Carreno.
It's not. But not everyone agrees that the outright banning of these new drugs is the best way to proceed. If anything, the proliferation of these quasi-legal drugs is proof to some that the federal drug laws are failing.
This is a failure to think through the consequences of criminalization of marijuana rather than rely on sensible regulation and education. Education seems to be what the DEA has in mind for now, at the risk of creating new demand. We'll notify you here with news about.
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