Understanding Synthetic Drug Addiction

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A Short Introduction to Synthetics

What are these substances? Who makes them? A complete list of all the synthetics being sold and abused would include hundreds of items. In the information that follows, you will find the main categories of drugs and the most popular synthetic drugs that are being abused. The list of substances changes almost daily. According to the United Nations’ World Drug Report for 2013, more than 250 “new psychoactive substances” have been found on the international market, 158 of them in the US.

Synthetics drugs are formulated in chemical and pharmaceutical labs around the world. Many substances were originally developed as possible new prescription drugs but were shelved because of bad side effects or because they did not do the job they were intended to do. Chemists have taken these original formulas and duplicated them or modified them slightly to make them into new substances that might not yet be illegal, depending on the national and local laws in the area where they will eventually be sold.

Inventors of the drugs were often staff in the labs of major pharmaceutical companies. Now, the drugs are mostly manufactured in illicit plants in India, China or Pakistan, countries known for their sophisticated chemical manufacturing industries. The drugs are then smuggled to other parts of Asia or Europe, Australia, Africa or North America. A few pounds of raw chemicals can bring hundreds of thousands of dollars in an affluent marketplace like the US.

These drugs can be purchased from drug dealers who work with smugglers, or they can easily be purchased online. There are many websites offering to sell these “research chemicals” to anyone with the money to buy them.

Most of these substances cannot yet be detected on drug tests which is why many people want to use them. Some branches of the military have had problems with soldiers or sailors abusing these drugs, but now there are drug tests for the most popular of these substances. Teens, people on probation, people who may be drug tested for their jobs - these new synthetics appeal to these groups and others want to get high without getting busted by police or employers. Lawmakers work hard to keep the laws current with the new drugs on the market but right now, there are just too many new substances being developed and sold.

It should be emphasized that abuse of any of these drugs is accompanied by a severe risk of addiction with the inevitable decline in morals and character that go along with it. Serious mental disturbance can also occur at any time with most any of these drugs. But with most of them, there are also risks to health that a person abusing them may simply choose to ignore. You’re about to learn about those risks.

European Agency Provides Update to Synthetics List

In 2014, the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction notified the public of a new, dangerous drug that was killing people in the UK and in Hungary. This drug was first seen on the market in 2012 and by 2014, had killed 26 people. The drug has different names – it may be called 4-methyl-euphoria or 4,4‘-DMAR. By any name, it is a killer.

At the time of this update, the drug was legal as it had not yet been included on lists of outlawed substances. It is a derivative of an illegal drug, D4-methylaminorex, that has an effect similar to methamphetamine.

Those who have died of this drug have manifested difficulty breathing, foaming at the mouth, high fever and cardiac arrest.

The drug can be powdered or in tablet form, and there is no reason that drug dealers could not put it in a liquid form as well. Since there is no safe way to identify the drug, the only safety is in being drug-free.

Dangers of Synthetic Drugs

The category of synthetic drugs is one that is very hard to pin down, due to the speed at which this category is expanding. In the last dozen years, the list of synthetic drugs being abused in the US has grown enormously. So the signs and symptoms of synthetics abuse will have a very wide range. Symptoms of use of this class of drug is enough to create alarm in parents, medical professionals, law enforcement officials and lawmakers.

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The List Constantly Changes

New synthetics arrive on the market constantly, so it is not possible to compile a complete list. Chemists who wish to evade arrest can simply shift the formula slightly and come up with something new that might not be listed in the text of laws that ban drugs.

The synthetics class includes drugs like those called “bath salts” and those sold as synthetic marijuana. Both these types of drug are sold in deceptive packaging, being labeled as plant food, fish food, “soothing bath salts,” incense or potpourri. They have imaginative and fancy names. There are as many as a hundred different chemicals that might be included in either of these formulations. There are also Piperazines, another class of synthetics, and scores that just use a letter-number designation, like 2C-E, MDEA, or 3-FEC.

If you are trying to determine if a person has abused a synthetic, you might be looking for signs and symptoms like these:

• Seizures
• Hallucinations
• Suicidal tendencies and attempts
• Homicidal tendencies
• Delusions
• Overstimulation
• Aggression
• Paranoia
• Chest pain
• Heart attack
• Death
• Overheating that causes a person to tear off his clothes
• Other self-destructive behavior like bashing one’s body or head against walls

Less severe symptoms of synthetic drugs can include:

• Agitation
• Anxiety
• Heart palpitations
• Sweating
• Inability to speak
• Restlessness
• Euphoria

Symptoms can last for hours or even days. Since these drugs are addictive, one of the signs of synthetics abuse is compulsive use despite the harm that is being experienced.

The difficulty with determining if a particular set of symptoms relates to synthetic drug abuse is that drug tests, like laws, are trailing behind the industry manufacturing these drugs. There is one drug test, for example, that can identify fourteen drugs that might be included in bath salts, but there are eighty others that might make up the formulation. So a person could be tested for all known drugs and test negative but have abused a new chemical that was not included in the list.

Specific Dangers of Synthetics

• The actual contents of any of these pills or packages is completely unpredictable. The dosages are completely uncontrolled. Even the people selling them do not know what the chemicals are. When a person overdoses and arrives at the hospital emergency room (delivered by ambulance or police in restraints), the biggest challenge facing the ER doctors is to determine “What did you TAKE?” Even if someone previously used a drug that was labeled the same thing (for example, ‘Spice’) and everything “went okay,” they say, this next package could contain different chemicals or could be much stronger.
• For many of these chemicals, the difference between a recreational dose and a fatal dose is infinitesimally tiny, meaning that if they get just a tiny bit too much, they could overdose fatally.
• As seen in the examples above, the reactions of some people who have used these drugs have been violent and criminally, psychotically harmful.
• Because the formulas continually change, the drug they are about to consume could be completely new. It’s possible no one knows what the result of taking it is, including the criminal chemists who created it. These drugs are completely uncontrolled and untested.

Examples of Harm Resulting from Synthetic Drugs

Any drug abuse is accompanied by danger. Those dangers could include overdose, addiction, loss of self-respect, damage to relationships with family, criminal prosecution, injury while impaired, and more.

Here are some specific examples of the extreme and unpredictable damage caused from using these drugs: (Warning: This is nasty stuff.)

• In Louisiana at the end of 2010, Dickie Sanders snorted bath salts, then became erratic, despondent and, finally, psychotic. Terrified by hallucinations, he cut his own throat while standing in the kitchen with his father. The wound was repaired but the 21-year-old managed to find a gun the next day and kill himself.

• In 2011 in Washington, two young parents killed their young son and then drove away. Their fast and erratic driving attracted the police who chased them until the father pulled over, shot his wife and then himself. Bath salts were found in the father’s pockets, in the car and in the home where the child was killed.

• In August 2012 in New Jersey, a 33-year-old mother decapitated her toddler and then stabbed herself to death. She had smoked marijuana treated with PCP, a concoction currently street-known as ‘Wet,’ (because the joint is dipped in liquid PCP.)

• In September 2012 also in New Jersey, a 31-year-old man high on PCP and marijuana broke into a neighbor’s home and cut the throats of two children, killing one of them.

• In December 2012 in Texas, 17-year-old Emily Bauer smoked a substance sold as synthetic marijuana. It is commonly labeled as ‘Spice,’ advertised as incense or potpourri. Emily had a series of strokes that left her violently psychotic. Days later, swelling in her brain nearly killed her, leaving her blind and disabled.

• In July 2013 in Taiwan, a 17-year-old boy took a new drug called the “N-Bomb” (technically ‘25I-NBOMe’). He became violently sick and delusional. He struggled with family trying to stop him, then dived off a high rise balcony to his death.

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Fatal and Dangerous Outcomes to Synthetics Abuse

The abuse of this drug is not only dangerous and potentially addictive to the user, it can be fatal for children or people in the vicinity. In Washington State, bath salts abuse resulted in the deaths of a four-year-old boy and both parents and a teen in Minneapolis who died after overdosing on a drug just referred to a 2C-E. A mother in Kentucky who had used bath salts tried to kill her two-year-old when she became convinced he was a demon, but he survived. A Hawaiian man used Spice (synthetic cannabis) and then tried to throw his girlfriend off an eleventh-floor balcony.

Near New Orleans, a young man snorted bath salts and then tried to kill himself with a knife while his father stood nearby. He received medical treatment for the knife wound then succeeded in killing himself the next day.

This class of drug is so unpredictable that the smartest move is to avoid it entirely. Families trying to deal with someone who has been abusing a synthetic may not even be able to successfully drug test the user. This makes these drugs attractive to some people who think they can use a drug and not get caught but their risk is enormous.

The Narconon program not only addresses the debilitating effects of drug abuse on the mind and body, but also resolves why a person turned to drugs in the first place. As a result, a person can graduate from the program into a new life free from the use of synthetics.