A few years ago, horror stories of people under the influence of bath salts flooded the news, like the man in Miami who chewed off another man's face in a drug-induced zombie-like attack. Suppliers have found new ways to skirt the laws that ban designer drugs with a drug so new, it hasn't been banned yet: Flakka. Flakka contains a synthetic amphetamine like the cathinones in other bath salts.
"We're starting to see a rash of cases of a syndrome referred to as excited delirium," Jim Hall, an epidemiologist at the Center for Applied Research on Substance Use and Health Disparities at Nova Southeastern University in Florida, told CBS News. "This is where the body goes into hyperthermia, generally a temperature of 105 degrees. The individual becomes psychotic, they often rip off their clothes and run out into the street violently and have an adrenaline-like strength and police are called and it takes four or five officers to restrain them. Then once they are restrained, if they don't receive immediate medical attention they can die."
"On a scale of one to 10, Flakka is a 12," Lt. Dan Zsido of the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office told 10 News Tampa Bay Sarasota. "It comes from a place where we don't know how it's being made, who's making it, and what's been added to it before it reaches the end user so it's very dangerous."
According to Glatter, the U.S Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reports that Flakka cases have gone from zero (in 2010) to 85 cases reported (in 2012) to more than 670 (in 2014).
