'Bath Salts' Drug Trend: Expert Q&A
"Ivory Wave," "Purple Wave," Vanilla Sky," and "Bliss" -- all are among the many street names of a so-called designer drug known as “bath salts,” which has sparked thousands of calls to poison centers across the U.S. over the last year.
Citing an “imminent threat to public safety,” the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) made illegal the possession and sale of three of the chemicals commonly used to make bath salts -- the synthetic stimulants mephedrone, MDPV, and methylone. The ban, issued in October 2011, is effective for at least a year. During that time, the agency will decide whether a permanent ban is warranted.
WebMD talked about bath salts and other designer drugs with Zane Horowitz, MD, an emergency room physician and medical director of the Oregon Poison Center.
First of all, what are bath salts?
"The presumption is that most bath salts are MDPV, or methylenedioxypyrovalerone, although newer pyrovalerone derivatives are being made by illegal street chemists. Nobody really knows, because there is no way to test for these substances," Horowitz says.
Why are they called bath salts?
"It’s confusing. Is this what we put in our bathtubs, like Epsom salts? No. But by marketing them as bath salts and labeling them 'not for human consumption,' they have been able to avoid them being specifically enumerated as illegal," Horowitz says.
In October 2011, the DEA used its authority to place several of the chemicals used to produce bath salts under their control, and it’s likely that they will permanently illegalize the possession and sale of these chemicals and products that contain them. What impact will that have?
"Pretty much all of these chemicals will end up permanently banned," Horowitz says. "But it's easy to say, 'We've banned them.' It's something else to police them and make them go away. Cocaine, heroin, [and] marijuana are illegal, but they are all still out there. Designer drugs like bath salts never really go away. How people make them and how they sell them are the only things that change. People will abuse them until there's a crisis that brings attention to them, then they will disappear and a new drug will come along to fill the void."
Are bath salts illegal?
"You can find them in mini-marts and smoke shops sold as Ivory Wave, Bolivian Bath, and other names," Horowitz says. "The people who make these things have skirted the laws that make these types of things illegal. While several states have banned the sale of bath salts, ultimately it will have to be a federal law that labels these as a schedule 1 drug, which means it has no medicinal value but a high potential for abuse, and declare them illegal."
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