Last updated : December 23, 2024
New designer drugs, created to give users a cheap and intense high, are popping up across the country. Often combining household products, designer drugs claim to provide a “legal” high as law enforcement can’t keep up with the creation of dangerous new synthetics. These new synthetic drugs have deadly results; the extreme high craved by users also causes high rates of overdose and death.
The most dangerous aspect of synthetic drugs like bath salts and flakka is that they can be constantly reinvented to evade the law. These unregulated drugs are often more potent with each reincarnation.
Bath Salts
Bath salts rose to popularity in 2011, when the number of deaths increased by 20 times that of the previous year. This synthetic drug gets its name from its appearance: it is often disguised to look like common household bath salts, but won’t receive the same effects from snorting your private bath collection.
The chemical composition of bath salts varies, but it generally results in a high similar to that of LSD or methamphetamine. The hallucinations associated with these drugs are particularly nasty in bath salts—users are often described as “zombies.” Death associated with bath salts is often self-inflicted as a result of hallucinations.
While bath salts have been outlawed and declared a Schedule 1 substance, arrests and deaths still continue to this day.
Synthetic Marijuana
Like bath salts, synthetic marijuana is marketed as a “safe and legal” alternative to illegal drugs like marijuana. Commonly referred to by its nicknames “spice” or “K2,” synthetic marijuana claims to provide users with the same experience as cannabis. However, the unregulated chemical additives in synthetic marijuana can be dangerous and deadly.
Synthetic marijuana is particularly popular because its chemicals are difficult to detect in standard drug tests. The results of the drug are unpredictable and have been linked to negative side effects like psychosis, seizures, and panic attacks.
Flakka
Recently reported in Florida, Texas, and Ohio, Flakka is a new synthetic drug that’s drawn comparisons to bath salts. Flakka was developed as a result of DEA bans on other designer drugs as dealers try to stay ahead of law enforcement.
Flakka comes in a crystalline rock form like bath salts. It can be snorted, ingested, injected, or even inhaled through vapor. It is highly addictive and can be easily concealed in an e-cigarette or other common household product. The most dangerous effect of flakka is “excited delirium,” an energetic state of hallucination in which the user is likely to commit self-harm or hurt others. Like synthetic marijuana, dealers of flakka often don’t know exactly what is in the drug that they’re selling.
Krokodil
Perhaps the most dangerous drug on this list, krokodil developed as a dirt-cheap hallucinogen in Eastern Russia and Siberia. “Krokodil” derives its name from the flesh-eating effect it has on its users; Russian doctors were shocked to see patients hospitalized with skin that looked like the scales on a crocodile.
Krokodil can be created by items from your local grocery and hardware stores and is cheaper than heroin or methamphetamine. Its deadly effects are immediate—the area of injection is impacted with burst blood vessels and dead tissue. Repeated injection in one area can cause skin and muscle to fall off the bone, leading doctors to describe these gruesome victims as “zombie patients.”
While officials have downplayed krokodil in the United States, it has been recorded in Missouri and is a threat to spread given its low cost and common ingredients.
