Bath Salts Update: New Research, New Evolution

By Eric Peters

In 2010, following legislation to halt a nationwide surge in the legal sale and use of synthetic marijuana, a new and far more dangerous group of legal designer drugs emerged.

The use of these new designer drugs, which are commonly referred to as bath salts and still available everywhere from the Internet to convenience stores and head shops, quickly rose to epidemic proportions.

The national media soon took notice of the potentially dangerous effects of these drugs, and some investigative reports linked bath salts to suicide and severe hallucinations.

The New York Times reported, “Some of the recent incidents include a man in Indiana who climbed a roadside flagpole and jumped into traffic, a man in Pennsylvania who broke into a monastery and stabbed a priest, and a woman in West Virginia who scratched herself ‘to pieces’ over several days because she thought there was something under her skin.”

The active ingredients in bath salts were identified soon after use began to spread, but studies involving the effects of those chemicals on the brain, especially in tandem with one another, were never extensively explored until now.

Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University this month presented their findings from such a study, which reveals the neurological reasons bath salts can produce similar but stronger effects than off-the-street methamphetamine, cocaine or both.

While these designer drugs are labeled as bath salts, they are anything but, and were never intended to be used as such.

The two main active ingredients in bath salts are Methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV) and mephedrone, and VCU researchers found that it is the combination of these two chemicals that contributes to many of the negative effects of bath salts.

“It’s like a double punch,” says Louis J. De Felice, Ph.D., one of the researchers on the VCU study. “It’s as if a person were to take methamphetamine and cocaine at the same time.”

The mephedrone acts like methamphetamine by releasing dopamine into the brain while the MDPV acts like cocaine by preventing dopamine from being absorbed back into the brain.

“So that means the dopamine is out there, but unlike in a natural situation, it’s not able to be taken back up again,” explains De Felice.

Additionally, De Felice and colleagues discovered that the excess dopamine is likely to remain, along with the stimulating effects, long after the chemicals were removed.

The researchers at VCU only studied these long-lasting stimulating effects up to 30 minutes after removal of the chemicals, but have additional research planned that might help identify this phenomenon as the reason behind bath salts’ lingering psychotic and physical effects that sometimes last for days or weeks.

It was because of these negative effects that many bath salt variations had been outlawed throughout much of the U.S. by early 2011, but they remained easy to acquire through the Internet. According to the American Association of Poison Control Centers, there were more than 6,000 calls to poison control centers pertaining to bath salts in 2011, more than10 times the number in 2010.

Another problem, says Rutherfoord Rose, Pharm.D., director of VCU’s Virginia Poison Center, is that as soon as one ingredient or designer drug is outlawed, another takes its place.

“Substances like 2ce, 2ci and 25i have become the newest thing since bath salts were outlawed in most states,” he says. “They appear to have similar effects to the ingredients in bath salts, but in some cases we’ve seen the effect to be even more severe, producing refractory seizures, convulsions and bleeding in the brain.”

Rose says when it comes to new drugs like these, as the case once was with bath salts, his center relies on verbal reports from friends and users to identify what has been ingested because labs simply can’t test for new and emerging drugs that haven’t yet been identified and studied.

So the fight continues and researchers such as De Felice and his colleagues push forward, studying, identifying and working as quickly as possible to publish research that sheds light on how and why these chemicals are so dangerous.