Views , Citations 4. View Metrics. Anita Slomski. A dangerous drug that lingers. Illegal but easy to find. Confounding the clinician. See More About Addiction Medicine.
Access your subscriptions. Access through your institution. Add or change institution. Free access to newly published articles. Purchase access. Rent article Rent this article from DeepDyve. Access to free article PDF downloads. Save your search. Customize your interests. Create a personal account or sign in to:. But they can also cause paranoia, nervousness, and hallucinations seeing or hearing things that are not real.
Researchers do know that bath salts are chemically similar to amphetamines, cocaine, and MDMA. These drugs change the way the brain works by changing the way nerve cells communicate. Nerve cells, called neurons, send messages to each other by releasing chemicals called neurotransmitters.
Drugs affect this signaling process. Dopamine is the main neurotransmitter that relates to the brain's reward system — the system that tells us we feel good.
Circuits in the reward system use dopamine to teach the brain to repeat actions we find pleasurable. Drugs take control of this system, releasing large amounts of dopamine — first in response to the drug but later mainly in response to other cues associated with the drug, like when you see people you use drugs with, or plases where you use drugs. The result is an intensive motivation to seek the drug. These drugs raise levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin.
Learn more about how the brain works and what happens when a person uses drugs. And, check out how the brain responds to natural rewards and to drugs. These reports show people who use bath salts have needed help for heart problems such as racing heart, high blood pressure, and chest pains and symptoms like paranoia, hallucinations, and panic attacks.
They might also have dehydration, breakdown of muscle tissue attached to bones, and kidney failure. Read more about the link between viral infections and drug use.
Intoxication from several man-made cathinones, including MDPV, mephedrone, methedrone, and butylone, has caused death among some people who have used bath salts. Snorting or needle injection of bath salts seems to cause the most harm. Okay, first things first, are these actual, like give-your-mom-for-Mother's-Day bath salts?
People aren't going around getting high off of Dead Sea salts. One cannot use these for bathing. Well one could , but it would not have the desired effect. These bath salts, also known as "plant food," are a blanket term for a group of synthetic drugs. They are often made from mephedrone and methylenedioxypyrovalerone, or MDPV, though, as a Journal of Medical Toxicology article reported and we learned from Reuters' Jack Shafer , sometimes the packets have nothing more than caffeine and local anesthetics.
Sometimes the mixture has other drugs similar to MDPV and mephedrone which are generically called cathinones. No, those drugs are not common ingredients in bath salts or any other spa-related product. Rather, they are illegal substances, related to khat an organic stimulant found in Arab and East African countries, as we learned from this enlightening and we guess prescient New York Times trend story by Abby Goodnough and Katie Zezima from last July.
Two reasons. The drugs usually come in powder and crystal form, looking like the real-deal bath salts and also carry names that call back to our bath products, like Ivory Wave and Red Dove.
Also, selling them as "bath salts" served as a legal loophole for dealers. That along with the misleading label "not for human consumption," which gets around the Analog Act, under which substances "substantially similar" to illegal drugs is deemed illegal, but only if it is intended for consumption.
See the trick there? Kind of, yeah. Last March the federal government put a temporary year-long ban on the drugs that go into making bath salts.
But, those can be slightly tweaked no pun intended , getting around that. Plus that expired in March Though, that Times article said at least 28 states had banned bath salts as of last July. And the Senate passed a bill on May 24 that would make the salts illegal, closing some of the loopholes.
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