There is a new addiction that people have been suffering from lately. It is to what is now a widely found product sold in stores as “bath salt” or plant food. There are many brands of these legal substances and different ones are said to give different effects. Some of the brands are said to cause a person to feel like they are MDMA, some are said to feel like the person is on cocaine or speed. Because these drugs are sold as “bath salts” or “plant food” and labeled as being not for human consumption, the federal government is having a really hard time getting a legal hold on the situation.
There are many differing opinions about these drugs and their effects in the public. Many people who are using them obviously say that there is nothing wrong with them and that the effort of trying to get them banned is ridiculous and should be abandoned. However there are a lot of people who have seen the devastating effects of these drugs close at hand and say that they sooner they are banned and made illegal the better.
Bath salt addiction is a very hard addiction to control. The main problem with it is that there are all types of unknown chemicals being used in these drugs, the ingredients are not always listed on the packaging, and there are not even drug screens that can test for them at this point. People have showed up to the ER overdosed or suffering from medical complications, and the doctors there would never had known what the problem was if the person had not admitted to the fact that they had taken the new designer drugs.
Addicts Say It’s Ok
When one searches on the Internet about this new line of designer drugs there are two main responses that come up. There are many horror stories that have come up about the ill effects of these drugs and the response of people who are using these drugs is always quick to blame the person using the drugs, not the drugs themselves. The average user who posts on the internet about these “bath salts” says something like the following: “The effects of these drugs on me are great. I fully enjoy the feeling that I receive from these drugs and they have opened up entire new worlds for me. I like to take them with a loved one and we enjoy a really nice time together. If there are some people out there who are not able to handle the high of these drugs then that is their fault. These drugs should not be banned for the rest of the population because there were a few people who probably had addictive personalities and behavioral problems to begin with, that were not able to handle the use of these products.”
Obviously the above is not what was said word for word about these drugs, it is just a reworded version of what a lot of different people said about the situation. Some of the users would then go on to say which specific brands were better and which ones would cause which kind of high. Some of the people said that the drug had really improved their lives because they had lost a lot of weight and their houses were really clean. Another person online had said that she had recently been suffering from depression and had gained some weight. She said that with the discovery of bath salts she was able to lose the weight and is now happy about life again. She said that her family was pleased to see her back to her old self.
Addiction to Bath Salts is Scary
As much as there are many users out there who are more than willing to defend the use of the new designer drugs, there is definitely a very scary trend of abuse of these products that is going around. There have been a few people who have used personally interviewed and they discussed their experience with the drug. Some said that it was like cocaine but lasted for a much longer time. They said that the cocaine like euphoria only lasted for a little while and then the rush turned into one that was similar to methamphetamines. There where a lot of people who were up for over twenty four hours after only using one single dose. Some of these people said that they may have used too much, but since the use of these drugs are highly unknown, it is difficult for people to know how much to use or not.
People have also reported that with drug abuse, many people start to suffer from hallucinations and psychosis. There have been accountings where people began to see hallucinations mixed in with reality and believed the hallucinations to be real. The reason that people are probably experiencing these effects from these drugs is due to lack of sleep and food. If a person were not using drugs but was to stay up for days on end without eating, there is a probability that they would begin to suffer from severe psychosis. While a person is under the influence of these drugs however, the need to eat and sleep can elude them for days and the person may find it impossible to do either during this time.
There have been many recorded cases where a person has had psychosis from using these substances and have become violent. They have had hallucinations where there are phantom people attacking them and they have responded as thought the situations where real. The second part of this article is going to be mainly devoted to the experience of one man who was addicted to bath salts for about one half of a year and the devastation that it caused him in his life.
