KONAWA, Okla. — Past midnight, Kat Green arrived home from her police shift exhausted. She pulled the ponytail from her hair, slid into pajamas and clicked on the television. Then her smartphone started ringing with urgent messages.
Mass drug overdose. Party at a ranch house outside of town.
Green yanked her black police shirt over her head and sped off into the spring night. On the way, more information trickled in: At least a half-dozen young adults sick, some near death. She knew she had to be strong. In a town of just 1,300 people, she was bound to know some of them.
As the squad car raced up a dusty gravel driveway near 1 a.m., emergency lights flickering, Green spotted three young men writhing on the front lawn. The lanky one in the front looked familiar.
“Oh my God,” she thought, running closer. “That’s my son.”
Colton, 20, was still breathing, but his mouth foamed and his eyes rolled back in his head. He could only growl.
Green grabbed her son by the shoulders. She tried to rouse life from his rigid body. “Colton! Colton!” she hollered in his face. “Son, what did you take?”
From rural Oklahoma to suburban Minnesota, a tide of dangerous synthetic drugs is causing mayhem and baffling police and prosecutors across the nation.
Packaged and sold as innocuous products such as “herbal incense” and “bath salts,” the drugs are touted by users as legal alternatives to marijuana, cocaine and other controlled substances that can bring stiff penalties and jail time in even small amounts.
But the consequences of using them are proving to be devastating.
This spring, synthetic drugs sent shock through a suburban Twin Cities neighborhood after a house party went awry. Eleven teens and young adults had to be rushed to hospitals after snorting a synthetic drug in Blaine. A 19-year-old died hours later after doctors removed his life support.
In Mississippi, a man high on bath salts stole a gun from one sheriff’s deputy, then shot another dead. He told deputies that he saw the devil and broke through gurney straps and medical tape when they tried to force him into an ambulance.
In Iowa, an 18-year-old student smoked synthetic marijuana with some friends, then told them he felt like he was in hell. He went home and shot himself.
In an upscale suburb of New Orleans, a doctor’s son, high on bath salts, slit his throat in front of his family, then later took a shotgun to his head.
Outside Seattle, a 38-year-old man killed his wife, then himself, during a high-speed police chase in April. Police found their 5-year-old son dead at home. Both parents had bath salts in their systems.
Police in Bangor, Maine, have dealt with a number of incidents involving bath salts in recent weeks.
Altogether, poison control centers have received more than 6,600 calls about designer synthetics this year, 10 times more than the first half of 2010. Synthetic drugs have been linked or suspected in more than 20 deaths nationally in the past year, while emergency rooms are treating more patients who have overdosed on sometimes tiny amounts of designer synthetics.
Mark Ryan, director of the Louisiana Poison Center, said he has seen “bizarre reports” from all over the country.
“The severity of the cases is what makes it so bad,” Ryan said. “The symptoms are severe and people are a threat not only to themselves, but to those around them.”
The new drugs are easy to find. Merchants promote the drugs on the Internet, and some are available on the shelves of record stores and smoke shops. Authorities believe the drugs are often manufactured by rogue chemists in foreign countries.
Federal officials claim many of the new designer drugs are already illegal under existing laws. To strengthen the hands of police and prosecutors, lawmakers in Washington and many states are trying to combat the burgeoning crisis by banning specific substances in designer synthetics and their chemical cousins. In Minnesota, a new drug law with that purpose went into effect on July 1.
But few prosecutors have brought charges under the laws, which have yet to be fully tested in court.
U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a former Hennepin County attorney who is now sponsoring some of the federal legislation, called the growth of synthetics a “major shift” in the drug trade.
“I think it’s only going to get worse if we don’t start getting serious about enforcing these laws and giving the prosecutors and cops the tools that they need,” Klobuchar said.
Federal agents who have devoted their careers to America’s war on drugs are scrambling to find a way to fight a problem emerging with a different set of rules.
“We’re going to be constantly having to deal with this issue of ‘legal’ stuff coming on the market,” said Rusty Payne, a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) spokesman in Washington. “This is stuff that’s dangerous.”
Finding instructions for mixing, making, dosing and ingesting synthetic drugs is simple on the Internet. Erowid.org, one popular website, suggests mixing psychoactive powders into liquid to make it easier to measure accurate doses without expensive scales.
The Internet is also a flourishing marketplace for potential users to buy designer synthetics. One of the most popular online merchants appears to be am-hi-co.com, a site that acknowledges some of its “potpourri blends, incense and collectors items” may not be legal in all countries. In June, an estimated 8,156 people visited the site, up from just 515 unique visitors two years ago, ac cording to data analysis by Internet Exposure, a Web design and research firm hired by the Star Tribune. Several other sites selling synthetic drugs had similar growth.
Merchants are introducing new products online, too. When the DEA temporarily banned five chemicals used to make synthetic marijuana early this year, retailers started promoting new mixtures they claimed were not covered by any bans.
The market is too lucrative to disappear. Herbal incense, sometimes called synthetic marijuana, accounted for nearly $5 billion in sales last year, according to an estimate from the Retail Compliance Association, a national retailers group that formed to challenge herbal incense bans.
“Customers said right off, if you can’t sell stuff, we’re just going to go on the Internet,” said Duluth retailer Jim Carlson, who rolled out new products that he claims are legal as soon as Minnesota’s ban took effect. “Well, they don’t tax the Internet. The city and state will lose their sales tax.”
With names like Ivory Wave, Bliss and Cloud 9, many designer synthetics are marketed to appear harmless.
But taking them can be a life-or-death gamble.
The new drugs lack regulatory oversight and quality control. Users often rely on each others’ Internet postings to find out how much they should take and what they could experience.
Before the drugs showed up in the U.S., they were popular in Europe. After a rash of alarming incidents, authorities in several European countries banned the substances, some of which started as legitimate research chemicals but later became popular because of their psychoactive qualities.
Tracking the source of these drugs has been difficult, but authorities suspect many synthetics are produced in bulk quantities in such countries as China, Pakistan and India, according to the recent testimony of a top DEA official.
“Today, the marketing of such ‘designer’ drugs has ushered in a new era of drug distribution,” Joseph Rannazzisi, deputy assistant administrator of the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control, told members of Congress in April. “No longer are these substances sold in a covert manner to thwart law enforcement efforts. Instead, the substances are sold at retail outlets in plain view.”
Many of the substances are so new to the market that they have little track record. What may give one user a euphoric high could permanently injure someone else. Erratic labeling means buyers sometimes wind up with vastly different chemicals than the ones they ordered.
Cody Wiberg, executive director of the Minnesota Board of Pharmacy, said manufacturers don’t know what’s going to happen when they tweak chemicals. “They could produce something that kills people or that destroys some part of the brain that leaves somebody with a seizure disorder for the rest of their lives,” he said.
Star Tribune writer Larry Oakes and staff researchers Sandy Date and John Wareham contributed to this report.