ANDERSON COUNTY — Near the checkout counter at Zane’s Fast Stop are two empty glass shelves where the synthetic stimulants known as “bath salts" used to be displayed.
The powdery or crystallized drugs, once sold for less than $20 a jar, have also disappeared from the Iva Quick Stop.
Independent Mail reporters bought bath salts from both of those Anderson County convenience stores about a month ago.
But in Anderson County and in the Upstate, a lot has changed in a month.
Anderson County enacted an emergency ban on bath salts on Oct. 18 — three days before the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration made the same move.
The federal agency’s temporary ban makes it a crime to possess or sell the three key ingredients that are used to make the paranoia-inducing drugs. The drugs’ major components are mephedrone, methylone and methylenedioxypyrovalerone, or MDPV.
For at least one year, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration will classify those substances as the most restricted drugs in the country, while agents study the drugs to determine if they should be permanently controlled.
Anderson County leaders have already enacted measures intended to last longer than a year. After the county’s emergency ban was in place, the Anderson County Council voted last week to approve a more permanent ordinance. That ordinance makes it illegal to have bath salts or synthetic marijuana in any of the county’s unincorporated areas, and comes with a $500 fine for violators.
The city of Anderson and Pickens County have voted on similar ordinances, as have other areas in the Upstate. Those ordinances also ban substances used to make synthetic marijuana — a move made in reaction to the Oct. 4 death of Anderson University basketball player Lamar Jack. Toxicology tests and analysis revealed that Jack had ingested JWH-018, a chemical found in fake marijuana, before he died.
Enforcing the ban
Anderson County Sheriff John Skipper said his narcotics officers have seized 1,100 packages of bath salts and synthetic marijuana products since the county ban took effect.
“We’ve been going around to a lot of places to let people know about the ban, but we haven’t issued any citations yet,” Skipper said. “We have also been getting calls from citizens saying, ‘Hey, I read about this stuff in the newspaper, and I know of a store that has been selling this kind of stuff.’ We have been following up on all those calls and are making sure that people know these things are illegal.”
Before the ban, law officers in the Upstate dealt with bath salts users like a Piedmont man who needed an Anderson County SWAT team to calm him, a Central man who wielded a gun and threatened to shoot imaginary people, and a Liberty woman who wandered the streets carrying a child.
“The only reason that bath salts were such a big hit was because you could walk into anywhere and buy them,” said Lt. Chad Brooks of the Pickens County Sheriff’s Office.
Since the federal ban, mentions of “bath salts” have also disappeared from the pages of police and deputies’ reports in the Independent Mail’s coverage area. From Sept. 18 to Oct. 19, Pickens County sheriff’s deputies answered 10 bath salts-related calls from Easley to Liberty to Central, according to incident reports. Officers in those areas say that they are unaware of any new calls related to bath salts since the ban.
The same is true in the county and city of Anderson.
“Our guys have made copies of the federal regulation on bath salts and we are going around to convenience stores and gas stations handing it out,” said Anderson police Sgt. Tony Tilley. “We want people to know they are illegal and they need to get them out of their stores.”
Anderson University spokesman Barry Ray said Friday that the university created a policy against synthetic marijuana and bath salts on campus right after the death of Jack, a 19-year-old sophomore.
Clemson University does not have a separate, special policy, according to its spokesman, John Gouch.
“Since the DEA has put it on their illegal list, there’s no reason for Clemson to do anything extra,” Gouch said. “We will just comply with the law.”
Plenty left to do
Law enforcement officers say their next tasks involve searching for sales of the drugs on the streets and on the Internet.
Central Police Chief Kerry Avery said that working with local postmasters is integral to getting enough evidence to justify searching personal computers.
“When we get a search warrant, it wouldn’t just be for the product itself,” he said. “It would concern related papers, computers, thumb drives and zip drives.”
Officials believe that the persistence of Internet-based and street sellers will keep law enforcement and health-care providers busy, regardless of the federal ban.
Dr. Wally Davies, medical director of AnMed Health Medical Center’s emergency department, said he had seen several people who came into the emergency room and either said, or showed symptoms indicating, they were high on bath salts. Davies said the failure of hospital drug tests to detect bath salts is one of the biggest problems doctors face when they are trying to determine if someone has taken the drugs.
Davies predicts that a reliable test to detect bath salts won’t be available quickly.
“I’m sure they will come up with a test for it, but it will take months, if not longer,” he said.
Understanding the drugs’ long-term effects will take even longer.
“Usually there’s a several-year lag between when stuff starts showing up in the public and when it starts showing up in a definitive publication,” Davies said.
That’s frustrating for doctors at Patrick B. Harris Psychiatric Hospital in Anderson, where at least two patients are still having trouble coming back from the effects of bath salts they took weeks ago.
“We think the federal ban was a good idea; it was necessary to protect the public health,” said hospital director John Fletcher. “But we are not under the illusion that the ban means we will never see another person high on bath salts.”
A spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said the agency doesn’t have any statistics that demonstrate the effects of the temporary bans on synthetic marijuana and bath salts.
It’s too early to have that kind of information, said agency spokesman Jeffrey Scott.
“We are going to continue to aggressively pursue our cases, but we also rely on our state and local counterparts,” Scott said. “We have gotten a lot of calls from store owners who want to make sure they aren’t supposed to have the stuff and we have to tell them that it’s illegal.
“We get: ‘Can’t I still sell out my last bit of stock’ — and we have to say no,” Scott said. “But we aren’t going to be the ones out there shaking down 7-Eleven and Circle K.”
In the Upstate, Dr. Davies says that controlling access to synthetic drugs is “like playing Whack-A-Mole.” He said that as soon as one substance is banned, novice chemists begin to use the Internet to try to figure out how to make still-legal variants of the drug.
Some Internet companies that sell bath salts and synthetic marijuana are already claiming their suppliers have replaced banned chemicals with legal ones that are just as effective.
“There’s too much money and too much demand from the public,” Davies said. “People are going to find a way to manufacture this stuff.”
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