Synthetic Street Drug Camouflaged as Bath Salts Has Dangerous, Bizarre Effects

LOUIS DE FELICE:

Well, first of all, bath salts is not a defined substance. It's a combination of drugs. There are several main components that are in bath salts. But you shouldn't think of it as just one kind of drug.

So it contains what are called cathinones, particularly synthetic cathinones.

And what we discovered was that some of these cathinones behave like methamphetamine, very similar to methamphetamine. But other of the synthetic cathinones that are in bath salts behave like cocaine.

So it's an insidious combination of two drugs, one of which, the methamphetamine-like component, releases dopamine into the brain, and the other, called MDPV, actually prevents dopamine from being taken up again.

So it's as if a person were to take methamphetamine and cocaine in just the right way to keep levels of dopamine very high in the brain for long periods of time.

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