Stuff You Should Know - Bath Salts: Steer Clear

Episode Date: November 21, 2017

Although much of the media-fueled hysteria over the designer drug called bath salts has been utterly unfounded, especially when it comes to driving users to eating people's faces, you'll still want to pass on them. Learn why. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And then on January 16th, the next night, we're gonna be at Revolution Hall in Portland, and we are super psyched for these, right, Chuck? That's right, these tickets are going fast, so for all the deets, go to our live home on the web, S-Y-S-K-Live, dot com. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks, dot com.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there, and they are both loaded on bath salts. No, we're not. No, you're not, like you even need to say that. Everybody knows you're not on bath salts. Yeah, and so, COA time,

this is about the drug bath salts. It's not just about us chatting about how lovely it is to soak in a tub. Do you remember how confusing it was when these first came out, being an old person? Yeah, they were like, is that a bad thing? Like, are they actually snorting bath salts? Right, yeah.

So, even though a lot of this episode about the drug bath salts will be about the incorrect hysteria surrounding bath salts, much like the crack episode, you should still not ever do bath salts. Yeah, yeah, that's not an endorsement for going and trying bath salts. There's so 2011 anyway.

Yeah, but there is a lot of interesting hysteria surrounding this, kind of like PCP and crack and all this stuff. Yeah, it's a great, it's a really great study in how the media can really fuel drug hysteria, and not only how they can, how every time a new drug comes out, they do. Because anytime the media scares everybody,

people pay more attention to the news, and the media makes more money, so they have a reason to scare people, and this is a great example of it, but it is also an example of reality coinciding with hysteria too. There was some really messed up stuff that did happen on bath salts, just not nearly as widespread

as people thought. Yeah. It's stay off the bath salts. Exactly. So I guess our story sort of starts in 2010-ish when this new drug appeared on the scene, and it is what they call a designer drug, meaning that it is created by a person synthetically, and in this case it's-

Rather than God. Yeah, in this case it's something called synthetic cathenone, which we'll get into all the chemical stuff in a bit, but, and I was shocked to learn that designer drugs, there's like several hundred a year? Is that what it said? Like 250 something in Europe per year? We worked also off of a Smithsonian article

that was great called No Bath Salt Won't Turn You Into a Cannibal, and the author mentions that there was, yeah, I think from 2009 till 2014 or 15, there was like 279 new designer drugs that hit the market. That's so scary. Sure, yes. The reason why though is because designer drugs are easily tweaked, and the reason that they tweak them

just ever so slightly is because governments tend to outlaw specific chemicals, and they do that by the chemical composition. Well, if you add like a covalent bond here or a hydrogen atom there or whatever, I don't know, I'm not a chemist, but if you alter it ever so slightly, so it still has basically the same effect,

but is a different chemical than the one that's outlawed, you can then turn around and sell that legally for a while until that chemical composition gets outlawed. Yeah, and this article is rightfully referred to as a cycle, and a very tough cycle to battle as far as drug enforcement goes. That's right. So it's a new day and age with a synthetic drug thing.

But it does seem like if the media gets the nation on board, then the drug warriors can be like, it's outlawed now, and everybody's like, oh, okay, cool. All right, so 2010, what's going on? 2010, over in London, I believe, a drug called a methadrone got kind of big. Meth is an MEPH. Yeah, I'm not like lisping.

Methadrone, also known as meow meow, which is probably the greatest drug slang name of all time, although there's another one in here that we'll get to that may be even better than meow meow, but I think I'm just gonna call everything meow meow from now on. Yeah, I just like the idea of someone like, walking up to a guy on the street corner and say,

hey man, you got some meow meow? Right. So I got you hooked up with meow meow. The guy's like, you know, you could just say meow and you know what you're talking about. He's like, no, it's better if you say it twice. He said, I can also hook up your kitty with some meow mix. Right.

So this stuff kind of hit the scene in Europe and then in very short order, it made its way over to the US as well. And it was really popular all of a sudden among club kids, ravers. People who enjoy getting high on drugs really liked it a lot. Yeah, and wearing pants with wide legs.

Sure, yeah, that's a big one still probably. Although I think that's like goths now. Now ravers are called goth kids. There's like been a convergence, yeah, it's weird. But they're all like into fluorescent. It's a bizarre convergence that happened somewhere in our rear view. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

After we kind of moved out of that. I mean, I was post-rave. Like I wasn't in that scene even. I was too old for that. I was peri-rave. What does that mean? Like right in- Oh, you were?

Sure. Did you go to those things? Yeah. I went to the, I might have told the story once, but I lived in a warehouse in Atlanta one year and actually it was right at the turn of 2000. And they had raves at these warehouses for a while. And I went to one.

Me and my buddies were like, all right, let's do it. And yeah, what am I seeing? Yeah. But we had one friend our age that was really into it. And he even wore the clothes and was like, dude, you're too old to be wearing this stuff. Come on. That's awesome.

She'll remain nameless. I know exactly who it is, I'll bet. No, you don't. I don't think you know this guy. Oh, okay. Who are you gonna say that? I'm not gonna say now, then. Oh, okay.

You'll tell me off, Mike. Maybe so. So anyway, 2010, long, long, long after Chuck went to his rave and I went to my rave, this new drug hit the scene. And the reason, one of the reasons it was so popular and became very widespread, like out of nowhere, was because you could go to a head shop,

you could go to like a Spencer's maybe. You could go to the mall, you could go to a gas station, you could go to like a skate shop and buy this stuff. And it was called bath salts. And some of them, they had like brand names on some of the bath salts, like a locomotion, vanilla sky, zoom, ocean snow. Like every dumb name you can think of

is what they call them. But they were all generally lumped into this new drug, bath salts. It was all meow, meow. And it was totally legal. And if you looked on the label, it would say, I love that name. If you looked on the label,

it would say not for human consumption, this is pond cleaner. Right. Or vacuum refresher. So buy it and snort it. Right. Or plant food. Yeah, plant food was another one,

fertilizer, something like that, right? And then yes, you would buy this packet. I think it was like 50 bucks for 50 milligrams or something like that. Yeah, I don't even know how much that is. I think they came in like a packet. Okay. You know, like pop rocks size packet?

There you go, put it in something I can understand. Right, okay. So about a pop rocks amount was I think 50 bucks. All right. And yes, the people would take the home and chop it up and snort it or crazy, crazy people would inject it. Yeah.

Some people smoked it. Some people just ate it. But I think the predominant way it was done was snorting it. Yeah, and the reason, I think we probably already said this, but the reason it was called bath salts was because it very much looked like the stuff that you put in the bathtub to have a nice, quiet soak.

They're very relaxing. You light a candle, put in some bath salts in your tub, which is very ironic because the drug is the opposite of that experience. Yeah, especially if you do too much. Yeah, by all accounts, bath salts will, actually I'm gonna just go ahead and read this because it's so great.

Is this from the Smithsonian article? I think it's from our own, but it really describes the experience such that why would anyone want to try this out? The bodies of bath salt users experience a smorgasbord of stress effects, including rapid heart rate, high blood pressure, chest pains, fever, sweating, nausea, vomiting, nosebleeds,

tremor, seizures, muscle agitation. These can lead to muscle damage, kidney failure, heart attack, stroke, and death. The brain boards an emotional perceptual roller coaster of agitation, irritability, dissonance, insomnia, ticking slowly at pills of anxiety and then diving into valleys of depression. Concentration grows difficult.

Thoughts might take a turn towards suicide or extreme paranoia, fueled by delusions and in some cases hallucinations, all of which can culminate panic attacks, hostility, or aggression. Right. Sounds great. Right, so what that was describing

from what I understand was if you are a chronic user, in this stuff we should say it was highly addictive. Yeah, worst case scenario type of experience. Right, but it wasn't like out of the realm of possibility for just about anybody to have this kind of experience. Right. But it's not like if you snorted your first line of bath salts, like you're immediately,

you've gone nuts and you're having a horrible time. Right. The reason people tried bath salts is because they usually, at a normal dose, I guess, produced euphoria, talkativeness, sociability, energy. Yeah, like a sexy drive. Is that right?

Yeah, it would increase your sex drive. And even a lot of people likened it to a cross between cocaine and ecstasy. Right, and it was cheap. Yeah, that was another thing too. Yeah, like you said, again, the Pop Rocks thing, I don't know how much it took, but it was pretty cheap compared to the cocaine

and the ecstasy, I think. Right. So, should we take a break? I guess so. All right, well let's take a break and we'll come back and we'll hop into the bathtub again. ["The Cuckoo Song"] On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called

David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody,

about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck, we're in the tub. We're soaking in it. It's very relaxing.

Yeah, I think it's starting to permeate through the skin. Is that your foot? I sure hope so. Yeah, it's got a lot of hair on that toe. So, here's why bath salts begin to make the news, is because, and this is where it gets into a little bit of hysteria, because sometimes these people were, in fact, on bath salts and did some extreme things.

And sometimes people were not on bath salts, but a cop on the scene who talked to a reporter said, hey, it sounds like bath salts to me. And then all of a sudden, it's reported that way. Yeah, there was a very famous case of that. Yeah, most infamously is the zombie, cannibal, Rudy Eugene in Miami. Remember that?

Yeah, I remember. Very disturbing. Yeah, there was a man named Rudy Eugene who completely out of the blue, as he was walking around Miami one Saturday, just jumped on a homeless man that he saw. And over the course of 18 minutes, ate his face. 18 minutes. Ronald Pepo is the name of the man.

And he's recovered, actually, he doesn't have a face any longer. He doesn't have eyes or anything like that. Yeah, but he's taken the opportunity to learn the guitar again. Oh, wow. Yeah, he's actually seemed like he's in high spirits and everything now. But he was not in high spirits while Rudy Eugene

was eating his face. No, and Eugene died on the scene. He was killed by a cop who, from what I read, it took multiple rounds to kill him. Yeah. Making animals sound like it was so disturbing, it immediately became a bath salt frenzy. But here's the thing, he was not on bath salt.

No, a cop on the scene apparently said to a reporter, he's definitely got to be on bath salt. And the entire media, the international media, took that and ran with it. Like you said, a month later, the TOX report came out. And the only thing they found in the system was marijuana. Yeah, and you don't hear much about the followup reporting usually.

No, you don't. And as a matter of fact, as recently as I think 2016, this Forbes article we found mentioned that CBS News was still reporting that the episode was the result of a bath salt overdose. It's so lazy. It is. So the fact that that happened in 2012,

right in the peak of the kind of hysteria that had been building over bath salts use, it lent this idea to bath salts that it turned you into a zombie cannibal who was capable of doing anything. And usually would become very physically violent, was impervious to pain. Yeah, super human strength. Yep, took like 15 cops to take them down.

And the media was reporting on this without facts. And somebody would do something crazy. And somebody would suggest it was bath salts. And the media would report that the bath salts did this to this person. A month later, a TOX report would come back. There was no bath salts involved, but it was too late. So bath salts, and whether this is unfair or not,

it doesn't matter. The point is this. The media was being extremely lazy. And they shaped public opinion over a drug in ways that should not have been shaped. And they should be taken to task for that. Yeah, and here's a quote, I think, from that Smithsonian article.

It said, the description of bath salts present in these broadcast media reports was very different from the scientific literature on the topic. And it does not appear that the media took this particular source of information into account in reporting. So basically. That's from that Forbes article.

Oh, is that the Forbes one? So basically, they were completely ignoring the science behind it. And all this notion of super strength and psychosis, which maybe could happen under the most extreme overdose addiction cases, was not, I mean, basically, like you said, its talkativeness, energy, euphoria, that's a long cry from a super strong zombie cannibal.

Right. The thing that strikes me is, I want to know why Rudy Eugene did that. Yeah. Why? Where did that come from? It was like, do you remember many, many years ago, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago, there

was a guy on a bus on the Trans-Canada Highway who, out of nowhere, pulls out a knife and stabs the guy sitting next to him, who he doesn't know and apparently hadn't even spoken to on the bus ride, stabs him to death, and then cuts his head off. Yeah, I remember that. And that guy supposedly had no history of violence. And it came out of nowhere.

What makes somebody snap? What makes somebody chew someone else's face off? That's what the media should be finding out and reporting on. Instead, they're just parroting, or in this case, they're parroting the supposition of one police officer who was on the scene and never followed up on the talks report. Right.

Should we talk about the history a little bit? Yeah. It's very interesting. I'm sorry. Am I in a soapbox? I don't think so. OK, good. No, you're on a bar of soap.

All right, I can deal with that. It's very, I can inch off the ground. I get so sick of myself sometimes, you know? No, no, no, no. So bath salts historically, and this is very surprising to learn, but synthetic cathenones came about in France in the 1920s, which is a shock to me. That was a swinging time for France.

I bet it was. And it was, it didn't become super popular and was all over the place. It kind of went back underground until it was published. The recipe was published on the web in the mid-2000s. Could you find who published it? I couldn't find. No, I mean.

Some underground chemist found it and published it. Yeah, and it was taken off the web, or at least that website was shut down in 2004, but it was already out there. And there are some other drugs that we need to mention that sort of are in the same category. One is called Haggagot, which was big in Israel. And I believe Haggagot was a synthetic version of the natural plant, Cot, K-H-A-T.

Yeah, and Cot is a leafy plant that grows in, I think, the Horn of Africa and parts of the Middle East. And it's kind of popular in those areas. Apparently, it's just a part of everyday life. Like, if you're a student cramming for tests, you're going to chew Cot leaves like you would chew tobacco if you're a redneck here in the US. Or like, you might brew a tea from it,

which you would drink at like social gatherings. Some people drink it in the morning. It's often compared to coffee. I've seen that it is far, far stronger than coffee. But it produces giddiness, euphoria, something verging on anxiety. And so Cot is the natural version of, what is it? The synthetic cathenone.

OK, but it's the natural version of the cathenone. Correct. And so everything else is a synthetic version, including bath salts. Right, and that Haggagot, which was big in the Middle East. So there are a lot of different versions. It's not like there was one bath salt recipe. Like, I think that it was continually sort of changed.

And all of these synthetic drugs, like we mentioned, that cycle are constantly being tweaked and changed and are sort of different versions of the same thing. But so bath salts came about, because like I said, in 2010, methadone made a big splash on the UK club scene. And methadone is kind of like, it's like an even more synthetic version of MDMA, right? Yeah.

It produces similar effects, but it's a, why can't I say it? Cathenone? Yeah, I don't know. Cathenone, cathenone, OK, I got it. Meow meow. It's a, right, it's a type of meow meow, right? Whereas MDMA is something else. But methadone, what it does is it forces

the release of dopamine in the neurotransmitter. And that's your happy feeling. That's part of the reward center, the pleasure center in the brain. And it forces that. Well, everybody loved methadone. And they said, well, if you love methadone, also known as meow meow, you're going

to love methadone mixed with a couple of other drugs. Yeah, one called methadone. Which is another cathenone, another type of meow meow. It does get a little confusing. And basically, from what I can tell, the reason that they say it's like cocaine and ecstasy is because of the combination of the things, like one is like ecstasy and one is like cocaine.

So two of them are like ecstasy. Methadone and methadone are like ecstasy, where both of those things go in and say, hey, neurons, release a bunch of dopamine. So you've got more than usual. The feel good stuff. Right. And then you've got MDPV.

And I'm going to try saying this out loud, because I've practiced a couple of times. Let me see if I can. I didn't even highlight that word. Are you ready for this? Sure. OK. Chuck, MDPV.

It looks like the alphabet. It's so long. Methylene Dioxy Pyrovalorone. Whoa. Yeah. I told you, I practiced. That was take one, everyone, just so you know. That was not the magic of editing.

And MDPV is, I'm not sure if it's a cathenone or not. But what it does is it stimulates the release of norepinephrine. It also prevents its reuptake. But it also prevents the reuptake of dopamine. So you have two drugs that are forcing your neurons to release more dopamine and another drug that's stimulating your fight or flight response

and is preventing that dopamine that's being released from being taken up. So it's just floating in your brain. Yeah, it's like a perfect storm of brain activity. I guess if you're a drug user, the right kind of brain activity. Right. So these are three different drugs

that people liked on their own that somebody mixed together. Like, MDPV supposedly produces feelings akin to cocaine. But like 10 times the impact of it, I've seen in multiple sources. And they mixed these three things together. That's what bath salts were. Correct. And so in 2010, in the UK Poison Control Centers

yielded or fielded rather, 3,470 bath salt calls just from January to June, which is about 10 times the previous year's total. By 2011, mid 2011, 28 states here in the United States had banned bath salts. And then finally, in October 2011, the DEA basically can do this thing where they're like, emergency, we're

not even going to go through all the rigamarole. We're just going to say, this stuff is federally banned. Yeah, Wolf Blitzer said it was dangerous. So we're going to ban it. Yeah, or actually, that didn't ban it. It was October, I'm sorry, July 2012. That was a federal government. Right, when Obama signed a federal ban on a bunch

of synthetic drugs, bath salts being one of them. But like you said, before that, the DEA had the authority to be like, this is outlawed. We're not even going to Congress, the president, we're outlawing it, and they did. So methadrone, methalone, and MDPV were all outlawed, I think. And the head of the DEA stood in front of America

and said, meow, meow. We just gave out, meow, meow, the boot. Let's take another break, and then we'll come back and talk about all the reasons why you should not try bath salts right after this. Let's go. Let's go. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up

sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS,

because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

So meow, meow. Yes, meow. What's that from Super Troopers? Yeah, when they played the meow game, that was pretty funny. So people may have heard, like, oh, wow, 10 times greater than cocaine. I've got to try that.

It's just like ecstasy, but even more potent. I've got to try it. Don't try this. No. And here are all the reasons why you should not try it. So yes, it will produce feelings of euphoria, great sensations in you, if you do a normal dose. You don't really know what a normal dose is.

One of the big problems with this is that it was a designer drug, meaning that it never spent any time in a legitimate pharmaceutical lab. There was no research. There was no R&D. There was no testing whether on jailed inmates against their will or not. Nobody studied this stuff.

They just did things like go over patents and medical literature to find compounds that sounded like, well, I can work with that. I'm a chemist. Let me adjust that a little bit and then give some to my neighbor, who I don't really care if they live or die, and then see what happens. And if they get off on it, I'm going

to flood the British club market with it. That's how these drugs come out. So no one knows. No one who has any idea what they're talking about knows what an actual dose should be. And the problem with bath salts in particular and with cathodones is that if you traipse into the overdose territory, which you very easily can, you're in big, big trouble.

Yeah, I think it was the Forbes article he sent, all of those awful side effects that I mentioned before we took that break. You can happen upon that rather accidentally. And it said that quite often, a bath salt user will get way more than they bargained for. They're after the little sexy drive, and hey, I'm up, and I'm talkative, and I'm feeling

like I'm the king of the world. Yeah, and watch me tear my shirt in half. Right, and before you know it, you're clawing skin off your arm in a psychotic break. Right, so that can happen if you overdose. It apparently also can happen if you're a chronic user, too. And apparently. You mean like Dr. Dre's chronic?

Or you mean just a chronic user? Sometimes the two overlap. But if you abuse the drug and you use it frequently, it can have all sorts of terrible effects on your old dick to you. The reason why, apparently, you see this kind of thing. Like anytime a new drug comes out and it's addictive, they'll say that it's X number of times more addictive

than the most addictive drug that came out last. Yeah, like you thought that was bad. Right, so bath salts are frequently said to be like multiple times more addictive than meth or whatever. No one knows if that's true or not, but the point is this. It is highly addictive. And anyone who knows about how it hijacks your brain

can tell you, yes, that's how drugs addict you. And a release of dopamine that stays in your system, in your synapses, longer than normal, is going to create cravings. You're going to become addicted to whatever substance does that to you. So it's really easy to get addicted to the cathenones that are found in bath salts.

Yeah, you're altering your brain chemistry. Right, and because of the prolonged effects that these chemicals have on your brain, the hangover is really, really bad, and so you may want to use more to get back up again. And again, when you use it to a chronic degree, you're setting yourself up for those really horrible side effects that you can have, even without an overdose. Yeah, that's the vicious cycle of most

of the feel-good drugs like that, is your body adjusts and gets a little more used to it. You do more to get that same feeling. You're chasing that initial rush or whatever that you get. And then before you know it, you're in bad shape as a person. Very sad. So that's not like Nancy Reagan talk. No, that's real.

That's, yeah, it's going to have terrible effects on you, and it can be very addictive. This is your uncle Josh and Chuck being real. The more you know. But as we said before, and peppered throughout the show, despite that, that doesn't change the fact that the media far exaggerated sometimes the effects of basalts.

But what they really did was exaggerated how much it was going on. Like at a certain point, I think they even found that CNN was reporting this massive uptick when, in fact, it was actually going down in usage. Yeah, I'm not quite sure if it was the DEA outlawing the ingredients, and it made it harder to get, or if the kids who were using it.

And apparently it was largely a drug of the younger generation. Just said, this is whack. I'm done with this and stopped using it. But it clearly peaked in 2011, and usage was halved by 2012. Yeah, it says here in 2011, poison control calls. And that should tell you how bad this thing is. Right, that's how he ranked it. That's the proxy for use.

6138 calls in 2011 compared to 2,654 in 2012. And this is while CNN, and we're not picking on them, like a bunch of news outlets were calling it an epidemic. And it never really was. It was always sort of a niche, smallish time drug. Sure. And one of the other things, though, that they did was say, it will turn you into this violent psychotic

or chew a face. So when the DEA outlawed the constituent drugs of bath salts. The meow meow. I mean, I love that. There was actually supposedly there's a Chinese Walter White who was sentenced to life in prison, known only as Zang. But he was a chemist who apparently traveled abroad to Europe or somewhere overseas and found

like there was a big demand for a methadone. And he was like, oh, I know how to make that. So he made like 425 pounds of it and was selling it over the internet via Bitcoin before the Chinese caught him. On the dark web. Yeah, I guess so. And so guys like that were guys like that who weren't arrested, I should say, went back and said, oh, OK, well,

let me alter this a little bit. And now there's a second generation of bath salts coming out that are, again, synthetic cathodones, there's one called the Alpha PVP, better known as Flocka. Oh, is that what that is? Flocka. I've heard of FLA KKA.

Yeah. When I saw that, I was like, oh, finally I know what Waka Flocka means. And I looked it up, I'm like, nope, spelled differently, has nothing to do with one another. Still, the quest continues. But Flocka apparently, if you want to see some whack stuff, look up people freaking out on Flocka on YouTube.

And there are plenty of high on bath salts videos on YouTube before. Flocka seems like it might actually be worse. Really? Yeah. And what are these friends saying? Look at Timmy. I don't see some of them are.

We're going to put this on YouTube. One I saw was this lady, I think in Miami, who was in one of the weirdest positions I've ever seen on the ground next to a car, but had her leg up back against the car. It was screaming at somebody to bring it on, even though she couldn't move on the ground. Weird.

Just under her own will, she couldn't move. And some guy, I guess, is just sitting there with his phone recording her. Which you can't really blame him, because it's like out in the middle of. That sounds familiar. Yeah. And somebody goes, are you on something?

You think? Yeah. It's just put a perfect little period on that, but if you see those videos and then see bath salt videos, it seems like Flocka may even be a little worse. Yeah, I mean, we're kind of laughing at this, because we try to lighten the mood about stuff. But obviously, there's nothing funny about someone

under the ravages of a drug addiction, even if some yokel films it on their phone, throws it on YouTube for the world to laugh at. It's very sad. Thank you for rescuing that story. Well, I just want to be clear. It's super sad that these chemists aren't the ones doing the drugs, for the most part, don't you think?

I would guess probably not. They're just creating something in a lab to sell and make money off of that destroys lives. Right. Luckily, though, Chuck, with Flocka, the highest you get off of Flocka is by vaping it. And fortunately, nobody vapes. Right.

So it'll probably, it's actually supposedly falling to the wayside already. But that's another good study on media hysteria as well. Yeah. The media started to do the same thing. There was a kid in Florida. Austin Heroof. Austin Heroof beat a couple to death.

Stabbed, killed. Didn't know that he just happened to be walking past their house and they, I think, were sitting in their garage. Such a disturbing case. And he walked up to him and killed him. It chewed on one of their faces. He was reported to be growling like an animal or whatever. And the first thing everybody said was that guy was on Flocka.

Yep. It was the sheriff on the scene, just like it always happens. Someone stuck a microphone in his face and he was like, looks like Flocka to me. And then all of a sudden, Austin Heroof, the 19-year-old Florida state frat boy, was a Flocka abuser who did this awful, awful thing. But they found no Flocka in his system.

No, he did do that awful thing. And by all accounts, it was just a psychotic episode. Right. Again, he had not been on Flocka. The Tox Report showed no Flocka in his system, just like Rudy Eugene, just like that guy on the bus in Canada. This is the real question of the podcast.

What happens to make somebody do that? I don't know. I mean, these are the cases where, obviously, well, in Rudy Eugene's case, he died. But there needs to be some way that there's an automatic brain donation in cases like this. Agreed. So they can study what the heck is going on.

I guess you can kind of let the media off the hook a little bit, or certainly let the public off the hook, because you want to give explanation to behavior like that. You don't want to think that anybody could just be walking around and suddenly snap. You want to think that they have to be on something that overtakes their willpower, takes over their humanity

and rids them of it, and turns them into a monster. Not that we're all just ticking time bombs. Yeah, I mean, when you read interviews like a year later with that kid in Florida, he said that the demon was after him, and when you talk to him today, he's like, I feel, you know, I think he literally said, this sucks. Like, this thing happened.

I don't know why it happened. I feel fine now. So can you guys let me go? That's not quite how it works. But I'm not saying have sympathy for this kid. It's a weird. Well, if he had a psychotic break that had no control over, I feel a tremendous amount of sympathy for him.

I do. I certainly feel it for his victims as well and their families. Yeah, I think that's the thing. But if this kid just like lost his marbles and got violent, and he had no control over it really honestly, then yeah. Of course. Yeah, it's one of those things where there are many victims and it's a tragedy on many fronts.

But by all accounts, in his case, it wasn't even like he was abused as a child. I mean, I think it literally happens sometimes with the brain. And there's something physical that happens in the body. Some chemical, something happens in the brain. We don't know what it is, but it's the only explanation. So field of psychiatry. Stop sitting around congratulating yourselves

and get to work figuring out what happens. Is that what's going on? And then lastly, there's one more new bath all out on the market called 4MAC. And this one is the only other one that has a rival nickname to Meow Meow. It's called Shrimp. You know, Emily sells bath salts in her store.

I remember this was like, OK, are those bath salts or bath salts? But she, I mean, it's not in the news so much anymore, but it would be funny if she had to have a sign and said, bath salts, not those bath salts. These are your mom's bath salts. Instead of not your mother's bath salts. But if your mom was on bath salts, then they would be her bath salts.

It'd get confusing. Yes. All right, well, if you want to know more about bath salts, go read about it. Don't go try them yourself, OK? And since we said that, it's time for a listening man. All right, I'm going to call this a little 1,000 episode. Congrats and a little Simpsons part.

I love the little Simpsons ditty. Hey, guys, congratulations on 1,000 episodes. I hope you know who's joined after you've brought to all of us over that milestone. As I tuned into the Simpsons part two on Thursday, I was on a flight to Salt Lake City to interview for a position in a program pursuing my doctorate or physical therapy.

Needless to say, the whole day, I was anxious, and I'm not knowing what to expect for my first interview. And I had a long day of traveling and put me on edge. But man, the two part on the Simpsons soothed my soul with me at ease. Man, comma. Yeah, that's what it said. My flight landed, got the rental car, drove to my hotel,

starving, having missed dinner, had to settle for some ramen out of the vending machine. Ooh, sounds delicious. Yeah, is that bad? I sat down on the questionable hotel comforter to eat my dinner and watch some TV before grabbing some pillow. Turned on the TV, it was almost creeped out

to hear the Simpsons theme song playing as a new episode was beginning to play on whatever channel it just happened to be on, which would be Fox. Destiny, fate, chance, whatever you call it. Joy instantly struck me and actually laughed out loud at myself. The two-parter really brought back memories of childhood and trying to watch episodes of the Simpsons sneakily

without my parents knowing, because my mom thought it was the worst thing possible for my young eyes and ears. It was quite comical to me that here I was on the eve of what could be a huge turning point for my career. And what is getting me through the self-doubt, anxiety, and uncertainty was a podcast by chance in an episode of The Simpsons. So thanks for all your hard work.

You guys brought so much happiness to all your listeners. Turn me into the best dinner party fact nerd out there. Much love, Jared. Thanks a lot, Jared. Much appreciated. That's a good one. Yeah, hope you got your job, buddy. Yeah, same here.

Let us know, will you? For sure. OK, well, if you want to get in touch with us like Jared did, you can hang out with us. I'm on Twitter at JoshumClark. Hey, also check out my website. It's ruceriusclark.com. Chuck's on facebook.com slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

Correct. And Stuff You Should Know. And you can send all of us, including Jerry, an email to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. And then join us at our home on the web, the official StuffYouShouldKnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app,

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