No one know if the 19 year old who murdered a man in Florida and gnawed on his face while wearing a Donald Trump hat was high, and if so, what he had taken, but the bizarre, violent behavior is consistent with people who take flakka, a popular South Florida synthetic drug meant to mimic cocaine.
Coke makes people do crazy and terrible things sometimes (though many who take the drug simply enjoy themselves and move on), but the worst cocaine excesses are tame next to flakka, as are the associated health-risks. So too with "spice/spike," billed as a synthetic marijuana substitutes that have been implicated in many horrific excesses and kill their users like crazy.
Why would people take flakka and spice instead of snorting coke and smoking weed, both of which are much less harmful to users and those around them? Because coke and weed are banned and policed, while the legal system hasn't caught up with synthetic substitutes. Prohibition on alcohol gave us the health risks and organized crime problems created by bathtub gin, and the War on Drugs gives us the Zetas and flakka and spice.
So now we have flakka, which emerged as a replacement for bath salts, which had emerged (now banned) as something you could buy at the store for a cocaine-like high.
The government keeps banning things, and people keep getting worse off. Synthetic drugs are killing people, especially our kids.
But government has a novel approach this time – it's working on banning flakka, and they're trying to get China to ban certain chemicals and stop their export. As the DEA admits, when they manage to ban one substance, producers will slightly alter the compound to make it a new substance free from the "controlled substances" ban.
How the War on Drugs Makes People Eat Other People's Faces After Stabbing Them to Death
[Justin Gardner/Alternet]
(via Naked Capitalism)
