By Bo Petersen
The Post and Courier
ST. GEORGE, S.C. — The first scary wake-up about synthetic drugs called bath salts came in early January. A man crashed through the storm door of his home and ran down the streets screaming at his neighbors that somebody was after him. No one was.
The abuse of the store-bought drugs seems to have spiked out of nowhere in Dorchester County. On Monday, Emergency Medical Services director Doug Warren and Sheriff L.C. Knight called on County Council to ban “the advertisement, possession, purchase, sale or use of ‘synthetic stimulants’ and ‘synthetic cannabinoids.’ ”
Council unanimously approved the ban in a preliminary vote.
Warren and Knight said it’s the beginning of an all-out effort to work with other emergency and law enforcement officials to have the drugs banned across Dorchester, Berkeley and Orangeburg counties.
“I don’t know that it solves our problem. All we can do is get it passed,” Knight said of the ban.
Since January, Dorchester EMS crews have taken eight confirmed cases and 35 more suspected cases to the hospital. Meanwhile, deputies find themselves transporting more arrested persons to the hospital instead of jail because they just can’t control them.
In the January incident, the man’s paranoia was disturbingly profound, the EMS director said. And, as it turned out, not isolated.
Since then, EMS crews and deputies have been responding to repeated calls of “hyper-excited” people doing things like tearing off their clothes and running down the street naked.
The county’s move is the latest among a number of local and state efforts to put a clamp on what appears to be a burgeoning problem while waiting for the federal Drug Enforcement Administration to re-list the drugs as Schedule 1 narcotics, a move that would ban their use as medicine and remove them from store shelves nationwide.
Moncks Corner banned the drugs in September.
S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control workers are “pursuing emergency action” to implement some sort of make-do statewide ban until the re-listing, spokesman Adam Myrick said. He said DHEC hoped to have something in place in the next few days.
The Dorchester District 2 Board of Education in Summerville recently made it a policy violation to be caught possessing or using the substances, after reports from its school officers.
At the Monday meeting, Councilman Richard Rosebrook said abuse of the drugs has changed the personality of a local high school student he is familiar with. “I hope Summerville and Berkeley County follow suit (with bans). It seems to be all over the place,” he said.
The drugs are crystal or powder substance that mimic illegal drugs, reportedly causing rapid heart rate, severe panic attacks, hallucinations, seizures and psychosis. The symptoms can be fatal.
The products are sold in stores and smoke shops for about $25, and are smoked, snorted or injected. The substances go by names such as bath salts, spice or K-2, Ivory Wave, Purple Wave, Vanilla Sky or Bliss. They are considered highly addictive.
The outlying suburbs might be a hotbed for the abuse. Hospitals in Charleston report few admissions, but Trident Health Systems facilities outside the city report treating users every week and sometimes every day.
The spike is big enough that, though some abuse might have been happening before this year, Knight said, it wasn’t enough for law enforcement to distinguish it from other drug abuse. The behavior of recent abusers, though, is dramatically more erratic.
“People doing bizarre stuff,” Warren said Monday. “These people are scared beyond reason and there’s no reasoning with them.”
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