Teen used bath salts, drank blood, wanted to eat babies
A Utica teen was taken into custody Monday after he allegedly told his father he wanted to eat people after using a combination of bath salts and other drugs, city police said.
When police responded to a call for an emotionally disturbed person Monday night, they found the 18-year-old and his father sitting on a bench in the 200 block of North Genesee Street.
The father allegedly told police that his son was hearing voices, had expressed a desire to “rip babies apart so that he can eat them” and had cut his own leg so that he could taste his blood, police said.
The teen also allegedly had used bath salts two days earlier, and a mix of cocaine, acid, angel dust and LSD over the course of the previous week, police said.
The unidentified teenager was taken to the St. Luke’s campus of Faxton St. Luke’s Healthcare for a mental health evaluation, police said.
Information on Bath Salts used as a drug from Wikipedia
Bath salts is the informal “street name” for a family of designer drugs often containing substituted cathinones, which have effects similar to amphetamine and cocaine. The white crystals resemble legal bathing products like epsom salts, and are called bath salts with the packaging often stating “not for human consumption” in an attempt to avoid the prohibition of drugs.
Synthetic cathinones such as mephedrone which are chemically similar to cathinone, naturally found in the plant Catha edulis (khat), were first synthesised in the 1920s. They remained obscure until the first decade of the 21st century, when they were rediscovered by underground chemists and began to be used in designer drugs, as the compounds were legal in many jurisdictions. In 2009 and 2010 there was a significant rise in the abuse of synthetic cathinones, initially in the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe, and subsequently in the US and Canada. Drugs marketed as “bath salts” first came to the attention of authorities in the US in 2010 after reports were made to US poison centers. In Europe, the drugs were predominantly purchased from drug dealers or from websites, but in the US they were mainly sold in small independent stores such as gas stations and head shops. In the US, this often made them easier to obtain than cigarettes and alcohol.
Hundreds of other designer drugs or “legal highs” have been reported, including artificial chemicals such as synthetic cannabis and semi-synthetic substances such as methylhexaneamine. These drugs are primarily developed to avoid being controlled by laws against illegal drugs, thus giving them the label of designer drugs.
The number of calls to poison centers concerning “bath salts” rose 6,138 in 2011 from 304 in 2010, according to the American Association of Poison Control Centers. More than 1,000 calls had been made in 2012 by June.
Tags: abuse, amphetamine, bath, cathinone, cocain, drugs, Mephadrone, meth, methylhexaneamine, salts, teen