Thursday, January 3, 2013

The story behind the 'Bath Salts' drug panic

Why People Thought 'Bath Salts' Made Rudy Eugene Eat Ronald Poppo's Face - Hit & Run : Reason.com - Jacob Sullum:

December 24, 2012 - "In a well-informed and revealing Playboy article, Frank Owen analyzes 'a classic drug panic,' explaining how and why Rudy Eugene's grisly assault on Ronald Poppo in Miami last May came to be blamed on 'bath salts,' a group of quasi-legal stimulants that Eugene, a.k.a. the Causeway Cannibal and the Miami Zombie, had not in fact consumed....

"Armando Aguilar, president of the local police union ... decided to bury the racial angle by feeding local reporters an alternative narrative.... Reporters didn’t seem to care that Aguilar had no expertise in the pharmacological action of drugs on the human brain or that he didn’t provide a scintilla of credible evidence that bath salts were involved....

"To this day, even after toxicological tests on Eugene's body revealed no drug but marijuana, Aguilar insists 'there was something else in Rudy Eugene’s system other than marijuana that the medical examiner didn’t detect,' possibly 'a new form of bath salts or maybe even a completely new compound that we don't yet know about'."

Read more: http://reason.com/blog/2012/12/24/why-people-thought-bath-salts-made-rudy
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