The clock strikes 5
pm and you hurry home after a long day at work. Tired and exhausted, you turn
on the tub faucet and get the water to the perfect temperature. You fill your
bathtub and cue up your favorite song. You grab the bag of bath salts and start
pouring them into the bathtub, hoping they will melt your worries away. But as
they dissolve, you pause and wonder, “Do people really abuse these bath salts? Can
they really make people crazy enough to start eating each other?”
Bath salts made a big
splash in popular media on May 26, 2012. In the so-called “Miami Cannibal” case, a homeless man was attacked and
maimed by an assailant thought to have abused bath salts. Toxicology reports
were inconclusive in regards to the involvement of bath salts in the attack,
but the case certainly put the spotlight on bath salts. But the bath salts
implicated in this attack are not of the variety one would use in the tub.
What are these bath salts?
The bath salts we’re
talking about are considered illegal drugs of abuse and bear no resemblance to
Epsom bath salts people use in their bathtub. The behavioral effects of these
drugs of abuse are difficult to study because of the difficulty in detecting
them. However, it is believed that they affect behavior in a manner similar to the
drugs methamphetamine or MDMA (ecstasy), depending on which bath salt is
abused. Bath salts are considered designer drugs - drugs that have been
synthesized to resemble an existing natural compound and whose chemical structure
might be modified to become extremely potent and dangerous even at low doses.
Cathinone molecule (left) is
a naturally occurring compound in the plant Catha
edulis commonly called khat (right, image from Erowid.org).
There is a large list
of different molecules that are referred to as bath salts but they all resemble
the naturally occurring compound “cathinone”, hence the names synthetic
cathinones or cathinone derivatives or cathinone analogs. Depending on the molecular
structure, they may have different stimulatory and hallucinogenic effects. The
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) classifies cathinone as Schedule I under
the Controlled Substance Act (CSA). A Schedule I substance has no accepted
medical use, high potential for abuse, and severe psychological and physical
dependence potential. Street chemists have attempted to circumvent this legal
restriction by changing the structure of the compound slightly and marketing it
as “Not for human consumption”. As a result, designer drugs can rapidly evolve
and change in structure within weeks, making it difficult for forensic
scientists to detect such illegal substances.
How do toxicologists detect these drugs?
Toxicologists
typically use complex equipment to identify such drugs, including instruments
like a GC-MS (Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry), a sensitive device that
allows scientists to separate chemicals and analyze them individually. The GC
can be thought of as a miniature oven, a bit larger than a medium household
microwave, containing a very thin and long tube (column) made of heat-resistant
material. The chemicals of interest, in this case the bath salts, are usually
in a solution. When the sample is injected into the GC, the solution is rapidly
heated, which aerosolizes the drugs to be carried by a flow of very pure gas through
the column in the oven. Depending on the temperature of the GC and gas flow,
the hotter it is, the faster the drugs move through the column; the cooler it
is, the slower they move and the more they interact with the column, resulting
in separation.
A GC-MS schematic. Carrier
gas such as helium, nitrogen, or hydrogen is supplied into the system (blue
box). Upon injecting the sample (yellow box), the sample is carried by the gas
through the heated oven (red box) and separates different molecules on the
column (light green loops). The isolated groups (represented by blue squares
and light green circles) of different molecules exit the oven into the mass
spectrometer (grey box) and the molecules are ionized by a stream of electrons
(e), breaking them into smaller fragments (light green dots) that are detected
by the mass detector.
Think of their
interaction with the column as handshakes: some people shake your hand quickly and let go
while others shake slowly and take time to let go. Now consider the column as a
line of people waiting to have their hand shook - you, a fast shaker (i.e. the
chemicals/drugs), will move down the line of people shaking their hands quickly
and move on to the next person in line. Your friend, a slow shaker, will move
slower.
Now let’s take this a
step further. Imagine you and your friend have a few members of your close
family with you - you and your family represent a group of molecules of drug A
whereas your friend and their family members represent drug B. When you first reach
the beginning of the line (i.e., the GC column), it becomes congested as
everyone from drug A and drug B are shaking hands with the GC column line. As
they move down the line, drug A molecules (you and your family members) move ahead
faster as a group since all of you shake hands faster. Drug B molecules move
slower down the line. Ultimately the drugs become separated as they move
through the column and reach the end.
When the drugs are
well separated, they exit the oven into a Mass Spec (MS), where the drug
molecules are bombarded with electrons that cause them to break into smaller
pieces or fragments. The pattern of fragmentation can then help identify and
quantitate the drugs from the injected sample. While individual fragments may
overlap between compounds with similar structures, the combination of fragments
is unique to each compound. For example, two drugs have overlapping fragments,
drug 1 produces fragment 1 (Frag1) and Frag2 and drug 2 produces Frag2 and
Frag3. Even though Frag2 is not unique to one drug, if the instrument produces
a fragmentation pattern of Frag2 and Frag3, scientists would conclude that they
are detecting drug 2.
In order for forensic
scientists and clinical toxicologists to detect these drugs, they need to
isolate the drugs from submitted specimens such as urine, blood, saliva, etc. Furthermore,
while they can run the isolated samples on a GC-MS under these harsh conditions
of heat and electron bombardment, small drugs such as cathinone and its
derivatives do not produce a unique fragmentation pattern, making the drugs
difficult to identify. Therefore, scientists usually react different chemicals with
the samples to stabilize the drugs so that they can detect a unique
fragmentation pattern. Different drugs react better with different chemicals,
so scientists need to optimize this parameter before they can run a sample.
Why is it hard to detect the drugs?
Street chemists are
continuously modifying the molecular structure of existing compounds. The list
of bath salts is a never-ending one that includes methcathinone, ethcathinone,
mephedrone, pentedrone, methedrone, methylone, butylone ethylone, and pentylone
to name a few. Taken together with the type of instrumentation forensic scientists’
use, it is understandable why forensic scientists may have had difficulty
detecting the presence of bath salts in the Miami Cannibal case. Unfortunately,
forensic scientists often have to play a game of catch-up.
Bath salts are typically sold
in colorful, attractive packaging that might contain anything from a very pure
drug to a mixture of many different drugs depending on the dealer. The
uncertainty of the purity and ingredients makes such drug use even more
dangerous. In these images the left packet contains methylone and the right
packet contains pentedrone.
What now?
It is best to stay
away from these harmful drugs of abuse and educate your friends and families about
the harm they can do. Scientists will continue to increase their library of
drugs that they can detect as fast as possible in a never-ending race to find
these newly synthesized street drugs. The next time you are getting ready to
draw your warm bath to soak in, think about this article and how the label
‘bath salts’ is no longer a simple term referring to the heavenly, soothing
aroma of Epsom salt. Now sit back, take a deep breath, and relax.
Contributed by: Omar El Jordi
References:
- Poklis, J., Wolf, C., ElJordi, O., Liu, K., Zhang, S., & Poklis, A. (2014). Analysis of the First- and Second-Generation Raving Dragon Novelty Bath Salts Containing Methylone and Pentedrone. J Forensic Sci, 60, S234-S240. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1556-4029.12629
- Drug Enforcement Administration. Controlled Substance Act (CSA) scheduling. http://www.dea.gov/druginfo/ds.shtml