Josh Bloom, Medical Progress Today 6/14/12, "About Face (Eating)"
In 1985 Michael Hovey, an organic chemist at du Pont in Wilmington cooked up a batch of 3-methylfentanyl, an illegal narcotic that is one hundred thousand times stronger than morphine, in his lab, ushering in the modern era of so-called "designer drugs".
After that, things started to go poorly. Getting rid of the stuff, which had a street value of $112 million, proved to be challenging, as evidenced by the fact that he tried to sell it to an undercover FBI agent. Later, out on bail and determined not to go back to prison, Hovey committed "suicide by police."
If this sounds crazy, things have gotten crazier since.
There have been many designer drugs made in the last 80 years, but several years ago, a new one started to become popular. It is called methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV), also known as "bath salts."
If the name sounds familiar, it's because it has been in the news quite a bit lately. The consumption of "bath salts" has allegedly been responsible for a small group of maniacs going around chewing on people's faces, and other assorted violent attacks.
For example, a couple of weeks ago, Miami police shot and killed a naked man who was eating the face of another naked man on the MacArthur Causeway to Miami Beach. Had this happened a few miles further east, it could have possibly been called the South Beach Diet II. There have been at least two similar attacks--one more in Florida and one in Louisiana--all attributed to bath salts...[Read more].
