ARIZONA ON HIGH
“I made a shit-ton of money selling bath salts, and I don’t feel good about it.”
Joe Johnson (not his real name) sits at his computer desk and pulls up an email he says contains the original recipe for bath salts. For nearly three years, starting in 2009, the Phoenix resident sold spice and bath salts for a Valley-based national distributor. He provided PHOENIX magazine with proprietary documents showing recipes for bath salts, invoices for the receipt of raw chemical compounds, and staggering sales figures well into the millions, but did not want his name or the name of his former employer published. “I think people go to any extreme to escape reality, especially if their reality sucks and they have no money,” Johnson says. “And that’s a void that was filled. [Bath salts] are affordable, legal and accessible. Those three things are an equation for a hot fucking commodity.”
Profits were enormous – according to Johnson, the company would buy a kilo of MDPV for $2,000 and cut and parcel it into $50,000 worth of bath salts packages, which translated into about $300,000 in post-markup retail and street sales. Johnson said in one week alone he made nearly $20,000 in commission. “I sold a shit-ton of this stuff – in the streets, in duffle bags, like kilos of cocaine.”
Johnson says the company he worked for earned about $3 million in annual profits. Johnson’s sales sheets show he alone sold just under $1.4 million in bath salts to more than 150 retail outlets throughout the nation over a nine-month period in 2011. One of the reasons Johnson left his lucrative sales job this year was the collateral damage he started seeing. “Every tweaker on the block does it if they can’t get meth. Go stand in any head shop… they will have a line constantly of tweakers buying this shit. Because it has the same properties as meth. It’s addictive,” he says. “There are people cooking it up in spoons and injecting it. It’s out of control. I never thought it would get to that point.”
Last November, the DEA published a “Scheduling Update” stating that 127 shipments of chemicals used in bath salts had been encountered at a single United States point of entry, and that “most of these shipments originated in China or India and were being shipped to destinations throughout the United States such as Arizona, Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia.”
Ramona Sanchez says the DEA is “looking into investigations in Arizona,” and that the investigations are less focused on bath salts users than on producers and distributors. “Our investigations target the manufacturers and importers and those that are distributing among our communities,” Sanchez says. “We’re concerned more so about the bigger rings, the people behind the distribution of these synthetic drugs, not necessarily the people who are purchasing them at the local level… It’s more concerning that possibly Arizona is one of those states that [the DEA] included in being a major distribution area for these synthetic drugs.”
Gray says she’s still concerned with the prevalence of synthetic drugs in Arizona, despite the state’s ban on many chemical compounds. “A lady contacted me and said her son, who was a scholarship winner for the universities and one of the top in his class, tried the drug, and he dropped out of college, because it’s so addictive,” Gray relates. She says when the mother looked at a package of bath salts her son had, she discovered it came from Tempe-based company Dynamic Distribution. “It’s right here in our backyard,” Gray says. “Prescott has had a big problem. [Yavapai County Attorney] Sheila Polk has been very aggressive in going after the shops, but they brag about, ‘Yes, you banned these, but we’ll have another one ready to go whenever the legislature bans them, and we can say these are the legal ones.’”
Two weeks after Governor Brewer signed House Bill 2356, authorities in Prescott issued search warrants for five shops suspected of selling bath salts. Several people were arrested for possession and sale; employees at one store also face fraud charges for allegedly letting customers purchase bath salts with food stamps. “So taxpayers are now paying for this,” Gray says. “And when [bath salts users] go to the emergency room, these are people who probably don’t have insurance, and then the taxpayers are having to take care of them… It’s interesting that some people say, ‘Well, just let them destroy themselves.’ But the rest of the taxpayers end up picking up the cost, because they end up in the hospital.”
Dr. LoVecchio says the hospital visits for bath salts users can be extremely costly. “These people have very, very huge, expensive hospital bills and huge work-ups. You’re looking for infection, making sure they don’t have meningitis. They end up getting CAT scans of their brain, they end up getting lumbar punctures many times, they end up getting lots of blood work.”
As this issue went to press, Congress had just passed a Food and Drug Administration bill containing provisions to ban 28 chemicals commonly used in bath salts; the bill was headed to President Obama for final approval. But with the endless array of synthetic analogs, it might make a mere dent. “[Labs] are about 10 formulas ahead of us,” Johnson says. “Every time we release a law outlawing that formula, they’re going to change two or three molecules in it and release it again... I don’t know if the bath salts game is ever going to disappear.”