MAN:   What is your name? 
 
BOY:   Haha. Ahhh.
 
It's the designer drug that's wreaking havoc across the United States, a potent chemical mix that is tearing families apart. 
 
BRANDI:  I have lost my brother and my best friend. I don't know if I will ever get them back. 
 
Plunging users into psychosis... 
 
TIFFANY RUSSELL:   He feels like there’s mind control, he feels like he has no control over his mind. 
 
And inducing unimaginable behaviour. 
 
DR RICHARD SANDERS:  He went ear to ear with a large butcher knife and cut his throat. 
 
For the last few years, bath salts have flown under the radar. A synthetic chemical cocktail said to mimic the effects of cocaine and methamphetamine, it is difficult to detect and gained an underground following as a cheap and legal high. Most people had never heard of it until earlier this year when an unthinkable act shocked the world. 
 
ERIN BURNETT, CNN NEWS REPORT:  Drugs known as bath salts are blamed for a gruesome scene in Miami. 

NEWSREADER: Two naked men found off the Macarthur Causeway on Saturday afternoon, one literally chewing the face off the other. 
 
Rudy Eugene was killed by police, after he inexplicably ate the face of a homeless man, Ronald Poppo. 
 
ERIN BURNETT:  All that's left were his goatee. His eyeballs are gone, his face, it is unbelievable. 
 
Although bath salts were blamed, no clear link was established but the case set off a media frenzy. 
 
NEWSREADER 2:  I'm calling it a bath salt epidemic in the country. 
 
NEWSREADER 3:  They make people crazy. 
 
NEWSREADER 4:  A couple of cannibalism and self-mutilation cases could be linked to bath salts. 
 
NICOLETTE LANG:  They've got to get it off the market. They're killing people. 
 
New York State is in the midst of a bath salts crisis. 
 
BRANDI:  That store right over there, 420 Emporium, is where my brother began buying bath salts. 
 
Desperate for intervention, Nicolette Lang is protesting outside the shop she claims supplied bath salts to her son. 
 
NICOLETTE LANG:  He kept telling us his house was haunted. We would go check the house and have priests go with us. We would believe in him. He believed in himself, but came to find out it was bath salts. 
 
The drug has only recently been made illegal, but many shops continue to sell it under the counter. 
 
BRANDI:  Your sister has been using the bath salts? 
 
GIRL:  Yeah. I think over a month. She has.
 
BRANDI:  Does she buy them here? 
 
GIRL:  Yes. 
 
BRANDI:  How much does she use, do you know, has she ever said? 
 
GIRL:  She has a caterpillar every two hours. 
 
BRANDI:  What's that, a tube, a vial every two hours? She was going through over a gram a day? 
 
GIRL:  Yes. 
 
DR RICHARD SANDERS:  Every individual that markets or sells or distributes this in a convenience store should have to consume about five grams of it before he's able to sell it over the counter. I would like to see if they survive. 
 
Richard Sanders has a right to be bitter. His son Dickie was a rising BMX star in a league of his own and with the world at his feet. At 21, he still shared the closest of bonds with his father, a respected Louisiana doctor. 
 
DR RICHARD SANDERS:  There was a goodbye on the telephone. It was a goodbye four or five times. It was always, "Love you dad" and it was always, "Okay, son, love you too". It was always Dickie with, "I love you dad again" it was special. 
 
Dickie's life began to unravel when he was booked on a marijuana driving charge and subjected to a stringent drug testing regime. To skirt the system, Dickie decided to try bath salts. Within hours of taking them, his paranoia spiralled out of control. 
 
DR RICHARD SANDERS:  He was seeing police helicopters and then again police cars out in front of the front yard. I told him at that point, I said, ‘Dickie, we just walked outside, partner, there’s no one outside - I just showed you there's no-one out there. This is so crazy, why are you doing this?’  I said, ‘I will basically go outside and see if there's any police. If there are any police out here, I will have them come inside and you ought to be arrested because you're acting so crazy’. 
 
He immediately grabbed a knife, went ear to ear with a large butcher knife and cut his throat. Holding the knife up and said, "Dad, what am I doing - what's going on – what’s happening dad, I don't want to hurt myself, what’s happening, what am I doing?"
 
Dickie was rushed to hospital to have the wound stitched but when he got home the next day the psychosis returned. 
 
DR RICHARD SANDERS:  His whole personality began to change. He became extremely anxious. He became extremely concerned about locking the doors and relocking the doors in all of the house. 
 
By now Dickie had not slept for days. Exhausted, Richard fell asleep clutching his son, but early in the morning he woke with a start. 
 
DR RICHARD SANDERS:  I came down the steps here and attended him and rolled him over and he just slumped. 
 
Beside him lay the rifle he'd used to shoot himself in the mouth. 
 
DR RICHARD SANDERS:  When you realise there's nothing else to get done, basically, you cry. You scream. The incredulous nature of this chemical - the mystique of it. The feeling as a physician, that I wasn't able to predict or see any evidence of suicidal ideation in my son. 
 
Driven by his grief and his anger, Richard Sanders probed the pharmacology of bath salts for clues to explain his son's psychosis and soon found a culprit - the chemical known as MDPV. 
 
DR RICHARD SANDERS:  It inhibits re-uptake of Norepinephrine and Dopamine and keeps those neuro-transmitters firing off on the nerves that are causing the psychoactive process, whether it's paranoid delusional activity, extreme thought and content disorder processes and things like that. 
 
JIM BURNS, DRUG ENFORCEMENT ADMINISTRATION:  This is a public health issue because we have no idea what this does to people. 
 
For Special Agent Jim Burns bath salts are the most problematic drug he's ever encountered. While bath salts are banned, traffickers continue to modify the chemical composition, to stay a step ahead of the law. 
 
JIM BURNS:  New York State passed a bath salts law a year or so ago, and they specified five different chemicals. No sooner had they past that then some enterprising chemist somewhere, well, they tweaked the chemical formula, and now it's no longer the substance that was banned in the state law. So you're back to square one. 
 
Nevertheless, New York State Troopers are fighting back and I've been invited to witness their first strike. 
 
NEW YORK STATE POLICE:  We're just going in as we speak. You can see them pulling right out. 
 
Staff in the smoke shop offer no resistance as the authorities swoop, one of hundreds of raids taking place simultaneously across the country.  In the city of Utica, bath salts are proving to be a major headache. The crime rate is soaring. 
 
UTICA POLICE:  The majority of our crimes stem from the drug trade, the drug use, you know, someone committing a burglary in order to support their habit. 
 
Get out of the way! 
 
If we get a call involving someone who we think may be intoxicated on bath salts, there's definitely not just a one officer call. We know the potential for violence. 
 
In this city, emergency laws have been passed allowing police to arrest users of the drug. 
 
UTICA POLICE:  This is what she had on her. She said she was going to Ted's Smoke Shop, went by earlier, to get some bath salts. But this is all she had. 
 
But arresting users will have minimal impact and at the DEA, Jim Burns is focussing on the supply chain. 
 
JIM BURNS:  This is part of a seizure that the Buffalo office made earlier this year. This store had an AK-47 with a high capacity magazine that they kept loaded and behind the counter. 
 
What is especially disturbing to law enforcement officials is the origin of the ingredients in bath salts, traced back to chemical manufactures in China.
 
JIM BURNS:  We have an office in Beijing, and we've given a lot of the intelligence and information we've developed in a number of our cases here in upstate New York that point, that the sources being in China. 
 
TIFFANY RUSSELL:  They allowed it to, not just come to America, but it's prevalent. So when they finally did decide to do something, it's kind of like, it's too late for the thousands who have been affected and it's kind of “screw you”. 
 
Tiffany Russell has little patience for government pondering over a drug that she says has destroyed her family. 
 
TIFFANY RUSSELL:  I went from being a mum who had a wonderful handsome intelligent productive son, who had everything going for him, that was the light of his life, to... I don't have a child. It's not even if he were dead, it's almost as if he never existed. 
 
Tiffany's son, Skyler, gained national attention at 14, as one of the young stars of the TV series, 'Endurance'. Now 24, Skyler has been addicted to bath salts for almost three years. 
 
TIFFANY RUSSELL:  This is just a few items that I collected. So the bath salts come in a package like this. He will leave them lying around, not remembering where he put them, and I will confiscate them. 
 
In an effort to shock Skyler out of his addiction, Tiffany recorded their discussions on video.
 
TIFFANY RUSSELL:  How does it make you feel? 
 
SKYLER:  Energised. That's it. 
 
TIFFANY RUSSELL:  You don't look so energised. 
 
SKYLER:  It’s because I didn't sleep all night. 
 
TIFFANY RUSSELL:  It makes me sad now watching it. My heart aches. 
 
REPORTER: Do you see bath salts having robbed you of your son? 
 
TIFFANY RUSSELL:  Absolutely. It's robbed him of a life. It's taken his life, it's taken his soul. I still have my life and my health and he doesn't and he doesn't even know it. 
 
With nowhere else to turn for support, she sought help from the US reality show, 'Intervention', which offers addicts a chance to undergo rehab. 
 
SKYLER:  I built a weapon... to fight the phase people. If I hit the head with the top part, they die basically. This could kill them, if I put it through their heart or brain. 
 
The intervention failed and Skyler was later diagnosed with schizophrenia and Tiffany believes the drug is firmly to blame. 
 
TIFFANY RUSSELL:  I don't think Skyler had any disposition for schizophrenia or other psychosis. This happened a month after using the bath salts and I believe it's all induced by the bath salts. 
 
Skyler has agreed to meet me. Lucid and sober, he lets me film as he drives around Phoenix looking to buy bath salts. 
 
SKYLER:  You got bath salts man? 
 
MAN:  I don't, bro. 
 
SKYLER:  Do you know who does?
 
MAN:  I don’t, because if you get caught it’s 10 years, felony charges.
 
SKYLER:  Damn.
 
With the ban in place, bath salts are proving harder to find. But Skyler is determined to find it. 
 
SKYLER:  I want the drug. I want things that other people consider to be bad. As far as I’m concerned, fuck ‘em.
 
With Skyler refusing to co-operate, Tiffany has been left with few options and remains angered at the government's failure to prevent the bath salts scourge. 
 
TIFFANY RUSSELL:  They allowed the bath salts to be legal, they allowed the access, they knew what the bath salts could do. There's record of it in Europe. It existed years before it existed here. 
 
In fact the forerunner to bath salts was a synthetic compound popular in Britain known as Meow Meow. It was banned there in 2010 in a blaze of worldwide publicity. But, astonishingly, it failed to show up on the DEA's radar. 
 
REPORTER:  Was there any reason it didn't come on a bit earlier, that the US wasn't prepared for a wave of bath salts to emergency here? 
 
JIM BURNS:  You know, Nick, I can't really answer that. With this, you know, it just sort of like snuck up on everybody. 
 
Allowing bath salts to flourish has made the problem intractable and many see it as one of America's biggest drug intelligence failures. Others go further - convinced it was America's continuing crackdown on soft drugs that is ultimately to blame leading to the creation of this deadly new high. 
 
DR RICHARD SANDERS:  The rug was pulled out from underneath him and the system won. The system won. The system that created and entangled his life won. 
 
YALDA HAKIM:  The complications of trying to rein in a deadly drug. Nick was featured on US TV News while filming that story. Watch the video on our website and read more background about bath salts. That’s at sbs.com.au/dateline.