NEW ORLEANS -- In an unprecedented move Thursday designed to stop the sale of phony bath salts, Governor Bobby Jindal announced that six chemical compounds are now illegal.
Until Thursday, the bath salts were sold legally at convenience stores across Louisiana.
"In my 41 years in law enforcement, this is the most dangerous drug I have encountered," said St. Tammany and Washington Parish District Attorney Walter Reed. "Yet, until today, it has been legal, sold in hundreds of convenience stores across Louisiana and across America."
In early December, Reed was the first Louisiana leader to publicly ask that phony bath salts be made illegal.
When used illegally, the bath salts are most commonly snorted, and according to the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, they act as amphetamines with hallucinogenic properties.
The phony bath salts are responsible for at least three suicides in Louisiana and dozens of attempted suicides.
According to DHH Secretary Bruce Greenstein, their use has reached "epidemic proportions."
In the past three months, Louisiana Poison Control has fielded 165 calls about the bath salts, seven times more calls than any other state, and many according to Greenstein have come from emergency room doctors, trying to understand the symptoms they're seeing.
"Behavior is like nothing we've seen before," Greenstein said.
Hallucinations can last for several days, Greenstein added.
By state law, the Secretary of the State Department of Health and Hospitals can add compounds to the state's list of illegal drugs.
Before Thursday, that had never happened.
"We've not done this before through the Department's emergency rule making powers," Jindal said, "but we recognize this is such a unique and serious to the children of Louisiana that we knew that it was important for us to act as quickly as possible."
Now, Methylenedioxymethcathinone, Methyenedioxypryovalerone, Methylmethcathinone, Methoxymethcathinone, Fluoromethcathinone and Fluoromethcathinone are considered Schedule One narcotics, like heroin and LSD.
"The reality is, the chemicals used to make these dangerous substances have no legitimate use other than to provide a high for their users," Jindal said.
At least nine different phony bath salts have been identified, containing some combination of those six chemicals.
Among those identified: Cloud Nine, Scarface, White Dove, Charge +, White Lightning, Ivory Wave, Hurricane Charlie, Red Dove, and Ocean.
"They all have at least one of the six in it and there's a different variety of cocktails created around these chemicals," Greenstein said.
Slidell police began visiting convenience stores Thursday afternoon to pull the phony bath salts off shelves.
In one store, police confiscated 150 packets of one product called Scarface.
Police asked stores to voluntarily remove the phony bath salts last month.
"We had a few stores in our area here in Slidell that refused and kept it on the market for sale," Slidell Police Chief Randy Smith said. "So today, that's what we're doing, we're going out, we're not initiating arrests but we are seizing the product."
Arrests, according to Smith, could begin as soon as tomorrow.
More than four dozen law enforcement leaders from southeast Louisiana came to the St. Tammany Parish Courthouse Thursday, praising the governor's announcement.
"For us to be able to face this contemporary challenge, we have to do this out of the box thinking and re-engineer the manner in which we approach this so that we can eradicate this in it's availability quick," said Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand.
Jindal said the fight is far from over.
He said the state is looking into more comprehensive legislation to ban all designer drugs.
"It's not going to end here," Normand added. "Today, it's bath salt. Tomorrow, it's going to be something else."
