Stop Saying the Miami Cannibal Was on Bath Salts

By now, I'm sure anyone with an internet connection is familiar with the recent incident in which Miami Police shot dead a naked man who was in the process of eating another man’s face. If not, google the phrase "bath salts". It's the name the media have settled on for the drug they speculate Rudy Eugene was high on when he was biting chunks out of homeless Ronald Poppo's cheek.

Today there's a fresh "bath salts" horror story in the news, about another guy in Miami who has been threatening to get his crazy drug cannibal on in public. Weirdly, the criteria for what constitutes "bath salts" seems to have shifted – whereas before it was a new variety of LSD or cocaine (wtf?), now it's apparently just another name for mephedrone: which has more in common with MDMA and was massively popular in the UK a couple of years back when it was known as "M-kat", "meow meow" or "plant food".

Chances are you saw a few people take mephedrone. Did they seem more into dancing to "Happy House" by the Juan MacLean all night and trying to have sex with one another, or eating people's faces?

Anyway, if you were not particularly sensitive to concepts like alarmism and the US government’s history of proactive and deceptive fear mongering, you might assume that there was sufficient enough evidence to suggest a relationship between the horrifying act and the aforementioned substance.

Headlines like “Miami's 'Naked Zombie' Proves Need to Ban Bath Salts, Experts Say” via US News & World Report, and “Bath salts: Officials say the synthetic drug in disguise was behind recent ‘cannibal’ attack” via New York Daily News are hypnotising scared parents, squares and even cool people across the globe despite the fact that, as of now, there is little-to-no evidence that supports the claim the designer drug was ever consumed. No toxicology results and no documentation – not even any hearsay of perpetrator Rudy Eugene being connected in any way to hard or designer drugs. Leaving the only thing we can responsibly say Eugene consumed that day was another man’s face.

It appears that the genesis of this buzz avalanche began with a CBS Miami broadcast that interviewed President of Miami Fraternal Order of Police Armando Aguilar, a peculiar fellow, who would continue to go on a crusade of bath salt speculation, strangely conflating LSD, bath salts and cannibalism:

“We have seen already,” Aguilar said, “three or four cases that are exactly like this, where some people have admitted to taking LSD.”

First off, “exactly like this”? Dude is clearly not aware of the concept of words having specific meanings, which becomes very apparent when he conflates LSD, a psychedelic substance of the Ergoline family, with bath salts, a new blanket term used to market an array of grey market designer amphetamines and other bad things that are definitely in no way related to LSD.

The segment continues to bewilder when they interview an E.R. Doctor.

“He (E.R. Doctor Paul Adams) says the new LSD is commonly called ‘bath salts'.”

So not only are they conflating two non-related drugs, they are connecting this “new LSD” with cannibalism, which has since been echoed in the countless headlines of major, local and even seemingly progressive media outlets. And while most reports qualify their statements with something along the lines of “experts say” or “according to officials”, none of them bother to mention that this accusation is completely unfounded and that people have been committing gruesome and often unexplainable crimes long before bath salts showed up to the party.

And now, in the wake of this probably-not-bath-salt related tragedy, we have everyone, local and federal, even Canadians, pushing for a ban not only on bath salts but also “synthetic marijuana” and other designer drugs. Not to say that bath salts shouldn’t be banned or that they were not involved, but forming drug policy around blatant conclusion-jumping and deception seems (or at least it should seem) antiquated. This is the same methodology that got marijuana outlawed. Like, weed was literally being blamed for murder, rape and Satanism. High School kids write term papers about this bizarre and transparent concept all the time yet – at least in this particular case – everyone seems OK with it. Bunch of fucking zombies.

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