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store.“At the busiest times, especially after dark, it was like a Walmart parking lot out there,” said a neighboring business owner who requested to remain anonymous. Some customers reportedly showed up five or six times a day. Locals said it looked like a line outside a food bank. From his next-door tattoo parlor, Charlie Barham watched D.K. Tobacco’s business swell following local news coverage. “Suddenly we saw more than just your average tweaker pulling into D.K.,” he said. “Construction workers driving up in city trucks. Everyone including your grandmother heard about this stuff, and decided it was worth giving a shot.”In a matter of weeks, signs of wreckage appeared in the neighbourhood. Violent face-offs with suspected users became increasingly common, overwhelming police officers and emergency room personnel. In May alone Roanoke city police responded to 34 bath salts-related calls. “It was more than just a serious problem. It was an epidemic. And it came on so suddenly,” said Roanoke city police chief Chris Perkins. By this point the predicament was no longer restricted to city limits; Amped was ravaging the entire county. “We had an officer fight a kid for nine minutes,” said Roanoke County police chief Chuck Mason. “Most of our scuffles are less than a minute. The kid came charging at him out of the house stark naked.” An emergency room physician interviewed by the local news station said that if cocaine and methamphetamines were tropical storms, the bath salts situation was a hurricane.
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“The drug dealer,” he said.I continued on to a gas station down the street where crack-heads often hung out. It was early evening, but the sun was still beating down on the modest office buildings of downtown. A small group was tooling around on a vacant stretch of asphalt. I asked a man who looked like an unwrapped mummy about Amped. He said he had done it, and liked it, because he could snort it, smoke it, or shoot it. His friend, a shrunken fellow with bloodshot eyes, jostled up and told him not to talk to me. He ignored his buddy’s request, which made him more agitated and prompted him to grab a box cutter from the dirt and thumb the release mechanism. “Ah! It ain’t got no blade in it!” he moaned, throwing it back onto the ground before the pair walked away.
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