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New drugs, dire effects

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By: LISA MARCHESONI, Special to the Post

Posted: Sunday, November 13, 2011 5:06 am

New drugs, dire effects | RCSO, Citizens Academy, Crime, Drugs, Mollys Plant Food, Bath Salts, Smyrna, La Vergne

Different brands of synthetic drugs and high quality marijuana buds were confiscated by the sheriff’s Narcotics Division. Detectives have found drugs concealed in items such as this container, which had a label covering the contents.

This is the sixth of a series of stories about the Sheriff’s Citizens Academy at Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office. The academy is for citizens interested in learning more about the sheriff’s office. The academy is free and lasts 16 weeks. For more information, contact Deputy Greg Dotson at 904-3033.

Designer drugs such as plant food and bath salts cause users to suffer medical emergencies, according to detectives with the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office.

Both the plant food and bath salts are legal to possess but illegal to manufacture or offer to sell or sell under state law, Detective Lt. Egon Grissom of the Special Enforcement Bureau explained to members of the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Citizens Academy.

The package states the product is not for human consumption but users smoke, snort or eat it. The effects of both drugs are dangerous.

With plant food, the 24-hour to 48-hour high is similar to the illegal drug Ecstasy that gives users a sense of euphoria, paranoia, agitations and delusions. Bath salts are worse than plant food and comparable to cocaine, methamphetamine and PCP, Grissom said.

“Bath salts make people absolutely psychotic,” Grissom said. “People are cutting their own throats over this stuff. The Tennessee Poison Control Center reports a significant number of calls of people high on plant food or bath salts. Because of this stuff, there are people who are being put in hospitals daily.”

Plant food is packaged in capsules for $15 to $25 a capsule and not sold in garden stores.

“Who is their right mind would pay $25 to put one pill in plants?” Grissom asked, explaining how the drug is marketed as plant food.

K3 is another name for synthetic marijuana sold as incense.

He urged the citizens to boycott shops selling the plant food and bath salts because, “basically, they’re selling drugs.”

Grissom and his staff of six detectives joined other Murfreesboro, Smyrna and La Vergne police officers and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation in September to remove the product from Rutherford County stores.

Besides the designer drugs, the narcotics team investigates other drug-related crimes in the county of 262,000 citizens. They gather information from citizens, confidential informants, other agencies and their own undercover work to “get as many drugs as possible off the streets and drug dealers in jail.”

Grissom witnessed a dealer stop in the middle of the road sell heroin.

“Drug deals happen every day in this county,” Grissom said. “It’s all about the money. You can buy as long as you have the money.”

Narcotics detectives average about 100 search warrants a year where they thoroughly search suspected dealers’ homes for drugs. They have found drugs hidden in products disguised as soft drink cans, Ajax cans and snack canisters. He showed the citizens some of the products.

“We have literally opened up walls and found kilos of cocaine,” Grissom said.

One of their most successful operations was taking off the streets 27 kilos of cocaine valued at $473,000.

When the division seizes cash from drug dealers, the money is deposited into a drug fund to pay for more operations and supplement the sheriff’s office budget to “fight the war on (illegal drugs) crimes.”

Tagged under Bath Salts, Citizens Academy, Crime, Drugs, La Vergne, Mollys Plant Food, RCSO, Smyrna

Member Opinions:

By: jsc2h_mtsu_f11 on 11/18/11
I understand the concept of “stupid is as stupid does” as spoken by one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers, I think. I understand it to mean a person is as stupid as what they do. Anyone ingesting “designer drugs” is stupid, obviously, because the action itself is stupid. Why would anyone put something in their body that is as mysterious as these drugs seem to be? It wasn’t mentioned above, but in other news reports over the last year it has been mentioned that the ingredients of these drugs (particularly K3; bath salts and plant food are news to me) are never clearly defined.
I empathize with law enforcement agencies trying to police stupidity, and I understand how nihilistic this may sound, but If someone is willing to take that kind of risk they probably deserve the consequences. It’s not a new argument. Evan as a child in elementary school when I sat through anti-drug speeches during assemblies we were hammered with the idea that addicts will do anything to get high. So clearly synthetic narcotics aren’t out of the question for those individuals; but high school students looking to experiment with narcotics for the first time are well equipped to know how stupid that decision would be with something that doesn’t even have clearly defined ingredients or effects.