FFPD Steps Up Defensive Against Bath Salt Use in Fort Fairfield
By: David Deschesne
Fort Fairfield Journal, April 2, 2014
The Communist Chinese are waging chemical warfare against the people in the United States via highly addictive and potentially deadly synthetic cathinones, a/k/a “bath salts”. Police departments across America are on the front lines of this literal war in trying to curb both the trafficking and use of this very destructive class of drugs. In Fort Fairfield, bath salts are at the top of Fort Fairfield Police Chief, Bill Campbell's priority list.
“For the past couple of weeks we have been focusing our attention on bath salt users and traffickers in Fort Fairfield. We've had some successes both in sentences and people checking into rehab. We've also had successes in arresting people on outstanding warrants,” said Chief Campbell. “Our approach is pretty simple; when a bath salt house comes to our attention we park very near that house, at one time we parked in the driveway because it was an apartment building. We're not there to intimidate, we're there to let them know that bath salts - as with any illegal drug - will not be tolerated in Fort Fairfield. We've been getting a lot of complaints over the past couple of months about bath salt use, bath salt trafficking and those types of things and this was a way that we thought we could at least get things to calm down a little bit.”
According to a Wikipedia entry, bath salts “is a term used to describe a number of designer drugs often containing substituted cathinones, which have effects similar to amphetamine and cocaine. The name derives from instances in which the drugs were being sold under the guise of being bath salts. Their white crystals often resemble legal bathing products like Epsom salts, but are chemically disparate from actual bath salts. The drug bath salts' packaging often states 'not for human consumption' in an attempt to avoid the prohibition of drugs.”
Bath salts are highly addictive and pharmacokinetically unstable. Users are immediately “hooked” and end up suffering from skewed metabolism, elevated body temperatures, heart palpitations, nausea, loss of appetite that leads to anorexia, kidney failure, liver failure, intense bouts of paranoia and hallucinations, and suicide. If left untreated, a user may end up starving to death, or otherwise succumb to a host of immediate medical complications that inevitably occur after using these toxic drugs.
“We've been very vocal with the people we've been dealing with,” said Chief Campbell. “If we have the occasion to talk to them, even on the street, if they're in our databanks as being involved with bath salts - either a user or a trafficker - we're letting them know that we know who they are.”
The Chief says traffickers of this deadly class of drugs are not welcome in Fort Fairfield. “They have a choice; they can quit doing what they're doing, or they can move somewhere else because quite frankly we don't need traffickers of bath salts in Fort Fairfield.”
Bath salts are so unpredictable, so addicting and there are no age boundaries. “I've heard reports of people in their 50s and 60s using them all the way down to the teenage years. So, that's been our concentration for the past several weeks. We've been fairly successful, we're not going to quit. We've been working with the Department of Health and Human Services, Child and Family Services, with some parents who have been involved with their children, we've been working with Probation & Parole with people who are on probation and are using the drugs, getting them tested and if they've violated parole we take them off the street and hopefully get them into some type of treatment.”
Chief Campbell says while traffickers of bath salts are immediately arrested when found out, users are not. “If we find somebody who's using bath salts first of all we make sure they're medically okay. If we think that they're a danger to themselves because of the state that they're in we're probably going to call an ambulance and have them come and check them out. They're most likely going to make a trip to the hospital. The issue with bath salts is there are not a whole lot of medical treatments that can be done. Basically, the doctors keep them under observation and wait for them to come down off the drug. It's such a new drug that treatment both for the addiction and treatment at an emergency room is very minimal.
With Chief Campbell being a resident agent of Maine Drug Enforcement Agency (MDEA), Fort Fairfield Police Department continues its working relationship with the MDEA. “We arrested a person in town a couple of weeks ago who was involved in a big case down in Mars Hill where twelve pounds of bath salts were recovered in a matter of a couple of days.”
Local police departments now have the capability, through a partnership with MDEA, to test anything that is seized that is suspected of being bath salts. “They have a spectrograph type machine that is almost a handheld device, it's very small. When they're in town they bring it up and test the drugs for us. We used to have to send drugs away to a lab which cost a lot of money. Now we can test it with this machine; maybe we have to go back later and charge somebody with possession or trafficking but at least we could charge them. Then, at a later point if that person decided they wanted to have a trial then we would send it away to have it tested at the State lab in Augusta.”
If anyone has information about bath salt use they can contact FFPD or Aroostook County Crimestoppers. All informants are treated confidentially and their names are not used if they wish to remain anonymous. “I am still a resident agent, a member of MDEA even though I'm the chief of police here. So, in the capacity of an agent if a person calls me directly, nothing they tell me is going to go anywhere other than my partners who are in the Houlton office. It's not going to be shared with the officers that I work with unless it's a safety issue or something along that line. Confidentiality at Maine Drug Enforcement is above par. We just do not give out people's names. If they don't want to be known then that's how we take the information - anonymously. Their name will never appear on a piece of paperwork, anywhere.”
