We’re told all kinds of horror stories about drugs. We’ve all heard those scare stories about people frying their minds, jumping off cliffs, or breaking into murderous rages. We’ve heard those “reefer madness” stories that are usually so over-the-top that reality can never live up to them.But flakka—the new synthetic drug that’s been said to turn people into zombies—is different. It’s a new generation of bath salts that, compared to other drugs, hasn’t spread that far. But the people who use it have gone on mad, violent, zombie-like rampages that make the worst drug stories your mother ever told you seem tame. here are 5 facts about (FLAKKA).
5)It Makes People Move Like Zombies
They call flakka “the Zombie Drug” for a reason. It’s the way people move when they’re on it. Their bodies jerk and contort in an unnerving and inhuman way, almost like a zombie.When somebody takes too much flakka, the muscle fibers in their body start to dissolve into the bloodstream. Their bodies start moving uncontrollably. Sometimes, their heads will drop down below their shoulders; other times, their limbs will stiffen and shoot out. It’s like watching a marionette dance as its strings are cut or, perhaps, a glitch in a video game.But it’s not just that the users look weird. Flakka activates the fight-or-flight response in a person’s brain, often turning them irrationally violent. And at the same time, it causes paranoid, delusional fantasies—meaning their brains just come up with reasons to start fighting.
4)It Has Made People Kill
The best-known story connected to flakka is the story of Austin Harrouff, a 19-year-old boy who was caught chewing off his neighbor’s face and growling like an animal. The madness, paranoia, and superhuman strength he showed made people think he was on flakka, but in this case, toxicology tests showed he wasn’t on any drugs at all. When it came out that flakka’s best-known murderer wasn’t on the drug, some people started saying the stories about it were overblown—but even if Harrouff wasn’t on it, there are plenty of other stories of people becoming murderers after taking the drug.One man, named Leroy Strothers, grabbed a gun, stripped off his clothes, climbed up onto a rooftop, and opened fire on his neighbors. He’d taken flakka, he later told police, and became convinced that a Haitian gang was outside trying to murder his family.
“[Flakka] actually starts to rewire the brain chemistry. They have no control over their thoughts. They can’t control their actions,” one expert explained. “It seems to be universal that they think someone is chasing them. It’s just a dangerous, dangerous drug.”
3)It Gives Users Super Strength
Somehow, flakka seems to actually give users superhuman strength. Their brains get altered until they have that power a mother taps into when she gets the strength to a pull a car off her child, and that can make them incredibly dangerous.A man named James West tried to break his way into the Fort Lauderdale police headquarters.[7] After smoking flakka, he’d become paranoid that there 25 cars trying to chase him and run him over. He wanted the police to help him, so he tried to break down their front door. West tried to smash his way through by kicking a hole in the hurricane-proof glass, smashing it with rocks, and tearing the door off of its hinges—and he almost succeeded. A detective in the office later said, “His power was so forceful that, when he pulled, you actually could see the doors shaking and him throwing the rocks that cracked the impact window.”And he’s not the only person who’s been able to tear down doors. Another man in West Palm Beach wandered into a hospital and turned violent when security asked him to leave. In a flakka-induced rage, the man smashed through the hospital’s glass doors with his bare fists.“That’s what that drug does. It totally alters reality,” an emergency physician named Dr. Nabil Ed Sanadi explained. “They’re just using their physical strength to escape from whatever their brain is telling them.”
2)It Makes People Suicidal
Flakka doesn’t just make its users a danger to others, though—it makes them a danger to themselves. The drug can overwhelm them with feelings of depression and suicidal thoughts. In fact, some of the first deaths from the drug came from suicides.When John Hummel Jr. started taking flakka, he was overcome with paranoia. He started calling his mother with what she called his “crazy calls,” describing his delusions. “Somebody’s chasing me,” he told her once. “It’s the cops, they’re here, the helicopters are overhead.” His mother tried to help him, but she didn’t get to him in time. Soon, he was found in a hotel closet, hanging from the ceiling with an electrical cord around his neck.
1)You Can Order It Online
The really terrifying part is how easy it is to buy flakka. Restrictions are bit tighter than they used to be, but at its height, flakka could be ordered online with the click of a button. The drug was sold online by about 150 different Chinese companies.[9] The biggest is Kaikai Technology Co., a company run by a Chinese drug lord named Bo Peng, but he’s believed to just be one of many who put the drug up on online shopping sites. They charge $1,500 for a kilogram of flakka—which, usually, can make about $50,000 on the streets. Up until recently, it was perfectly legal for them to sell flakka, too. That doesn’t mean they didn’t delve into the dark side of their business, though. When The New York Times contacted a flakka dealer and asked about the price of shipping, the customer service representative on the other end told them it depended: “I can handle this for you legally or illegally.”The laws are getting a bit stricter now. The United States put a temporary ban on flakka in 2013 and is working on a full one, and even China banned it in 2015. But outside of the US and China, there are plenty of countries that are only starting to talk about it, which means that, in some places, it’s still a legal drug.