Paranoia, no-sleep after taking bath salts
Festival-goers who took dangerous cathinones when they thought it was MDMA have described the days without sleep, hospital trips and paranoia that followed.
Drug-testing service Know Your Stuff issued a warning last week when it found half the samples brought to it at New Year’s Eve festivals were cathinones, or bath salts, instead of MDMA.
Eutylone was the most commonly found cathinone. It can give the same euphoric hit as MDMA but wears off quickly, leaving the user with horrible – and sometimes dangerous – aftereffects.
Dozens of people got in touch with Know Your Stuff describing their experiences of unknowingly taking cathinones.
One person who took cathinones on New Year’s Eve said they had ‘‘never felt so out of control’’.
‘‘I spent the whole next day in ER hallucinating, having extreme panic attacks, I honestly thought I was going to die.’’
Another said they spent the hours afterwards lying in bed ‘‘thinking I might die in my sleep, but I was too scared to move and get help’’.
Any attempt to sleep was met with the ‘‘worst panic attacks in my life’’. People reported going for days without sleep after taking cathinones.
‘‘I didn’t sleep for three days,’’ one person said.
Another person said they didn’t sleep for 96 hours and felt weak and extremely paranoid, with their partner vomiting foam. They went to the hospital. They weren’t alone in seeking medical help.
One person said their friend had a seizure in the middle of a festival mosh pit: ‘‘Luckily St John were there’’. Police tested their drugs, and they came back as ‘‘pure eutylone, no MDMA at all’’.
Know Your Stuff director Wendy Allison said as well as seeing hundreds of cathinone samples, high-dose MDMA pills are still a problem this summer. The service has updated its pill library with the super-strength pills it has seen this year.