Deadly drug flakka is just a click away

Online ordering makes for easy access

As easy as ordering a book from Amazon.com, you can buy bulk quantities of the key ingredient in flakka, a psychosis-inducing street drug which has contributed to nearly 20 Broward County deaths since September.

Although banned in the United States since February 2014, acquiring the synthetic stimulant alpha-PVP from overseas is as simple as going online, placing an order, wiring money to a lab or pharmaceutical company in China and getting it shipped to a post office box, mail center or your home.

“It’s that easy, and it’s despicable,” said Broward

Sheriff ’s Detective Bill Schwartz. “These drugs are being shipped from China right to your doorstep. You only have to be educated enough to use a computer and you can find it.”

Federal authorities this year have seen an influx of shipments into Florida, and the arrest of a Palm Beach County woman in April for importing the drug is believed to be the first South Florida prosecution of its kind.

Florida DEA agents seized 7.6 kilograms (nearly 17 pounds) of alpha-PVP last year, said Special Agent Mia Ro, a DEA spokeswoman. “Just this year, it has more than tripled,” she said.

Users have dubbed the volatile hallucinogenic substance as “$5 insanity,” “powdered psychosis” and a “total mind melt.”

A quick Google search shows no shortage of Chinese labs touting “big, beautiful crystals” and willing to fulfill mail-order requests for the crystalline substance and other “research chemicals.”

With a keystroke, choose a category of drug: stimulation and euphoria, smoking, psychostimulant, hallucinogenic or dissociative. One company will even send free five-gram samples to new customers. Several labs promise a “special method” of delivery to “bypass customs.”

A minimum 10-gram order goes for about $11 per gram. A kilogram will set you back about $1,560.

Trumpeting the drug as a means of increasing productivity and endurance, one website urges: “So don’t hesitate and try this awesome drug if you feel like.”

On other websites, designer-drug users share their experiences, warnings and advice via “trip reports.” They largely describe paranoid effects rather than “awesome” ones:

“Delusions of cameras in trees, feelings of impending doom, hearing sirens that weren’t there, and just knowing ‘they were coming for me’”

In recent months, people reportedly high on flakka have streaked naked down Broward Boulevard, tried to break into Fort Lauderdale police headquarters while fleeing imaginary killers and gotten impaled while trying to scale a security fence.

Flakka was to blame, police said, when an armed, naked man took to a Lake Worth rooftop, when a mother blacked out and left her unattended baby near a busy Boynton Beach street, when a Riviera Beach man beat a woman nearly to death and pulled out her dreadlocks one by one and when detectives followed a trail of blood from a beaten 82-year-old woman’s Riviera Beach home to a man lying in the street with blood-smeared arms.

In another escapade, a Melbourne man attempted to have sex with a tree, proclaimed himself to be the mythical god Thor and tried to stab an officer with his badge.

Two weeks ago, Fort Lauderdale police shot and killed an armed man who was high on the drug and holding a woman hostage.

“Alpha-pvp toxicity” was the cause of death for a 21-year-old man attending Miami’s Ultra Music Festival in 2014. And just since September, flakka has contributed to nearly 20 Broward County deaths, according to the Medical Examiner’s Office.

The drug has been a bit slower to infiltrate Palm Beach County but authorities there are seeing a rise in flakka-related antics and arrests. The medical examiner there has not attributed any deaths to flakka.

Because the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office did not until recently have its own alphaPVP testing kits, their ability to make immediate arrests had been hampered. Deputies had to send the flakka they confiscated to a crime lab, wait for a result and then file charges with the State Attorney’s Office, the agency’s spokeswoman Teri Barbera said.

“We are starting to see a lot of it,” Barbera said. “We have just received these kits. If we do get a positive for flakka on scene, we will arrest. It is only if we cannot

“Flakka is cheaper than a Big Mac. That’s the thing that scares me the most, how cheap it is.”

Kevin Stanfill, DEA Special Agent

confirm on scene that we send it to the lab for testing.”

“Before you know it you’re a bit paranoid…which winds up being intense psychosis which feels like being a skitzo”

“I don’t know that we’ve ever had anything that’s been imported into Florida that’s been more dangerous,” Broward Sheriff Scott Israel said. “Sometimes it takes five or six deputies to subdue a person. It’s easy to get a hold of, it’s affordable and it’s deadly. It’s something that we’re taking very, very seriously.”

A two-year federal ban of alpha-PVP went into effect in March 2014. Before it expires in 2016, the DEA hopes to secure a permanent ban, Ro said.

“People may know the street name flakka, but if they choose to use this dangerous drug they really have no idea what they are putting into their body,” Ro said.

Most worrisome of all is how inexpensive it is on the streets, said Special Agent Kevin Stanfill, one of the supervisors at the DEA’s headquarters in Weston.

“Flakka is cheaper than a Big Mac,” Stanfill said. “A flakka capsule goes for $3. Most of our kids have $3 in their pockets. That’s the thing that scares me the most, how cheap it is.”

“I was found wandering around lost in my garage looking for the ‘people who were watching me’”

Authorities are struggling to tailor their resources to stem the flow of flakka.

“Unfortunately for drugs like alpha-PVP, there are no restrictions on the exportation or manufacturing. We don’t even have drug dogs that can detect this, so it makes it a huge problem,” Schwartz said. “It’s illegal once you have it here, but if we can’t stop it from coming into the country, we’re going to continue to be faced with a problem.”

Believed to be the first South Florida prosecution of its kind, a 22-year-old Palm Beach County woman was arrested in April and charged with importing the illegal substance from a pharmaceutical lab in China.

British authorities tipped off London DEA agents who informed local law enforcement about multiple shipments bound for Broward and Palm Beach counties from a chemical company in Hong Kong. An undercover agent posed as a DHL employee and delivered one of the packages to a Boca Raton address.

Other parcels destined for Delray Beach and Pompano Beach also were intercepted.

And on Thursday, two Orlando-area men were federally charged for three illegal shipments of alphaPVP, a total of 11.2 kilograms, from China to mail centers in Weston and Fort Lauderdale.

“Taping windows and doors shut, unhooking phones and internet connections so no one could listen in”

The popularity of designer drugs, which are synthetic drugs designed in labs to replicate illegal ones, has fueled the rise in online drug dealing, said Guohua Li, professor of epidemiology and founding director of the Center for Injury Epidemiology and Prevention at Columbia University in New York.

“Drug dealers are taking advantage of new information technology and the globalization of commercial business,” Li said. “It’s caused a kind of sea change in the drug epidemic, especially in regards to designer drugs.”

Such synthetic drugs used to originate in Europe, Li said, “but it seems the epicenter has moved to Asia” where the ingredients are sold as “research” chemicals and labeled as “not for human consumption.” Local law enforcement say there are no legitimate uses for alpha-PVP.

Most of China’s synthetic-drug factories are clustered in the southern province of Guandong, which borders Hong Kong and has long been a hub for manufacturing traditional Chinese medicines, according to the global businessnews website, Quartz.

Alpha-PVP replicates an active ingredient found in khat, a flowering plant containing an amphetaminetype stimulant called a cathinone. Khat chewing dates back thousands of years in East Africa and the Middle East as a stimulant and social tonic where it’s known as “flower of paradise” or “tea of the Arabs.”

“It’s so fiendish and confusing that every prolonged

binge eventually seems to end in obsessive compulsions or paranoia.”

It’s a sign of the times, Fort Lauderdale police Capt. Dana Swisher said.

“Technology is such a major part of everybody’s daily life, it’s not a surprise to us now that we’re seeing more of an online-based supply and dealing,” Swisher said. “We’re seeing more and more cases.”

In the first quarter of this year, Fort Lauderdale police documented more than 290 incidents in which people were selling, in possession of, or under the influence of flakka, Swisher said. Fort Lauderdale police did not tally such incidents in 2014 or before.

Stanfill predicts that “this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

“Now, anybody can become a drug dealer,” Stanfill said. “It used to be, if you wanted to be a big-time drug dealer, you had to go into the lion’s den. You would have to go to Colombia, Mexico or Afghanistan. Now, you can sit there in your pajamas at your home computer and point and click.”

“It takes over you completely. You can’t control your actions.”