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REGULATE THIS INSANITY! It is not a conflation to say all illicit drug use can lead to this outcome, especially in a culture that seeks only pleasure, or only avoidance of any discomfort!
Murderous rampages, superhuman strength, and a high more potent than crystal meth: As deadly drug claims its first British victim, RICHARD PENDLEBURY investigates the insanity of taking flakka
By RICHARD PENDLEBURY FOR THE DAILY MAIL PUBLISHED: 8 February 2020
Camille Balla will next appear at the Palm Beach courthouse, Florida, at the end of March.
If her case goes to trial, the evidence is likely to unsettle even the most stout-hearted juror. And that is some understatement.
In March 2018, police were called to Balla’s home in Royal Palm Beach. There, they found the 32-year-old covered in blood, with large cuts to her fingers and palms. In the property’s garage they came across her mother Francisca, lying dead in a pool of blood.
- Factory worker Andrea Horvathova, 23, died after taking flakka with a cocktail of other illegal substances in the UK
- Camille Balla, 32, allegedly smoked a flakka-laced marijuana joint before killing her mother at their home in Royal Palm Beach, Florida
Her eyes had been gouged out, seemingly by some of the shards of broken glass which lay around her...apparently by her own daughter.
Francisca’s eyeballs had been placed on a cardboard box a few yards from her corpse. While officers were contemplating this horror, Balla reportedly veered between icy calm and shrieking hysteria. When formally arrested she allegedly began to chant, ‘I’m a murderer’!
Later she is said to have told police that before she killed her mother she had been smoking marijuana, which she believed had been laced with the designer drug flakka.
This will have surprised no one in the Sunshine State, because in the last half dozen years Florida has been hit by a flakka epidemic. It has manifested itself in dozens of overdose deaths and suicides, as well as a number of disturbing public incidents
Flakka gets its street name from the Spanish slang phrase la Flaca. This loosely translates as ‘a slim attractive woman’. But there is nothing beautiful about the effects of the drug or the circumstances of those who abuse it. They are often poor, if not desperate, individuals.
In the UK a hit of flakka can be purchased for as little as £2.30 — and it is said to be more potent and addictive than crystal meth.
Alpha-pyrrolidinovalerophenone is flakka’s scientific name, or more simply alpha-PVP. It is a synthetic version of the natural chemical cathinone, the active ingredient in khat leaves that are chewed for their stimulating effects in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.
But other side-effects are grim, even deadly. Flakka can cause paranoia, delusions, hallucinations, aggression and psychotic behaviour, leading some abusers to think they have superhuman powers, such as flying or prodigious strength.
Sweating and dilated pupils are common indicators. Heart attacks and strokes are a risk under its influence. First-time users are said to take three to four days to return to a normal state of mind. Repeat users can take more than two weeks to be restored to equilibrium.
In 2017, Derren Morrison was sentenced to life imprisonment for beating to death Louise Clinton on her 83rd birthday. He told police he believed the grandmother, a total stranger, was a blood-covered demon who had been trying to kill him. He had been smoking flakka before the assault, he said.
Last year, another alleged flakka user gouged out his own eyes and attempted to chop off his penis. The 35-year-old medical student from Brazil had been depressed after splitting from his girlfriend.
Flakka use by people with existing mental health issues can have explosive consequences. But such is the drug’s reputation for inducing spectacular psychosis that it has been blamed for shocking crimes without solid proof of a connection.
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Molly, which is another name for the drug MDMA, typically stays in a person's system for several days. The exact length of time depends on several factors, including the person's metabolism and the amount of the drug they have taken.
Molly detox: It is not possible to speed up the detox process for molly. The body will clear it from the system at its own pace, based on the liver's ability to break down the drug. Some people believe that drinking water can remove molly from the system more quickly. However, this is not the case. In fact, drinking too much water could lead to hyponatremia, or water toxicity.
Similarly, vigorous exercise will not boost the body's ability to metabolize molly. Exercise may increase thirst, which could prompt people to drink more water.
In some cases, especially in females, hyponatremia can be fatal. Learn more about the condition here.
Summary: Molly, or MDMA, can remain in the system for several days. Hair testing, however, can detect drug use several months after a person takes their last dose. Chronic use of molly can cause it to remain in the system for longer.
The liver metabolizes the drug, and the kidneys excrete most of it through urine. The body will also remove some of the drug from the system through sweat and feces.
It is not possible to speed up the metabolization process of molly, and some methods that claim to do so can be dangerous.
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Jeff Parsons 19 Dec 2019
The first conclusive study over the health effects of vaping has been published over in the US and it’s not good news. According to the study, carried out by researchers from the University of San Francisco, vaping does contribute to lung disease in adults regardless of whether or not they also smoke tobacco.
They state that vapers are 1.3 times more likely than non-vapers to develop diseases like chronic bronchitis, emphysema, or asthma. ‘I think it’s a critically important paper,’ Harvard University professor of public health Joseph Allen, who was not involved with the study, told Popular Science. ‘We don’t have any information as of now on the potential long-term impacts of e-cigarettes on respiratory health.’
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Dr Rob Waterman (Rural Health Tasmania) Source: PODCAST © Tasmania Talks
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FACTS WRONG ON UK PILL TESTING, USE AND DEATHS
15 December 2019
An article published in Tasmania’s Mercury is an example of misinformation being peddled by pill testing supporters to the media, with the island’s peak ATOD body misquoting UK statistics to push a bogus rationale for pill testing.
In the article Tasmania ATDC CEO Alison Lai asserts that UK ecstasy deaths have been increasing while ecstasy use has been decreasing, leading her to support the notion spread by the UK’s Dr Fiona Measham, of the pill testing outfit called “the Loop”, that higher purity pills are causing more deaths than might be expected. She then warns Tasmanians to beware the higher purity pills, implying the need for pill testing, which she lauds for its ‘success’ in the UK.
The reality is very different. Statistics from England and Wales show that the introduction of pill testing did not produce any reduction in deaths as promised, nor did it appear to change the behaviour of users by getting some to quit using ecstasy, as also forecast by its advocates. While European countries have poor to non-existent statistics on ecstasy deaths, the UK keeps up-to-date figures. Pill testing operated by “the Loop” began in 2013 and by 2016 began expanding into 12 music festivals with government assent. Ecstasy use increased by 76% amongst 16-24 year olds (see Table 1.06), the most prolific ecstasy users, between 2013 and 2017/18. In 2013 there were 43 ecstasy deaths, more than doubling to 92 deaths in 2018.
It is important to recognise that UK deaths include every age group but ecstasy use statistics do not include 13 – 15 year olds, an age group in which there have been frequent deaths (see this, this, this and this), which imply significant increases in lower high-school use in the last few years, more than explaining the doubling of deaths in the UK by 2018. Correlations of increased use and deaths mostly preclude the rationale that deaths are caused by increased purity.
The truth is that scientific studies have shown that ecstasy overdose is rare, a fact admitted by other leading harm reduction organisations worldwide, and ecstasy users frequently take two or three pills at the same time, with some users ingesting 15-25 pills in a session (note that there is no tolerance to the fatal effects of ecstasy, only a tolerance to the psychoactive effect here described). The science also shows users ingesting up to 77 times as much ecstasy as has killed many others, yet still being very much alive. And reports from the UK show the same expected pattern for deaths, where friends took the same number of high-dose pills but only one died, the same as happened with Anna Wood, Australia’s first ecstasy death, where four other friends took the same moderate-dose pills without hospitalisation or death.
Drug Free Australia is concerned that pill testing will only increase deaths here as in the UK. With ecstasy itself being responsible for all 392 MDMA-related deaths between 2001 and 2016 (see p 18), with not one from dangerous impurities or other dangerous drugs cut with a pill’s MDMA, Pill Testing Australia’s failure to dissuade even one single ecstasy user from discarding their pill immediately in the 2019 Canberra pill testing trial shows that the intervention fails at the most basic level of keeping pills out of the mouths of users in the first place, something that policing does alternately succeed at doing.