Bath salts and other weird highs

The latest drugs to hit the US are sold legally as 'bath salts' – but what, exactly, are they?
Bath salts being used as drugs
The latest in legal highs: bath salts. Photograph: Andy Mills/Star Ledger/Corbis

What's the most benign possible name for a street drug? The satirist Chris Morris created the tempting fictional high Cake, and Anthony Burgess could have joined him for a tea party with Milk-Plus, from his novel A Clockwork Orange. But the US drug scene has topped them both, with the boom of a substance whose name recalls the scent of lavender and presents for Grandma.

On Saturday, the New York Times reported that substances sold as "bath salts" – sometimes in packets marked Ivory Wave or Vanilla Sky – are sweeping the US, and remain legal in many states. They actually contain manmade chemicals including mephedrone. British newspapers often call mephedrone by the extremely fluffy name meow meow (users apparently do not), and despite the stimulant being banned in the UK in April 2010, it is still highly popular. A survey of 308 UK clubbers, conducted last summer and published online in the Journal of Substance Use, found 27% were planning to use mephedrone that night, making it the most common drug, above ecstasy and cocaine.

Meanwhile, in Russia, there's a movement away from outright euphemism, with one highly popular, codeine-based street drug being called crocodile (krokodil). This is not because it eats you alive. Not quite. But as Time magazine recently reported, when the drug is injected, "the addict's skin becomes greenish and scaly, like a crocodile's, as blood vessels burst and the surrounding tissue dies". It's a reminder, kids, that drugs spell danger. Even when their names evoke the loveliest kittens.