Flakka: Rampant Designer Drug Dubbed `$5 Insanity`

April 03--Like bath salts before it, a new synthetic designer street drug called flakka is unleashing maniacal paranoia, rage and delirium on South Florida's streets.

Since January, flakka has given rise to a naked gunman on a Lake Worth rooftop, a man trying to kick in a glass door at the Fort Lauderdale police station, another who impaled himself when he attempted to scale a security fence at the Fort Lauderdale station because he was trying to escape murderers, and yet another who left a trail of blood after attacking an 82-year-old Riviera Beach woman in her home.

"Longtime addicts who have tried flakka, they're terrified of it," said Don Maines, a treatment counselor for Broward Sheriff's Office community programs and vice president of the Broward Addiction Recovery Center's advisory board. "They can't think straight, they're paranoid, they think people are chasing them. One guy thought he was surrounded by German shepherds that were attacking him."

Flakka occurrences have risen at an alarming rate, with Florida crime labs analyzing zero flakka cases in 2010, 85 in 2012 and more than 670 in 2014, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

To combat the rising tide, South Florida law enforcement agencies are training their officers how to identify people high on flakka, creating task forces and linking arms with local and federal agencies.

An illegal, controlled substance, flakka comes in a crystalline rock form and can be smoked, snorted, swallowed in capsules or injected. It can sell for as cheap as $5 a hit, and its effects can last from three hours to three days.

One user branded it "$5 insanity," Maines said. "This is as bad as it gets."

By all accounts, it causes delirium, delusions and hallucinations, incites violent fits, nightmarish visions, belligerence and aggression and saddles its users with seemingly superhuman strength.

When a Fort Lauderdale police officer encountered James West in early February, West was out of breath, bleeding above his eye and convinced that 25 people had chased him from the downtown bus terminal to the police station, according to an incident report.

Surveillance video showed West prying, pounding, mule-kicking and throwing rocks at the station's hurricane-glass lobby door until it cracked.

West, 50, told police he had smoked flakka and he was desperate to get inside to escape from the people who were after him.

Flakka is the latest derivative to come out of the designer-drug phenomena, a lineage that includes Ecstasy, MDMA, Molly and bath salts. Flakka contains the chemical compound alpha-PVP, a powerful and highly addictive synthetic stimulant, said Jim Hall, a Nova Southeastern University epidemiologist who studies substance use and drug outbreaks.

Known in other parts of the nation as "gravel," flakka burst onto local law enforcement's radar late last summer, Fort Lauderdale police Sgt. Nick Coffin said. Cops saw it on the streets, selling cheap, he said.

"The cost is what really alarmed us ... a lot more people can get their hands on it, and that's always a problem," Coffin said. "We worked with the [Broward Sheriff's Office] crime lab to identify it as quickly as possible."

On March 22, before Shanard Neely impaled himself while trying to jump a 10-foot security fence at the Fort Lauderdale police station, he had told an officer "people were following him and he needed to go to jail or they would kill him," according to a report.

In a delicate and complicated 20-minute rescue, Neely, 37, was cut free from atop the fence, and with the 14-inch security spike still piercing his crotch and buttocks, was rushed to the hospital.

Neely told police he had been diagnosed as schizophrenic and admitted to smoking flakka, the report said.

The Broward Sheriff's Office lab saw its positive identifications of alpha-PVP steadily rise in 2014, hitting a peak in September, said Keyla Concepcion, a Sheriff's Office spokeswoman.

In the first two months of last year, the lab identified no substances as alpha-PVP, but by March it had 19. That rose to 39 in August and jumped to 84 in September, according to Sheriff's Office lab data provided by Concepcion. Numbers for 2015 are not available, she said.

Flakka has wreaked havoc elsewhere too, appearing in recent months with a sudden bang, said Alexa Lee, a program director with the Palm Beach County Substance Awareness Coalition.

"I would characterize it as a recent, recent rise, fairly sudden," she said.

On March 8, Riviera Beach police found Derren Morrison lying in the street with blood-smeared arms, mumbling incoherently, according to a police report.

Officers followed a trail of blood to a nearby home and through an open door where they found an 82-year-old woman bleeding profusely, the report said.

Morrison, 26, admitted to flakka use and said he did not remember attacking the woman, the report said.

Flakka is largely concocted in labs in China, India and Pakistan, and is bought in bulk online by low-level dealers who repackage it in gram-size packets or capsules and brand it with a catchy street name. It can end up mixed with heroin, cocaine or methamphetamine, Hall said.

"You may be buying a lot more trouble than you really want," said Hall, of Nova's Center for Applied Research on Substance Use and Health Disparities. "We don't know much about it; users don't necessarily even know what they're taking. I refer to it as the guinea-pig drug."

When a SWAT team was called to a Lake Worth apartment building Jan. 30, they found Leroy Strothers, naked on the roof, armed with a semi-automatic pistol and yelling that someone was trying to kill him, a police report said.

"Someone please call my sister, I feel delusional and I'm hallucinating," the report said Strothers, 33, shouted. He later admitted to smoking flakka, the report said.

The Broward Sheriff's Office has trained deputies how to identify someone on flakka and embarked on outreach presentations with community and church leaders, Maines said.

The Fort Lauderdale Police Department has created a task force, informally known as the Flakka Initiative, to work with local municipalities and other agencies, including the city of Hollywood, the Broward Sheriff's Office, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Postal Service, and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Coffin said.

And within the next month, the Palm Beach County Substance Awareness Coalition will launch a website --dontbeaguineapig.com -- dedicated to the latest information about designer drugs.

"It's so we can have a source of information that can hopefully keep up as they're created and designed and released," Lee said. "You don't know what's in them and you don't know what's going to happen when you put them in your body. It's like playing Russian roulette."

tealanez@tribpub.com, 954-356-4542 or Twitter @talanez

Flakka FAQ

It's called flakka in Florida, but is known as "gravel" nationwide.

What is it? It is a designer drug containing the chemical compound alpha-PVP, a highly addictive synthetic stimulant.

What does it look like? Crystalline rocks

Where does it come from? It's made in labs overseas and sold to dealers over the Internet.

How is it taken? It can be snorted, smoked in joints, pipes or e-cigarettes, swallowed in capsules or injected.

Side effects include hallucinations, psychosis, paranoia, anxiety, aggression and combativeness.

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