COLUMBUS, Ohio – The Ohio Attorney General’s Office is teaming up with the board that regulates drugs in the state to make it easier to crack down on the synthetic drugs known as “bath salts.”
Attorney General Mike DeWine attended the Ohio Board of Pharmacy’s monthly meeting yesterday to discuss a way to speed up the process of banning synthetic drugs as they are found.
In the past, it has been difficult for law enforcement authorities to keep up with the newly-manufactured drugs, also sold in head shops as incense or potpourri, DeWine says.
“Despite the success of House Bill 334, which outlawed a multitude of synthetic drugs in 2012, rogue chemists continue to create new, dangerous chemicals that fall outside of Ohio’s controlled substances law,” he said.
From now on, he wants his office to ask the pharmacy board to ban the substances as soon as they’re discovered by police.
Ohio law states that the Ohio Board of Pharmacy can schedule a drug as a controlled substance in specific circumstances, including if the substance has a strong potential for abuse, DeWine said.
“We are dedicated to aggressively eradicating these illicit drug operations and will use our full authority and resources to do so,” board executive director Kyle Parker said.
DeWine says the synthetic drugs are very addictive and capable of inciting violence and extreme paranoia.
On average, 10 to 15 percent of cases submitted to the state Bureau of Criminal Investigation’s laboratory for testing involve synthetic drugs and DeWine says each case could include anywhere between one and several thousand individual packets.
As an example, DeWine cited a case involving Hamilton police, who submitted nearly 52,000 packets for testing.
DeWine says his office has filed eight civil lawsuits against businesses in Ashtabula, Belmont, Clark, Guernsey and Seneca counties accused of selling synthetic drugs and the BCI has also assisted in serving more than a dozen synthetic drug-related search warrants across the state.