Las Vegas Weekly

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Zoom. Bloom. Lunar Wave. Hurricane Charlie. Red Dove. Blue Silk. White Lightning. You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?

These are all nicknames for bath salts, the newish synthetic drug that Nevada just banned. Sorry, bathers. (We should start calling bath salt users “bathers,” if we don’t already.)

A quick lesson on bath salts: You can swallow the drug, inject it, smoke it or snort it, and after you do, you’re probably going to feel euphoric. Unless you get palpitations or paranoia, as many people do. Then they show up in ERs across the country.

Until last year, bath salts were legal, but in September 2011, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration responded to a recent surge in popularity by invoking its “emergency scheduling authority” to ban the manufacture, sale or possession of the drug.

Tennessee, New Jersey, Maine and Ohio have all passed laws banning or regulating the sales of synthetic drugs, but Nevada is definitely on this battle’s forefront. Which doesn’t sit well with the local ACLU. If only these civil libertarians had a drug to help them cope with the recent legislative loss ...