On the afternoon of January 30, an armed — and naked — man stood on the rooftop of a Lake Worth apartment building screaming that someone was trying to kill him and threatening to shoot himself as well as anyone who attempted to approach him.
As the police approached, the man put his gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Fortunately, the gun malfunctioned and his suicide attempt was unsuccessful. A SWAT team from the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office was engaged and managed to negotiate the man’s surrender safely. During a subsequent interview with police he explained that he was under the influence of Flakka, which he had vaped from an e-cigarette.
In February, a man who was reportedly high on the synthetic drug was captured on surveillance footage as he attempted to break into the Ft. Lauderdale Police Department. The man used what was described as “super human strength” while kicking the doors and attempting to break them with rocks. He’d lost touch with reality due to the effects of the chemicals and believed he was being chased by several cars, requiring the assistance of the police.
At the end of March, the Ft. Lauderdale police were once again visited by someone experiencing the psychosis associated with Flakka. This time, a man was attempting to scale the spiked fence outside the department and was impaled by a foot long spike.
“He was just dangling there,” Asst. Fort Lauderdale Fire Chief Tim Heiser told CBS Miami. “There was no way he could have gotten off. It was too high up and nothing to actually leverage himself with.”
Flakka, also known as “gravel,” is an alpha-PVP described as comparable to a fusion of crack cocaine and crystal meth. It is a synthetic version of cathinone, a stimulant derived from the khat plant found in the Middle East and Somalia.
The drug, which can be smoked, injected, snorted, or swallowed, is designed to flood the user’s brain with dopamine, block neural transmitters, and create an intense feeling of euphoria.
The result of taking Flakka while already high, a practice known as “snacking,” has been linked to extreme aggression and psychosis.
"We're starting to see a rash of cases of a syndrome referred to as excited delirium," Jim Hall, an epidemiologist at the Center for Applied Research on Substance Use and Health Disparities at Nova Southeastern University, told CBS. "This is where the body goes into hyperthermia, generally a temperature of 105 degrees. The individual becomes psychotic, they often rip off their clothes and run out into the street violently and have an adrenaline-like strength and police are called and it takes four or five officers to restrain them. Then once they are restrained, if they don't receive immediate medical attention they can die."
The drug has reportedly been being purchased online from websites based in China and resold by drug dealers here in the United States without the dealer or the buyer knowing what chemicals the drug they have purchased may contain.
In 2013, there were reportedly 126 deaths in Florida linked to use of synthetic cathinone.
There have also been reports of a drug marketed as Flakka popping up in Ohio and Houston.
