SPIN magazine decodes the bath salt craze and gives the synthetic sweatshop high a healthy going over.  It’s a disturbing read.  (Screen Culture recommends Grinderman 2 RMX to soundtrack the downward spiral).

When the hipsters don’t have to take that step too far down the dark side of the road, hop across the tracks or slip the silver to the man but merely click the intermanet for their salty crystal zombie high you know there will be trouble.

Face eating.  Flesh fetishist.  Kony screams.  Synthetic dreams:

“If chemistry is one aspect of the problem, the Internet is another. Take, for instance, mephedrone: It was first synthesized under the name “toluyl-alpha-monomethylaminoethylcetone” in 1929 by a French pharmacologist named Saem de Burnaga Sanchez. It remained an obscure object of academic interest for 80 years until a clandestine chemist working under the pseudonym “Kinetic” uploaded a how-to guide on the Hive website. Then the drug exploded across Europe. The ban on mephedrone put an end to that specific synthesis, but chemistry, like any recipe, is malleable. “The Internet is great at proliferating this sort of information almost faster than law enforcement can really keep track of it,” says Robert J. Bell, a coordinator inside the DEA’s synthetic drug department.”

via spin