The bill (HB 2505) says any person who sells, buys or possesses synthetic drugs such as bath salts is guilty of a misdemeanor, and can be sentenced to up to six months in prison and fined up to $1,000.

Synthetic bath salts are said to increase blood pressure and heart rate, and can cause agitation, hallucinations, extreme paranoia and delusion and often mimic the symptoms of cocaine.

West Virginia State Police Sgt. Michael Baylous said the bill covers not only bath salts, but any "analogs or derivatives" of the drug.

"If someone changes the chemical compound slightly and tries to market it, if we test it and it's the same thing, it's still illegal," Baylous said.

The goal of the bill, which Mike O'Neil, chairman of the West Virginia Controlled Substance Advisory Board and a pharmacy professor at the University of Charleston, helped draft, was to encompass all the designer drugs.

"The laws that are instituted for West Virginia are very thorough and probably the most encompassing of the states out there," he said. "The verbage is such in the bill that if they tweak it just a little bit to make it a different drug, it's still in the same category, so it will be covered."

Where West Virginia will run into a problem, he said, is that it is a small state surrounded by big states. "Ohio is a great example of where the laws are different," he said. "People are going to buy it there and come back here, and they are putting themselves at a great risk."

O'Neil said now that the law is in effect, the state should start seeing changes.

"We'll deal with some of that, of course," he said, "but I think people are moving in the right direction."

In January, Louisiana became the first state to classify bath salts as a Schedule 1 drug, meaning the selling, buying or possessing of the substance would incur the same legal penalties someone would get for selling, buying or possessing heroin.

Since then, Florida, Alabama, Utah and Kentucky have followed suit.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency labeled the product as a "drug of concern."

The state forensic labs are doing "a very good job," of being able to identify all of the chemicals that are in the makeup of bath salts and are cataloguing them and comparing them against known standards for other drugs, O'Neil said.

In the past two years, Dr. Kanwar Ajit Singh Sidhu, a Charleston psychiatrist who specializes in addiction, has seen a significant increase in the number of patients seeking treatment stemming from the use of bath salts.

The synthetic drug is highly addictive and very dangerous, said Sidhu, an assistant professor with the West Virginia Department of Behavioral Medicine and Psychiatry.

The drug first entered the market in the late 1920s in Europe, and has gone in and out fashion in countries around the world, Sidhu said.

To avoid FDA regulations, it's been marketed as plant foot and bath salts, among other items, he said.

Bath salts usually are packaged as a white powder or crystal substance that has a smell of fish, bleach or stale urine, Sidhu said.

There is no definitive research on how and in what dosage these drugs affect the body, but they are extremely harmful, he said.

It is a neurotoxin, and similar to cocaine and amphetamines, the drug stimulates the nucleus accumbens -- the brain's reward, pleasure, addiction, aggression and fear center, he said.

Patients view it as a party drug and have been known to snort, smoke, ingest and inject it into their body, which can result in a half hour to several-hour high, he said.

"It gets even worse when used with alcohol and antidepressants," he said.

Long-term use of the drug also has been linked to death, coma and impotence, he said.

Part of the issue with enforcement, he said, is that the drug is not detectable in urine tests.

As long as it is available on the market, either as plant food or bath salts, and people are able to get around detection, there will not be a decline in use, he said.

Kanawha sheriff's Detective Sean Snuffer said numerous Kanawha deputies have responded to calls where people are "acting crazy and talking out of their minds." Snuffer said people are admitting to being on bath salts and are generally very paranoid. "They think someone is after them. It's really not that uncommon."

So far this year, U.S. poison centers have taken 1,782 calls about bath salts, showing that the public health threat has "yet to abate," according to the American Association of Poison Control Centers.

In 2010, poison centers took only 302 calls about synthetic bath salts.

The West Virginia Poison Control Center in Charleston has taken 171 calls about bath salts since Jan. 1, most of them from health-care professionals who need help treating someone who has ingested the synthetic drug.

The most calls have come from Harrison County, with 30, but Kanawha County is close behind, with 29 calls about bath salts.

From there, said Carissa McBurney, community outreach coordinator for the poison center, the numbers drop off steadily, with the next-highest number of calls from Logan County.

McBurney said the center is not getting calls from people who themselves have taken the drugs, but instead from people who need help caring for someone who has taken it.

Since April 10, however, the number of calls the center has received has declined. Call frequency peaked in mid-March, she said, around the time synthetic bath salts started getting more attention in the news.

McBurney speculated that, in addition to the law, which took effect April 12, it could be because health-care professionals now know how to treat someone who is on the drug.

"I hope that's not the case, though," she said. "Once people stop notifying us, we lose track of how common the substance is."

The use of bath salts in Kanawha County received national attention last week when an Alum Creek man, who admitted to using the synthetic drug, was accused of killing a neighbor's pigmy goat while wearing nothing but women's underwear.

Reach Kathryn Gregory at kathr...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-5119.

Reach Veronica Nett at veroni...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-5113.