Grassley synthetic drug bill approved

A ban on synthetic drugs that have been blamed for the death of an Iowan and mentioned in connection with the more recent incident of a man eating another man's face “can't come quickly enough” for Sen. Chuck Grassley.

A ban on the chemicals used to make the synthetic drug called K2, spice, bath salts or 2C-E has been approved by the U.S. House and Senate, and the Iowa Republican hopes the president signs it quickly.

“Just about every day, there's a new tragedy related to K2 or bath salts,” Grassley said Wednesday in a conference call with reporters. “The sooner this poison is off the store shelves, the better.”

Grassley introduced the David Mitchell Rozga Act in March 2011. It was named for an 18-year-old from Indianola who took his own life in June 2010, soon after using K2 purchased from his local shopping mall.

Since then, Grassley said, there have been more incidents. Two weeks ago, for example, police in upstate New York used a stun gun on a woman who was choking her 3-year-old son after smoking bath salts, he said.

Bath salts also were originally suspected in the Miami case of a man attacking a homeless man and eating nearly half his face before police had to shoot him. However, the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner has since said the man had used only marijuana.

The synthetic drugs often are easily purchased as legal products and said to produce a mild high, Grassley said.

In Rozga's case, he and some friends were about to go to a concert and thought smoking K2 before would be harmless fun, Grassley said in a floor statement.

Shortly after smoking the drug, Rozga became highly agitated and terrified. He killed himself about 90 minutes after smoking K2 for the first time, and the only chemicals in his system at the time were those that constituted the drug.

Grassley's proposal was included in a Food and Drug Administration user fee bill.