You May Have Already Missed Your Chance to Freak the Fuck Out on Flakka
If last year’s exciting videos of flakka users running naked through traffic, kicking police department doors, or trying and miserably failing to climb fences made you think to yourself, You know, I’d like to try that—too bad. Flakka is over. We beat Flakka.
South Florida was once the nationwide capital of the moral panic death drug known to lab technicians as alpha-PVP, which users snort, vape, or take as pills to experience symptoms like euphoria, psychosis and hyperthermia. But now, according to an article in the Washington Post, there’s no more flakka to be had.
The combined efforts turned the tide. Hospitals in Broward County went from seeing 306 flakka cases in October to 187 cases in November. The next month, it was just 54. Drug treatment admissions for flakka plummeted. The last death from flakka was in December. Calls to police about the drug have disappeared, too.
“There’s a drought on,” Davidson of the United Way said. “There’s no more flakka.”
Local and federal authorities, along with the Broward County United Way, combatted flakka by going to the source—China, where the U.S. Department of Treasury imposed sanctions designed to stop the drug’s import. Crucially, according to Broward County Sheriff’s Lieutenant Ozzy Tianga, freaked-out users were taken to the hospital instead of jail, and addicts were given specialized therapy.
It was an unmitigated victory in the war on drugs, according to the Post’s sources. If that’s really true, congrats—it’s probably the very first one in the drug war’s history. Or maybe people stopped doing flakka for the obvious reason: Soaring body temperatures and psychotic hallucinations just aren’t that good of a time.