HOW THE FLAKKA DRUG EPIDEMIC NEARLY DROVE SOUTH FLORIDA TO MADNESS

How The Flakka Drug Epidemic Nearly Drove South Florida To Madness

In 2013, a synthetic stimulant called flakka emerged in Florida — and wreaked havoc on users with its horrific side effects.

Drug Enforcement AdministrationThe effects of flakka are so gruesome that the U.S. put a ban on 116 different Chinese substances used to make it.

It started in Jupiter, South Florida, on Aug. 15, 2016. That evening, 19-year-old college sophomore Austin Harrouff was dining with his family at a restaurant.

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The trouble began when Harrouff abruptly walked out of the restaurant. His parents soon found him at his mother’s house, attempting to drink cooking oil. They then dragged him back to the restaurant, but it wasn’t long before he walked out again. The consequences would be far worse this time.

After leaving the restaurant at approximately 9 p.m., Harrouff walked three-and-a-half miles north toward his father’s house in the neighboring town of Tequesta. At about 10 p.m., just before reaching the house, Harrouff happened upon the home of middle-aged couple John Stevens and Michelle Mishcon sitting out in their garage.

The Stevens’ neighbor, Jeff Fisher, called 911 after going over to investigate the commotion in the darkness. He believed that he had been stabbed — and all he could really tell the operator at the time was, “There is a girl laying on the ground. He beat her up. I ran over there. I’m bleeding profusely here at the moment."

Martin County Sheriff’s OfficeAn October 2016 mugshot of Austin Harrouff.

By the time the police reached the scene at about 11 p.m., they found Stevens and Mishcon stabbed to death and Harrouff aggressively gnawing at the former’s face.

After several minutes of a struggle which involved multiple officers, their K-9s, and tasers, authorities removed Harrouff, grunting and making “animal-like noises,” over Stevens’ now dead body.

Martin County Sheriff William Snyder quickly called the attack “random.”

But that night, Harrouff himself suggested the underlying factor most quickly assumed to be the root of this “random” attack. “Test me,” Harrouff told officers at the scene. “You won’t find any drugs.”

Authorities took samples of Harrouff’s hair, DNA, and blood, and sent them to the F.B.I. for drug testing. But media outlet after media outlet immediately suspected that the culprit was a drug called flakka.

What Is Flakka?

U.S. Department of Homeland SecurityBecause the effects of flakka are so potent, between September 2014 and December 2015, 63 people died from overdoses.

Flakka seemed to make its media debut in Florida in 2016, but it perhaps reached its apex with the case of Austin Harrouff.

But what, exactly, is flakka and why has it made headlines?

Like “bath salts” — the other grisly crime-inducing drug that saw a sharp rise in popularity a few years ago — the flakka drug is technically known as alpha-pyrrolidinopentiophenone (alpha-PVP), a type of synthetic cathinone.

This dangerous class of drugs gets its kick from manmade compounds chemically related to cathinone, a derivative of the khat shrub. For thousands of years, people have chewed the shrub’s leaves for their psychoactive effects in the plant’s native North Africa and Saudi Arabia.

Kyoko Nishimoto/FlickrMan chewing khat in Sana’a, Yemen in 2013.

While it’s both relatively little-known and almost universally illegal in the West, khat has long been and still is openly and legally used in its native region.

There, authorities like the World Health Organization estimate that each day, more than 10 million people take advantage of the “state of euphoria and elation with feelings of increased alertness and arousal” that the drug causes.

The synthetic compounds based on khat are much more recent. First invented in the 1960s, these compounds contort that euphoria and arousal into something far darker. And all of flakka’s devastating delirium and aggression start with a simple white or pink crystal.

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, these foul-smelling crystals can be eaten, snorted, injected, or vaporized, the latter of which is the most dangerous method as it sends the drug directly into the bloodstream at unparalleled speeds.

No matter the method used, what’s perhaps most worrisome about the flakka drug is its extraordinarily small price tag: between $3 and $5 per dose. This has helped make the flakka drug popular, especially among the young and the poor, and especially after “bath salts” were widely banned in 2011 and many users thus needed a replacement.

But flakka’s effects prove that it’s certainly no mere watered-down version of bath salts.

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