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LIQUID DEATH
St. Petersburg Times; St. Petersburg, Fla.;
Jan 20, 2002; RYAN DAVIS;BRADY DENNIS;
Abstract:
It's a nightmare to catch and convict GHB drivers. Even when GHB
knocks a driver unconscious at the wheel, he typically snaps back to alertness. He blows 0.00 on a Breathalyzer test.
From
Dec. 1, 2000, when the FDLE started testing for GHB in urine, until July 31, 2001, it examined evidence in 3,293 DUI cases.
It tested for drugs in 1,941 of those cases. It checked for GHB just 30 times.
Like the FDLE, it tests for GHB at investigators'
requests. But there's a big contrast. The medical examiner also tests for the drug in every test on drivers 40 and younger.
Last year, it found GHB in about 8 percent of suspected drug DUI cases. That's 14 times more often than the FDLE finds the
drug in similar cases.
Full Text:
Copyright Times Publishing Co. Jan 20, 2002
Since middle school, Shanna
West had tried just about everything: She drank beer and smoked marijuana, she popped pills and snorted cocaine.
Shortly
before she turned 21, friends introduced her to a new high: GHB.
It was cheap, easy to get and it calmed her racing
mind. It had one other thing going for it - the cops couldn't tell she was on it.
The drug got her into trouble when
she drove because, just like that, she would fall unconscious. She once passed out driving the Crosstown Expressway; her Chevy
Cavalier bounced twice off the guardrail and barrelled 30 feet the wrong direction down the highway. The police drawing of
her accident looked like a big curlicue.
But the cop didn't smell alcohol and didn't know to test for GHB. He concluded
that West lost control for "unknown reasons," ticketed her for careless driving and sent her on her way.
Two weeks
later, it happened again. She passed out at a red light on Dale Mabry Highway. When an officer opened her car door, she didn't
even budge. But when paramedics arrived, it was like somebody snapped his fingers: She leaped from her seat and started talking.
She
blew a 0.00 on a Breathalyzer test and could have gotten away with it again, but this time she told the officers she had been
drinking from the bottle on her front seat. It had GHB in it.
Charged with driving under the influence, she bonded
out of jail a few minutes before sunrise, her driver's license in good standing.
At her boyfriend's place late that
afternoon, West dropped two shots of GHB into a bottle of Arizona Iced Tea, downed it and slid back behind the wheel.
She
headed north on U.S. 41 into Pasco County.
GHB, short for gamma-hydroxybutyrate, means different things to different
users.
Weight lifters say it helps build muscle. All-night partyers use it at nightclubs and raves. Business travelers
use it as a sleep aid. College students call it "zero-calorie booze."
But when it comes to GHB drivers, there are only
two types: bad and worse. Without warning, it knocks drivers unconscious.
"It's a cheap, wild high," said retired Los
Angeles Police Lt. Trinka Porrata, the nation's leading GHB expert. "It turns two beers into 15 with a couple drops."
The
number of GHB emergency room visits nationwide soared from 55 in 1994 to nearly 5,000 in 2000.
Because GHB is a social
drug, users tend not to stay at home. Bizarre and tragic episodes follow.
A 33-year-old was pulled over after driving
on three flat tires. Another 33-year-old varied speeds from 40 to 80 mph, oblivious that police were chasing him for 6 miles.
Another
man ran six stop signs while driving 45 in a 25 mph zone. Police tested him for alcohol, found almost none and cited him for
reckless driving. Ten days later he slammed into a stopped car, killing the driver.
Like all the others, he was high
on GHB.
It's a nightmare to catch and convict GHB drivers. Even when GHB knocks a driver unconscious at the wheel,
he typically snaps back to alertness. He blows 0.00 on a Breathalyzer test.
"(The erratic driving) is going to look
to police most often like alcohol, and when they get a negative alcohol reading they really don't have the means or the methods
to go further," said Jo Ellen Dyer, a California toxicologist. "They get away with it."
Like Shanna West did.
She
had been out of jail less than 12 hours. As day wore toward dusk, West drove U.S. 41 toward her friend's house in Land O'Lakes,
where she had grown up and attended school.
She stopped at a convenience store and tore out of the parking lot minutes
later, wheels screeching, headed north. In the front seat she carried the Arizona Iced Tea bottle with its extra ingredient.
She
started to fall in and out of consciousness at State Road 54 and U.S. 41; she remembers little of the next 8 miles. "I was
swerving all around the road, but I didn't have control enough to pull over," she recalled later.
What West has trouble
remembering, Ron Nichols of Spring Hill cannot forget.
"She passed me on the right side, over in the grass," Nichols
said. "I was blinking my lights, honking my horn, just trying to get her attention. I've never seen anyone drive like that
in my life. It looked like she had a death wish."
In a Chevy Corsica heading in the other direction, Maria Florez and
her two daughters were going to a School Board meeting in Land O'Lakes, where 14-year-old Virginia was to receive a college
scholarship. In the front seat was 54-year-old Barbara Mercer, who had grown close to the family helping Habitat for Humanity
build them a house in Dade City.
Florez saw West's headlights up ahead weaving across the two-lane highway. Florez
tried to swerve out of the way, but it was too late.
West crossed the center line a final time. Barbara Mercer was
dead.
GHB is only a Web page away. Recipes, ingredients and the drug itself are readily available on the Internet.
"If
you read the Internet, you'd think GHB improves your sex life, improves your sleep and gives you energy," said Dr. Karen Miotto,
who does GHB research at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Those myths aside, GHB is an industrial solvent,
a batch of chemicals cooked up over a kitchen sink. One dose can be 20 times stronger than the next.
It is typically
sold as a liquid, for as little as $10 a capful. A high can last four hours. It is wildly addictive.
Like alcohol,
it is a central nervous system depressant. Unlike alcohol, a couple of tablespoons can knock someone unconscious in 20 minutes.
Five minutes before dropping into deep sleep, users show no hint of drunkenness.
GHB fades as rapidly as it hits. Users
snap back into consciousness, feeling refreshed. They often don't remember how they got where they are.
"We have no
idea of the numbers," said Deborah Zvosec, a medical anthropologist who wrote an article about the drug for the New England
Journal of Medicine. "I definitely don't think it's a fad. I would tend toward epidemic."
Until 1990, most health food
stores sold GHB.
About the same time as it was banned in stores, the national poison center issued an alert, sparked
by three incidents in Florida. Two of those involved men who collapsed in Ybor City.
Florida made the drug illegal
in March 1997; it was banned nationwide in 2000 after it gained notoriety as a date-rape drug. A man would slip the odorless,
colorless drug into a woman's drink and knock her unconscious. It has the same knockout effect on drivers.
Florida
is home to the entire array of likely GHB users: athletes, body builders, partying college kids and all-night dance clubbers.
Said
Trinka Porrata: "Florida is the absolute capital of GHB death and destruction."
For the past decade, Florida has been
training law enforcement officers to recognize when a driver is on something more than alcohol.
Known as Drug Recognition
Experts, these officers undergo up to a year of intensive training. The problem is training enough of them.
Of more
than 42,000 sworn law enforcement officers in Florida, only about 90 are DRE officers. About 10 work in the Tampa Bay area.
The
only GHB training most other officers get is a pamphlet to read.
"There are a lot of subtleties that are impossible
for a normal officer to pick up on," said retired Miami DRE officer Charles Smith, an expert witness in drugs and driving
trials.
"With GHB, the person's speech might not be slurred, the eyes might not be bloodshot. It's just hard for a
normal officer."
Inside West's mangled car, investigators found a check made out to a Tampa drug rehab center. She
told a reporter she had just gotten serious about fighting her addiction.
Nov. 22, 2000, the day after the wreck, she
sat in her garage, both arms in casts. She puffed on Parliament cigarettes and confessed to a reporter that she drove high
on GHB. She figured her case was a slam-dunk conviction.
"I've killed somebody," she said. "I don't think it's right
for people to get away with stuff."
When the Florida Highway Patrol interviewed her more than two months later, she
confessed again. They also had her blood, drawn at a Tampa hospital after the accident. With her confessions, they knew to
test that blood for GHB.
With all that, how could she not get convicted of killing someone while driving under the
influence of GHB?
Easily, it turns out.
GHB disappears from from blood in four hours and from urine in 12 hours.
A DUI conviction can disappear with it.
But immediate testing doesn't solve the problem if no one tests for GHB - and
it's rare that anyone does.
In DUI cases, agencies across the state rely on the Florida Department of Law Enforcement
for blood and urine testing. Though the FDLE has called GHB a "growing concern for Florida," it tests for the drug only if
an investigator requests it or if the case catches the eye of a lab technician.
That rarely happens.
From Dec.
1, 2000, when the FDLE started testing for GHB in urine, until July 31, 2001, it examined evidence in 3,293 DUI cases. It
tested for drugs in 1,941 of those cases. It checked for GHB just 30 times.
In other words, when it tested for drugs,
the FDLE did not look for GHB 99.1 percent of the time.
It looks for most drugs - from cocaine to Ecstasy to amphetamines
to opiates - in every drug test. Why not GHB?
It's too time consuming.
A routine drug screen can require as
little as 10 minutes of hands- on time. A GHB test takes four to six hours of hands-on work.
The FDLE doesn't have
the equipment to test for GHB in blood. It has to ship those samples to other labs, even out of state.
To get an idea
of how many GHB cases are being missed, compare the FDLE approach with the smaller scale work of the Pinellas-Pasco Medical
Examiner's Office, which performs drug and alcohol tests for local DUI cases.
Like the FDLE, it tests for GHB at investigators'
requests. But there's a big contrast. The medical examiner also tests for the drug in every test on drivers 40 and younger.
Last year, it found GHB in about 8 percent of suspected drug DUI cases. That's 14 times more often than the FDLE finds the
drug in similar cases.
Testing quickly and looking for GHB in every case would seem to be the answer. But it's still
not that simple. A positive test hardly ensures a conviction in a DUI system geared toward alcohol.
For GHB and other
drugs, the law states that prosecutors must prove that a driver's normal faculties were impaired. That's easier said than
done.
"We have a whole body of law that has grown up around the breath test machine," said Pasco lawyer J. Larry Hart,
a former prosecutor. "But you are not going to find (GHB) on one's breath. Thus, the proof becomes more difficult for the
prosecutor to present.
"(A blood alcohol content of) 0.08 is a bright line," Hart said. "You're either across it, or
you're not. (With GHB), there is a standard, but it is not as bright a line."
Lawyer William Head, who wrote 101 Ways
to Avoid a Drunk Driving Conviction, brags about getting his GHB clients off: "I just won one in city court in Atlanta where
there was enough GHB (in the driver) to stop an elephant. They had to slap him to wake him up."
Since October 1997,
Shanna West's license has been suspended 14 times for traffic violations, insurance problems and failure to pay fines.
She
also pleaded guilty to DUI in the GHB case where she fell asleep at the traffic light the night before the fatal accident.
But
her record will not include a charge of DUI manslaughter.
Even though West confessed she was high on GHB when she caused
the accident that killed Barbara Mercer, and even though the state has witnesses that describe her weaving on and off the
road, prosecutor Phil Van Allen said he couldn't convict her on DUI charges.
"I do not have evidence to say there was
enough (GHB) in her bloodstream that it affected her ability to operate a motor vehicle," he said.
Instead of charging
her with manslaughter by DUI, prosecutors charged manslaughter by culpable negligence, which calls for a shorter prison sentence.
Now 22, West is scheduled for trial Feb. 11 in Dade City.
While West prepares for trial, Barbara Mercer's family copes
with the death of a wife and mother, whose laugh was so distinctive friends could tell it was her from aisles away at Wal-Mart.
Lindy
Mercer quit his job in Alaska with British Petroleum and took real estate classes. He took over his wife's job at Kelly Realty
in Dade City so he could be with his sons full time.
"I never knew that the bathroom floor gets dirty," Lindy Mercer
said. "I thought it was just always clean. I've been learning a lot of things like that."
He also has been learning
about GHB, the drug that helped kill his wife. The children, Tony, 18, and Ricky, 11, are coming to terms with it as well.
One
morning at First Baptist Church in Dade City, a Sunday school teacher asked her fifth-graders if there was anyone, anything
they would like to pray for that week.
Ricky Mercer raised his hand.
"I want to pray for the lady who killed
my mom, that she'll go to heaven."
What is GHB?
Nicknames: Liquid Ecstasy, Georgia Home Boy, Scoop, Easy Lay,
Grievous Bodily Harm, Liquid X, cherry meth, soap, Liquid E, GBH, Gamma-O, Gib, G.
What it is: Short for gamma-hydroxybutyrate,
GHB is a central nervous system depressant. Its "kitchen sink" concoction includes a degreasing solvent or floor stripper
mixed with drain cleaner.
Effects: Can cause euphoria, increased energy, desire to socialize and loss of inhibition.
Higher doses can make the user feel dizzy and sleepy, and can cause vomiting, muscle spasms and loss of consciousness. Mixed
with alcohol or other drugs, GHB can slow breathing to a dangerously low rate, which has been linked to several deaths.
A
matter of hours: A GHB high takes effect almost immediately and can last up to four hours. GHB disappears from from blood
in four hours and from urine in 12 hours.
GHB: Debunking the myths
The Internet is rich with "information" and
testimonials about GHB. The Times read some of those postings to the nation's leading GHB expert, retired Los Angeles police
Lt. Trinka Porrata. Here's how it went:
Internet: "Proper use of GHB by a healthy person is beneficial on multiple
levels, resulting in increased alertness, enhanced mood, improved memory, heightened growth hormone secretion, cellular protection
and deep sleep without a hangover."
Reality: "The only one of those that works is the deep sleep without a hangover
... and that's only initially. The more you take it, the worse the reaction."
Internet: "Women often report that GHB
makes their orgasms longer and more intense."
Reality: "People who use it end up so they have to take it to have sex.
They end up addicted and their lives are destroyed by it."
Internet: "Most users find that GHB induces a pleasant state
of relaxation and tranquility."
Reality: "They sometimes wake up wondering who walked by and puked on them. They don't
realize they puked."
Internet: "Several studies have strongly suggested that GHB has no addictive properties."
Reality:
"I've dealt with over 400 GHB addicts. ... A lot of them have $33,000 in credit card debt behind it. They've lost their wives.
They've lost their home. They've lost their lives. And every one of those addicts can name 12 more."
Internet: "I have
only been experimenting for a week but the results have been nothing less then miraculous. ... My depression has lifted and
life on the whole looks brighter."
Reality: "That's a nice temporary effect. It will work for a while and then his
whole life will go downhill."
Sources: errowid.org, disinfo.com, ghbinfo.org and vitalchemistry.com
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