Novel potent narcotics find unwitting victims in Vietnam
Friday, August 03, 2018, 16:10 GMT+7
Several illegal psychoactive drugs that have recently emerged in Vietnam are posing a serious threat to users as they are very powerful and come in deceptively harmless forms.
The new narcotics may be found in what looks like a herbal plant, a tablet and syrup or on stickers to be placed on the tongue.
Consumers tend to unknowingly fall victim to the substances, regarding them as ordinary stimulants.
Police in the northern Vietnamese city of Hai Phong have warned against the use of ‘magic mushrooms’ or mushroom-resembling objects that can induce strong visual hallucination.
Many young people indiscriminately consumed the ‘magic mushrooms’ since they likened the enjoyment of the plants to an exciting journey, police said.
A young man claimed he had purchased scores of the so-called magical mushrooms online, grew them and ate around 20 grams of the adult mushrooms raw whenever he wanted.
Following each time of consumption, everything before his eyes was perceived to turn fluid and then changed completely, he recalled.
He suffered a terrible experience mixed with fear and mustered all volitional power to resist the temptation to rush to the street in an attempt to end the feeling, he said.
The magic mushrooms are known to have psilocine and psilotsin, mind-altering substances banned from medical and everyday use in Vietnam.
The Ministry of Public Security also reported two potent psychoactive drugs newly found in some areas in the country.
The first looks like a pink cylindrical tablet engraved with a sign similar to a Japanese car company’s logo.
It contains N-ethylpentylone, a forbidden strong central nervous system stimulant.
The remaining, coming in dried threads, has 5FR-MDMB-PICA – a marijuana derivative known to cause hallucination and stimulation.
The strangeness in appearance of the new drugs tends to make users think that the substances are not dangerous narcotics, according to Nguyen Thi Kim Cuc, a doctor at a Hanoi-based medical center.
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