SYRACUSE -- A week after local police, led by the Drug Enforcement Administration conducted raids on a number of head shops in central New York, the Syracuse Common Council enacted a ban on the possession and sale of synthetic drugs including "bath salts."
The bill's sponsor, Councilor Jean Kessner told reporters, "Right now in our city we have a problem with bath salts and water. We have people who are disoriented, who are harmful to themselves and harmful to others. As a council we're trying to do what we can to give the police a tool so they can have a way to counter this."
The City of Syracuse joins a growing list of communities enacting laws to make synthetic drugs illegal.
Not everyone agrees that a ban on the possession and sale of synthetic drugs will have much effect. Before the vote, democratic Councilor Bob Dougherty called the nation's war on drugs a failure. He based that assessment on his 28- years as a supervisor in the probation department, dealing with people addicted to drugs and alcohol. "I've seen lives and families ruined by substance abuse and I've seen people incarcerated for possession of the same things we have in our medicine cabinets. Any objective analysis shows the war on drugs to be a monumentally expensive abject failure."
Despite his concerns, Dougherty voted to go along with the synthetic drug ban, because he says the people who put him in office support the law.
The law makes possession and sale of synthetic drugs a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail and a fine of $1000.
