Florida's now infamous zombie-murder, which had 31-year-old Rudy Eugene gnawing on victim Ronald Poppo's face for 18 minutes before he was shot dead by Police, shouldn't be blamed on any kind of patient zero scenario.

Rather, focus should be placed on a highly dangerous, yet widely available — and in some states legal — synthetic drug referred to as "bath salts."

The drug, which has faced scrutiny since January, is often compared to LSD, which is kind of like comparing a house cat to a mountain lion. Not to say that LSD is exactly safe, or that the drugs don't share some similarities, but LSD dominated 60's pop culture for a reason, and it is rarely associated with violence. Bath salts, though, seem to go hand in hand with acts of extreme aggression.

Consider these two cases out of Columbus, Ohio. In the first, a man was shot and killed by SWAT after taking his girlfriend hostage with a knife to her throat. The second involved a man who was caught breaking into his own home, and then shot dead after firing several rounds at police officers. Both men were believed to be high on bath salts.

Mark Ryan, director of the Louisiana Poison Center details how the drug effects users, “For lack of a better term, they're flipped out. It's almost like a psychotic break. They're extremely anxious and combative, they think there's stuff trying to get them, they're paranoid, they're having hallucinations. So, the encounters are not pleasant."

In fact, Florida saw fit to ban bath salts in February, making their sell a third-degree felony, after reports of two violent incidents on Martin Luther King Day. It wasn't until October that the DEA stepped in and put their tightest regulation on mephedrone, methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV) and methylone, the three primary chemicals used in the synthetic drug.

The three manmade chemicals are similar to khat, an amphetamine-like stimulant native to Arabic regions, and according to Dr. Zane Horowitz cause “agitation, paranoia, hallucinations, chest pain [and] suicidality.” He goes on to say, “It’s a very scary stimulant that is out there... but there’s something more, something different that’s causing these other extreme effects.”

To say the least, bath salts and MDPV are extraordinarily harmful. Much the same way that salvia and synthetic marijuana are marketed as a substitute for Tetrahydrocannabino — THC, the primary chemical found in marijuana — bath salts have become a way for users to avoid street violence and potential arrest while maintaining their high.

They provide a cheap — roughly half the price of cocaine per gram — quasi-legal high attractive to drug users looking to avoid the drug game. A dangerous game of cat and mouse spawned from America's failing war on drugs.

If anything, the recent explosion of MDPV related violence shows that “The War on Drugs” pushes abusers away from established, treatable drugs, to find new, sometimes mentally unsafe, options for chasing a high.

How long will the game go on? Users find a new drug, the feds ban it, and then another one pops up — on and on, so it goes. As Sgt. Rich Weiner of the Colombus Police Division put it, "If there is a way to buy it, to smoke it, they're finding those ways."