Every year, I wait for Drug Facts Day like it's Christmas. It's not just because it's super-funny that our next generation does not know how to spell, like, at all, but because I sometimes learn stuff myself! Like the part about black hairs on your tongue from doing too many drugs? Who knew that was a thing?

Enjoy our cherry-picked Qs and As from the 319 pages of questions from this year's batch.

The details of the case have been hard to figure from the start. Mr. Mulligan said cops kidnapped him to a cheap hotel and threatened to kill him if he left the premises, then beat him badly when they found he'd escaped. The police said Mr. Mulligan admitted to using marijuana and bath salts, then assumed a karate stance and charged officers.

Well, the details are still hard to figure, but The Los Angeles Times has a story that lends some credibility to the LAPD's claims. According to The Times, Mr. Mulligan walked into a police department headquarters in Glendale, Calif., and asked for help dealing with his substance use:"I know this is gonna sound crazy, but I feel like there are people following me. I feel like there was a chopper, do you hear a chopper?" Mr. Mulligan said on a recording made by Glendale police, adding that he'd snorted bath salts at least 20 times but, as of that day, had not used any for roughly two weeks.

"How long does this stuff stay in your … system, man, how's it legal!"

None of which explains why LAPD deposited Mr. Mulligan in a rundown motel room or felt compelled to beat him. But which may lend some support to the LAPD's story.

Photo of Brian Mulligan published yesterday by TMZ.

The LAPD never filed charges against Mr. Mulligan (another mystery), and for all the smoke coming off this story in the last ten days, Mr. Mulligan has yet to file the threatened $50 million lawsuit. According to the News, Mr. Flanagan is hoping that the L.A. city attorney will file charges against officers, providing richer access to police documents than are available to civil litigants. As Mr. Flanagan told the Associated Press, "As soon as we file a lawsuit, we can get depositions and find out what they did."

Reading the press accounts, it seemed a sordid and convoluted tale: on May 15, police officers stopped Mr. Mulligan, who specializes in financing deals for movie and television studios, while responding to a call about a man trying to break into cars in a Jack in the Box parking lot. The police searched Mr. Mulligan's car, and found thousands of dollars in cash; The banker told the cops that he was tired, they escorted him to a motel and told him to wait for the officer to return; Mr. Mulligan got tired of waiting, left the motel, and was subsequently beaten.

At any rate, that's one version of the story, at the end of which Mr. Mulligan was preparing to sue the city for $50 million.

There's another story, fed by the LAPD to CBS Los Angeles yesterday, in which Mr. Mulligan told officers that he'd ingested "white lightning"—a commercial name for bath salts—marijuana, and that he hadn't slept for days. And that the banker sustained his injuries after police found Mr. Mulligan wandering around in traffic and attempted to move him out of harm's way.

“They concocted a story to justify the unmerciful beating that they gave him,” Mr. Mulligan's lawyer told Bloomberg.

It's hard to know exactly what to make of it, but—bath salts, Hollywood finance, erratic police behavior—you can sign us up for a second helping.

Bath salts: do not ingest

Are you tired about hearing about the new synthetic drug bath salts yet? We're glad to have clarified that the brand of white crystallized substituted cathinones--paging Walter White!--were not actually bath salts.  (For awhile we were plagued with images of getting arrested at Bath & Body Works while on a perfectly innocent shopping sojourn.)

At the same time, it seems like the press is reaching with this one, especially since the drug seemed to be contained within bored teenagers in flyover states and INSANE PEOPLE. (See: Spin's "expose" on the topic, and the aftermath.)

That being said, we can't pretend like the epidemic of bath salts-- a designer drug that produces a cocaine/amphetamine/LSD-like high, or as one person who was offered it recently related to The Observer, "makes you feel like an animal"--is just going to disappear off the news cycle because we want it to. (Our magical thinking made Khat trend stories go away, right?)

In fact, the bath salt chickens have finally come home to roost in New York, turning vague rumors of people who pee on art and cannibals in Florida into a NYC reality.

The first tip-off was a press release last week from Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. Working with the New York DEA, the U.S. Attorney was charging four individuals allegedly involved in the manufacturing and distribution of bath salts in Florida.
From the press release:

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara stated: “The charges we are announcing today as part of ‘Operation Log Jam’ are great examples of law enforcement working together across the nation to wield the law’s might against a new, emerging danger to our citizenry, especially our children. The drugs may be synthetic but the danger is very real. As alleged, these defendants marketed their highly toxic synthetic marijuana as aromatic herbs, making it sound completely harmless, when in fact, it is a dangerous drug that can have serious health consequences. It is also an illegal drug, and as these defendants now know, marketing and distributing it can lead to serious consequences of a different sort.”

Still, the arrests happened in Florida, not in New York, so we felt safe from whatever "Operation Log Jam" was. But it turns out Attorney Bharara was not kidding about those "different sort" of serious consequences: On July 24th, a 49-year-old man named Daniel Avery destroyed a headshop in Watertown, NY with a baseball bat, claiming that the store sold his son the bath salts that caused the boy to O.D.

"You fucking sold my kid bath salts and I’ll kill you," Mr. Avery said in a voice message left at Tebbs Smokeshop. Later the grieving father allegedly broke down the store's glass door and smashed $640 worth of merchandize with a small blue Yankees bat.

Conclusion: Bath salts sound terrifying. Stay away at all costs.