New street drug began in lab in 1970s

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) - On the street it's known as PEA, N-BOM, Vortex and Pandora. Its actual name is phenethylamine, and it is blamed for five deaths nationwide.

The currently legal drug can be used as a liquid or blotted onto paper and ingested. Legislators are fast-tracking the process to make this designer drug illegal.

It's the drug that was responsible for sending four Grand Valley State University students to the hospital in January after a drug-fueled melee in a dorm.

But the drug has been around since the 1970s, and Dr. R. Corey Waller of the Spectrum Health Medical Group has been studying it for a long time.

"What we find are a lot of teenagers, very young adults, who come to the emergency department after the fact. It's too late at that point. They have already ingested the drug at that point and any harm that is done is done," Dr. Waller told 24 Hour News 8. "And so parents, if they were going to say anything to their children, it would be just to talk about it."

He said the drug came from labs in the 1970s while scientists were studying brain activity on rats. Eventually a chemist found a way to use it recreationally, and now it's being manufactured and sold on the Internet.

Addiction specialists in West Michigan said phenethylamine as a street drug is so new they haven't seen it yet. Once a new drug emerges, they said, it typically takes a year until patients seek help.

Michigan State Police say so far they have found 32 cases where they have detected it in labs, and 12 of those are in Grand Rapids.

The Michigan Department of Community Health released a danger notice about this drug.