It's something we only expect to see in zombie movies. A naked man, attacking another man, biting and eating parts of his face. But that bizarre and cannibalistic episode made headlines in Florida earlier this week.
Police say his actions were symptomatic of a drug-induced psychosis, a condition that is landing a growing number of people in the hospital.
Surveillance video from a Miami-Herald security camera shows a naked man devouring the face of another man. Armando Aguilar is with the Miami Fraternal Order of Police. "75 to 80 percent of his face was missing and he was actually swallowing pieces of the mans face," he said.
While police say they've never witnessed anything this extreme, they've recently seen similar cases of people with no clothes on acting violently after taking a new potent form of LSD. "Inside their body, their organs are burning up alive, they've reached temperature where their actually burning up and it actually makes them take off their clothes," Aguilar said.
In Miami emergency rooms, they've seen an increase of people suffering from psychosis for a variety of drugs.
"Cocaine and new LSDs, they cause delirium which means you don't make sense when you take them and when you don't make sense and you don't control your emotions, you don't control your actions, you find yourself in circumstances you just don't want to be in," E-R physician Dr. Paul Adams said.
During and after the recent Ultra Music Festival, Dr Adams says he has seen the effects of a designer drug nicknamed bath salts which also causes body temperatures to spike. "And then people don't drink water while they're taking it so they become dehydrated. So you mix dehydration with elevated temperature with loss of inhibitions and you have a life threatening combination. Mix for disaster."
Bath salts were banned in Florida in 2011 but new formulations have become dangerously popular. "We've had several deaths earlier last year. We probably had our first death from bath salts being chased by the police and then all of the sudden just collapsing," Dr. Adams said.
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