Sullivan County officials praise effort to curb bath salts use

Sullivan County officials praised a rule change that put bath salts on New Hampshire’s controlled-substance list as police in Newport, Claremont and other county towns faced a growing stream of cases tied to the drug. The change was meant to give officers a clearer legal path as residents and first responders dealt with the fallout from a substance linked to erratic behavior and emergency calls.

By September 2019, New Hampshire police were reporting an uptick in bath salts cases, and state officials described the problem as far wider than one town or one county. WCAX said the surge was statewide, while WMUR reported that the rule change listed bath salts as a controlled substance and gave police a better way to respond. A substance found in bath salts also became illegal in the United States in September 2019, after Sullivan County officials had pushed for the move.

The problem had been building for years. Claremont Police Chief Mark Chase said it began surfacing around 2016, a timeline that helps explain why local departments treated the issue as a long-running public-safety threat rather than a one-off drug case. In Newport, that danger was already showing up in the criminal justice system: NBC5 reported that police arrested a man for burglary after officers said he was high on bath salts.

The county response was not limited to a single law or one department. On Oct. 10, 2019, a multi-agency enforcement effort brought together the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office, the Charlestown Police Department, the Claremont Police Department, the Croydon Police Department, the Grantham Police Department, the Newport Police Department and the Sunapee Police Department, along with the Vermont State Police, Windsor County Sheriff’s Department, Springfield VT Police Department, the National Guard Counter Drug Program, NH Probation and Parole, the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, ATF, the Attorney General’s Drug Task Force and the New Hampshire State Police.

For Sullivan County, the public question now is not whether bath salts were a problem. Police in Newport and Claremont had already shown how quickly the drug could spill into burglary, disorder and emergency response. The harder test is whether the legal change and the coordinated law-enforcement push actually reduced those incidents in Newport, Charlestown, Sunapee and the rest of West Central New Hampshire.