The New York Times today has a big story about “bath salts,” a technically-still-legal-in-some-places recreational drug which is not actually made from bath salts, but rather mephedrone or 4-MMC. The story was scary in that After-School Special kind of way, so I checked out some posts on the subject by science bloggers Abel Pharmboy and Drugmonkey. Turns out, there is at least one death that can be directly tied to the use of “bath salts” (that is, well-documented as attributable to the drug itself and not, for instance, somebody walking into traffic while high) and one of the more concerning things is that there haven’t been any human trials that can tell you anything, reliably, about safety. Given that—and the anecdotal reports from ER physicians and poison control offices—doing “bath salts” sounds like something I’d categorize under “bad ideas.”