While the federal ban has been in place now for over a month, state statutes haven’t caught up. UlsterCounty district attorney’s chief of investigations William Weishaupt said that the frequent alterations of the drugs’ chemical composition enabled bath-salts distributors were able to stay ahead of efforts by state lawmakers to crack down. Weishaupt added that State Police laboratories, which test suspected narcotics, are unable to determine the exact composition of bath salts without major changes in protocol.
Chameleon-like substances
“The synthetics are very much a live chemical animal,” said Weishaupt who worked with Kingston cops attempting to bust Head to Toe Apparel. “As soon as the statutes change to catch a certain molecular structure, they change the formula.”
The chameleon-like nature of the bath salts stymied attempts by local law enforcement to prosecute Hartrum despite a growing volume of complaints about the store. In the summer of 2012, after observing what a major increase in the sale of bath-salts sales from the shop, the district attorney’s office and the KPD reached out to U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara and the New York field division of the DEA. Armed with the more airtight federal statute, the authorities initiated an investigation.
“It was getting frustrating to some degree,” said Tinti. “We felt like our hands were tied because of the difference between the state and federal law.”
Between August 2012 and January of this year, members of the KPD’s Special Investigations Unit, working with DEA field agents, carried out a series of undercover buys of bath salts, using a confidential informant who according to the federal complaint was working with police in exchange for leniency on a misdemeanor charge. The complaint alleges that Hartrum referred questions about the synthetic drugs to Greene, who described the effects of various brands and advised the informant how to use them.
According to one conversation contained in the complaint, Hartrum at one point advised the informant and an undercover cop that they could make money reselling the bath salts which, he said, were getting harder to obtain in Kingston.
“The people who have been using it and stuff are here all the time for it,” said Hartrum allegedly told the pair. “It’s kind of hard to get this stuff any more.”
Hartrum and Greene, the compliant alleges, were getting their supply of synthetic drugs from an unnamed distributor identified by a DEA agent as an out-of-state company and “a major supplier of synthetic drugs to regional retailers.” Mulvey said the DEA has been investigating a number of bath-salts distribution rings since 2011, but declined to discuss the suspected source of the synthetics.
During the course of the investigation, the complaint claims, Greene and Hartrum received and signed for more than a dozen FedEx packages containing bath salts from the distributor.
Following their arrest, Greene and Hartrum were taken to White Plains for arraignment in U.S. District Court. According to a spokesman for the office, Hartrum was released after putting up $5,000 in cash and obtaining a co-signer for the remainder of his $75,000 bail. Greene was released after securing a co-signer for $50,000 bail.
