Sept. 11, 2014
Orange police were called to the Jack in the Box restaurant on 16th Street Wednesday evening because a clerk had smoked PCP and was creating a disturbance. It was the second public intoxication case related to PCP in three days. Monday night, a man on PCP stripped naked in the middle of the street. In the past few months, public intoxication arrests involving the use of PCP has became almost as common as the public intoxication cases for alcoholic beverages.
Detective Captain Cliff Hargrave with the Orange Police Department said trends of drugs come and go based on availability. Lately, PCP has been commonly sold among illegal drug dealers. The drug played a prominent role in a recent murder case. An Orange County jury convicted a 32-year-old Beaumont man for murder in connection with a fatal accident that killed 16-year-old Lexy Bertrand, a Vidor High School student. The man’s girlfriend said he had smoked PCP. He then drove dangerously on the Interstate 10 to Vidor. While on Main Street, he told the girlfriend he was going to kill both of them and he stepped on the accelerator. Their car crashed into the minivan in which the teen was driving.
PCP is short for phencyclidine. According to the website for Partnership for Drug Free Kids, the drug was developed in the 1950s as a surgical anesthetic. It was discontinued for human use fifty years ago because “patients often became agitated, delusional and irrational” after being on the drug. The drug is also called angel dust, embalming fluid and rocket fuel. Hargrave said almost all the PCP found in Orange is in liquid form and the most common way to take it is by soaking the liquid on a tobacco cigarette or a marijuana joint. When a cigarette or joint are soaked in PCP, the street name locally is “wet.” Police in their reports say they can smell the drug on people. Hargrave said PCP has a distinct odor that is almost like perfume, but not pleasant.
The man who was arrested Monday night ended up naked. That is not uncommon. Business Insider.com reported that “the drug drives up body temperatures. Users can get unbearably hot and may take off all their clothes and dive into any body of water—or anything that looks like water—in an effort to cool off.”
The drug, created as an anesthetic, can make a person intolerable to pain. Orange police a couple of years ago had to use a Taser shock gun three times on a man reacting to PCP.
The woman at Jack in the Box was arrested for misdemeanor public intoxication and misdemeanor resisting arrest. Officer S.V. Ward went to the business at 7 p.m. after a disturbance was reported. He said the woman said to be on PCP pushed at officers and refused to cooperate. Even after being handcuffed, he had to threaten the woman with a Taser shock gun before she would get into the patrol car to go to the county jail. The officer had minor scrapes on his hands after the scuffle.
Ward also arrested the man Monday night. He went to the 900 block of Link Avenue after a call for help because of a disturbance. When he arrived, people at the house said the man had left. Ward said he saw the man, wearing shorts and a shirt, lying in the middle of Tenth Street. As the officer turned his car around, he saw the man take off his clothes “until he was completely nude.” The man smelled of PCP. The man had scrapes on his leg and knee. Someone at the house told police the man had fallen on a table inside the house. The man was taken to the hospital to be checked before he was taken to the county jail.
-Margaret Toal, KOGT-
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