It’s notoriously difficult to pin down the origins of most urban legends, not least because they pre-date the information era where literally everything is written down or recorded and posted on TikTok.
In the case of Rudy Eugene, we know where the legend started: news reports. Who is Rudy Eugene, you ask? The man best known as “Bath Salts Guy” following a 2012 attack in Miami in which he was caught by police attempting to eat a man’s face. Police then fatally shot him.
Countless reports at the time repeated the belief that the man was on bath salts, a claim that appears to have originated with the Miami Fraternal Order of Police, whose president compared the incident to other similar attacks and told the media, “They become violent, and they are burning up from the inside. Their organs are reaching a level that most would die. By the time police approach them they are a walking dead person.”
And thus, a legend was born. Or, if not a legend, at least a meme. “Zombie guy on bath salts eating a guy’s face off” became a common joke in the years following the event, and Eugene became known as one of the most infamous examples of a “Florida Man.”
As Redditors over at r/todayilearned recently discovered, this narrative wasn’t entirely accurate — and by not entirely, I mean not at all. Reports that emerged less than a month later revealed that according to the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner, the only drug found in Eugene’s system was marijuana. As a psychiatrist pointed out, however, there are no tests for all new synthetic drugs flooding the market. “They’re creating so many different synthetic-type drugs or synthetic bath salts to where you don’t have a test to actually examine or test for these substances,” Delvena Thomas told NBC Miami.
One Redditor commented, “From what I remember, the theory back then was he was given marijuana laced with some form of synthetic drug that they just didn’t have a way to test for yet.”
Another shared, though, that in their opinion at least, this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing: “I became a paramedic right before bath salts were at their peak, and I’m so glad that this case was attributed to bath salts even if it wasn’t actually the cause. Bath salts were a horrible drug and people quickly realized it wasn’t a fun drug to do, and this story likely kept a lot more people from trying it.”
So next time you hear a story about someone having their face eaten off during rush hour, don’t assume it’s a drug-induced freeway buffet, that’s just how people get down in the Sunshine State.
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