IIRC most of the so-called cannibalistic attacks that were attributed to bath salts turned out not to be. For instance the famous Miami face-eating attack turned up no evidence of anything but pot in the guy's system - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_cannibal_attack
The Miami incident was unrelated, but a casual googling will give you plenty of bath salts horror stories.
In the town where I grew up, bath salts became a large problem. At one point, a man on a two day binge broke into a local monastery, got into bed with one of the priests, and held him at knife point until morning. Just a month ago, the federal government busted a producer in a nearby house holding seven kilos of the stuff.
From work with community outreach and through relatives in law enforcement, I can tell you that one minor shift in the drug market radically altered the enforcement landscape. It was getting very bad for a while before the drugs were banned.
I don't know whether our experience was unique or rare as a community. I suspect our experience was simply an accelerated version of what would have happened elsewhere. For some reason, we had little enforcement, wide distribution, and a burgeoning market in the stuff. We were among the first areas in the country to pass a municipal ordinance to ban the substances, and request help from the Federal government.
I suspect that, as an area with harsh drug laws and strict enforcement of marijuana and cocaine, the balloon effect drove up interest in the designer chemicals. But that's just a hunch.
I think you're probably right.
Imagine what we could do in a non-prohibitionist atmosphere, where mainstream labs could research into stuff that gives people a buzz without being addictive or harmful...
Synthetic marijuana, properly made, could mitigate the unpleasant side effects such as apathy and paranoia through optimizing the cannabinoid balance. Hopefully, we'd even find the holy grail: anti-pain and anti-anxiety drugs that aren't physically addictive.
One great side effect is that research into palliative care would be greatly expanded. The military applications of new pain and anxiety medications would be massive as well.
The harm that we could prevent, not only from ending the narco-wars that are funding our enemies and tearing apart our neighbors to the south, but from a flood of new research and investment is staggering.
Addiction and habituation are not just down to this effect either. I know a variety of people who have been both daily pot smokers and daily tobacco users. The tobacco use was far harder to stop. (I'm not going to pretend pot doesn't have some addiction potential, and in fact it does seem to have minor withdrawals, just not anywhere near the level of tobacco, opiates etc). Receptors also recover after varying amounts of time.
So I don't see why we couldn't research things that are fun, don't compel people to chronic use, have minimal impact with occasional use, etc etc. It may not be possible to make the 'perfect' drug, but it may be possible to eliminate many of the harms. Particularly where some drugs are toxic over and above their primary effect, have toxic metabolic products etc
However, there are many ways of affecting receptors further up the metabolic chain. For example, recent research has focused on neurohormones are alternatives to benzodiazepines for anxiety treatment.
Some of these may be, in theory, less addictive or entirely non-addictive. Unfortunately, the current drugs are very effective for short duration courses, the most common medical use.
A less restricted market would incentive drug companies to find less harmful substances for recreational use. In a regulated market, you could even use the tax burden to further shape the public's preferences.