This is a warning to all parents out there, advise your children to be extra careful when buying or eating gummy bears or jelly candy!  A new drug has appeared on the market which looks and smells like gummy candies, but it’s actually dangerous new designer drug called Flakka and it’s powerful enough to kill a grown man.

According to police, the gummy candies are usually individually wrapped and when opened, they are covered in what appears to be sugar but is, in fact, a substance called flakka.

Flakka is a new drug sweeping the US by storm. It looks similar to gravel, but can also be ground down to even finer crystals that can resemble sugar.

Describing the candy to CBS Miami, criminalist Stephen Snipes said it is "much stickier than the actual commercial product and it was individually wrapped."

They have also been seen on Sour Patch Kids and other popular sugary gummy candies.

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A single dose smoked, swallowed or snorted can give a user a potent but fleeting rush — or turn them into a paranoid zombie with superhuman strength and off-the-charts vital signs. 

The man-made drug causes a high similar to cocaine, but like bath salts, flakka has the potential to be much more dangerous than cocaine.

"It's so difficult to control the exact dose [of flakka]," said Jim Hall, a drug abuse epidemiologist at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

"Just a little bit of difference in how much is consumed can be the difference between getting high and dying. It's that critical."

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Flakka stories are starting to pile up. A man in South Florida who broke down the hurricane-proof doors of a police department admitted to being on flakka. A girl in Melbourne, Florida, ran through the street screaming that she was Satan while on a flakka trip.

A 37-year-old old Woman named Stephanie told NBC News about her first experience with flakka, which she unwittingly smoked during a drug binge.

A quick blast of euphoria was followed by a sickening fear. As the drug deregulated her autonomic nervous system, she began hallucinating that she was being chased and took off running.

Her body temperature spiked and she tore off some of her clothes and jumped three stories off a bridge into the Intercoastal Waterway.

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In a recent presentation on the drug, John Cunha, an emergency-services physician at Holy Cross hospital in Broward County, said that users consider flakka to be the new crack or heroin. He compared the worst-case after effects of the drug to what can happen, in rare instances, to someone who runs a marathon, wherein muscle tissue starts to decompose and break down into the blood stream. That can lead to kidney failure and death.

Since flakka is so new, researchers aren't sure exactly how it affects the brain, or how addictive it is.

For now, they can only guess by looking at how its chemical cousins, like cocaine and amphetamines, work. These drugs cause a surge in two chemicals: the feel-good chemical dopamine (responsible for the euphoric sensations) and norepineprhine   (which raises heart rate and blood pressure and can make us more alert).

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Like cocaine and meth, flakka comes with a comedown, the period when the drug leaves the body and the person is left feeling fatigued or depressed. This sensation often results in users returning to the drug to get rid of the negative comedown feeling, jump-starting a cycle of use that can lead to abuse. Also like cocaine and meth, the drug may alter brain chemistry in a way that makes users require a larger and larger dose to get the same high.

Excessive use has been linked with feelings of extreme anxiety, paranoia, and hallucinations. Like with bath salts, people have also reported dozens of episodes of violent behavior in people on flakka.

At high doses, flakka may also cause the body to reach high temperatures (bath salts have been linked with the same symptom). This excessive temperature can lead to severe physical complications like kidney damage and muscle breakdown.

Share this so everyone is aware and stays safe!