Chemists Outrun Laws in War on Synthetic Drugs

Discarded wrapper from a packet of Spice, a popular synthetic cannabis mixture. Photo: Matto Fredriksson/Flickr

The war on drugs has a new front, and so far it appears to be a losing one.

Synthetic mimics of marijuana, dissociative drugs and stimulants such as the bath salts allegedly consumed by Randy Eugene, the Florida man shot after a horrific face-eating assault are growing in popularity and hard to control. Every time a compound is banned, overseas chemists synthesize a new version tweaked just enough to evade a laws letter.

Its a giant game of chemical Whack-a-Mole.

Manufacturers turn these things around so quickly. One week youll have a product with compound X, the next week its compound Y, said forensic toxicologist Kevin Shanks of AIT Laboratories, an Indiana-based chemical testing company.

Its fascinating how fast it can occur, and its fascinating to see the minute changes in chemical structure theyll come up with. Its similar, but its different, Shanks continued.

'What does chemically similar really mean?'

Active ingredients in the drugs are compounds originally synthesized by institutional researchers whose esoteric scientific publications were mined by as-yet-unidentified chemists and neuroscientists working in Asia, where most of the new drugs appear to come from.

One class of popular cannabinoid mimics, for example, was developed by respected Clemson University organic chemist John Huffman, who sought to isolate marijuanas chemical properties for use in cancer research. Other legal high ingredients have similar pedigrees, with designers including researchers at Israels Hebrew University and the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer.

While people raised on Reefer Madness-style exaggerations may be wary of claims that legal high drugs are dangerous, researchers say theyre far more potent than the originals.

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Chemists Outrun Laws in War on Synthetic Drugs