Reminds me of when spice and bathsalts were popular at Bragg and other bases. Thankfully, at some point joes concluded it's not cool to defecate yourself before jumping off the balcony...
Back then the law could not catch up with all the synthetic pot that was legal simply by changing a chain here and there.
The article brings back (selective) fond memories of my lab rat days with the NMR and spectrometer.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/85502...-mystery-drugs
Emily Dye, a 27-year-old forensic chemist at the Drug Enforcement Administration's Special Testing and Research Laboratory, did not know if anyone had died from taking this powder, or how much it would take to kill you.
What she did know was this: New drugs were appearing in the lab every other week, things never before seen in this unmarked gray building in Sterling, Virginia. Increasingly, these new compounds were synthetic opioids designed to mimic fentanyl, a prescription painkiller up to 50 times stronger than heroin.
This, Dye realized, could be one of them.
The proliferation of rapidly evolving synthetic opioids has become so fierce that the DEA says they now constitute an entire new class of drugs, which are fueling the deadliest addiction crisis the United States has ever seen.
The fentanyl-like drugs are pouring in primarily from China, U.S. officials say — an assertion Beijing maintains has not been substantiated. Laws cannot keep pace with the speed of scientific innovation. As soon as one substance is banned, chemists synthesize slightly different, and technically legal, molecules and sell that substance online, delivery to U.S. doorsteps guaranteed.
More Americans now die of drug overdoses than in car crashes. Almost two-thirds of them, more than 33,000 in 2015 alone, took some form of opioid — either heroin, prescription painkillers or, increasingly, synthetic compounds like U-47700 and furanyl fentanyl, manufactured by nimble chemists to stay one step ahead of the law.
It is now forensic chemists like Dye who are on the front line of the nation's war on drugs, teasing out molecular structures of mystery drugs so they can be named, tracked and regulated.
Linear Mode
