EU drug cops baffled by new wave of "designer narcotics" brewed in China, sold online

"With catchy nicknames like Meow Meow, Spice and NRG-1, the drugs are often sold online as 'legal highs.' They typically come in powder form and can be snorted, licked or packed into tablets and create highs that mimic drugs ranging from cocaine to ecstasy, which some narcotics experts say has become less available amid a world-wide effort to blunt production." WSJ on "designer drugs" cooked up in China and sold in Europe. Some 24 new strains were identified last year. Sellers sometimes try to evade liability by marketing the drugs as "plant food," "bath salts" or "pond cleaner."

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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soongtype

Wish I could read the full article.

I was discussing some legal cannabis-alternatives on an imageboard yesterday. Apparently, some of them work quite well, while others do absolutely nothing. I don’t buy for a second that drugs are less available. Drugs have steadily gotten cheaper and more potent since the war on drugs began.

also, “blunt production” LOL
- jamiethehutt
  
  While some of them do work (mephedrone was originally a legal high) I’m all ways wary of them. THC and cannabis have been used for millennia and it’s effects are known and it’s damn safe (well this may be refuted by a ZOMG SCHIZOPHRENIA!! post…) but I’m not sure what, if any, real testing these have gone through.
  - Jack
    
    While some of them do work (mephedrone was originally a legal high) I’m all ways wary of them. THC and cannabis have been used for millennia and it’s effects are known and it’s damn safe (well this may be refuted by a ZOMG SCHIZOPHRENIA!! post…) but I’m not sure what, if any, real testing these have gone through.
    
    *cough* Blue Sunshine *cough*
- Anonymous
  
  “Wish I could read the full article.”
  
  Copy, paste and Google the exact headline. You’ll get a link to the full WSJ article.
  
  DeSwiss
Anonymous

Meow Meow, aka Mephedrone, is already Class B in the UK.
- Anonymous
  
  Even though the only reason it was illegalised was due to ‘two deaths’, which later were discovered to be people that hadn’t even taken the drug :/
  
  Nice that the law seeks to prevent any enjoyment from ingestion irrelevant of it’s actual harm.
  
  That’s Meow Meow btw …
  
  If the government were as hasty at dealing with actual drug issues (like controlling drugs so that they’re produced fairly, and taxed … i.e. keeping the money out of the hands of criminals – cause let’s face it they’ll be grown and sold either way) as they were at banning potentially harmless substances, maybe our society could get somewhere.
Anonymous

You say meow-meow, I hear clarky cat. Youtube has the answers as usual.
Anonymous

Ahh Mephedrone and Naphyrone…Purple knees anyone?
Anonymous

Just wait until 6-ADP starts hitting streets in the UK.
jamiethehutt

Also aside from the media has anyone actually heard of mephedrone being called “meow meow”, I mean it sounds retarded and has more syllables than the scientific name. It’s always been M-Kat when I’ve heard it…
- Kyon
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mephedrone#cite_note-Eye-6
  
  According to the Wiki, the nickname “meow” originated in a headshop’s web forum, where it didn’t catch on. It still managed to make its way into the Wikipedia article in 2009, where it was later picked up by The Sun after someone forgot to fact-check.
teapot

I just realised why the internet is great: You can go from reading about soemthing to trying it out in a matter of minutes/hours/days.

DIY, hacking, How-to’s, ‘access’ to software for ‘educational purposes’, estores selling everything under the sun.

It’s just so beautiful.

/emotional_outpour_for_tha_tubes
Anonymous

jamie, i’ve always heard it called 4-MMC, Mcat, 4-Mcat, or just “meph”…Never Meow Meow. Though giving it a childish, cute kiddy (kitty?) name works great for the ends of pushing yellow journalism.
Anonymous

with the exception of the 2-carbon compounds and the DMT derivatives, most of these new “designer” compounds are bad fucking news.
- Anonymous
  
  It’s a pond cleaner AND a brain washer!
rwmj

Blimey we had all this nonsense in the UK only about 3 months ago. Now you’ve got to endure this misinformation in the US too …
John Napsterista

Infuriating paywall is infuriating. Here’s a free link to the same article (from another Murdoch outlet, natch!)

http://www.myfoxny.com/dpps/news/designer-drugs-baffle-europe-dpgonc-km-20100717_8707475
- John Napsterista
  
  fux0r! n/m, it’s just a tease, let’s you scroll for a bit before hitting the same paywall.
Anonymous

I’ve taken some of these drugs (one called Ebomb most notably) and it is nothing new. Just scare tactics. This same stuff was available 15 years ago when I was younger.

I haven’t messed with the JWH-018 at all though. That stuff is more expensive than weed anyway. I hate salvia too, i’m glad it got banned in the state I live yesterday.
Anonymous

There’s been huge debate about these products and their sale through “head shops” in Ireland. Some of these shops have been burned out others forced to close and legislation has been brought in to try and prevent there sale but apparently that has only forced manufacturers to come up with new variations (with worse side-effects).
IWood

PiHKAL, A Chemical Love Story. Shulgin, Alexander and Ann. Transform Press, 1991.

Or, you can dig it here.
TFox

The “legal” aspect of “legal high” isn’t quite true. In the US, if it’s “intended to affect the structure or any function of the body” then it’s a drug, period, whether it’s new or old, even if you write “incense” or “head cleaner” on the label. To sell these drugs legally in the US, you’d have to go through the whole FDA process to prove safety and efficacy for its intended use. Since no one has done that, selling them is not legal. Here‘s a typical enforcement letter.
Hundefar

OK, who the hell says ‘Meow Meow’ about Mephedrone? ‘I’m off me tits on this Meow Meow’..?? No, I don’t see that working.
Purplecat

So China’s now exporting drugs to the rest of the world, and claiming it as a free trade issue.

Did I hear someone say payback?
- Anonymous
  
  Bravo!
fullerenedream

I’m in Australia right now and I have heard mephedrone called Meow, but not Meow meow. It also sounds kind of nasty.
Anonymous

Slow news day, wsj?

Designer drugs have been around since the 70′s… Every year, 10 more are made illegal, while 100 more are created. This isn’t new or unusual, nothing at all has changed. This is a direct, unavoidable side effect of the drug war, that people will continue to invent new drugs to get high off. There’s no shortage of molecules out there, there’s practically an infinite variety. There are potentially millions of different drugs that can be used recreationally, and as long as law enforcement keeps making these drugs illegal, people will continue to invent new ones. It’s an unwinnable battle.

Anyways, the sad part about this is that these new legal drugs are often more dangerous than the currently illegal ones. Lots of safe, completely harmless and enjoyable drugs are illegal due to political reasons, leaving people’s only legal alternative as these untested experimental drugs. Again, the drug war is causing a lot more harm to society than the drugs themselves.

MDMA, for example is really quite safe. The only real danger is overheating or dehydration from dancing too long. That, and if you use it constantly all day every single day it can cause roughly the same amount of brain damage as alcohol. Since MDMA, the safe and enjoyable drug is illegal, there have been literally hundreds of replacements made available, many of which have killed dozens of people. BZP, Mephodrone, Methylone, etc, have all caused a handful of deaths and thousands of hospitalizations.

Cannabis is probably the single safest psychoactive substance on the entire earth, yet it’s illegal, leading people to buy synthetic chemicals formulated in a sketchy underground lab. These chemicals have never been tested in humans, no one knows what their side effects are, their long term effects are, whether they have any negative interactions with other drugs, etc. JWH-018 is 50 times more potent than THC and is theorized to be extremely carcinogenic. There are hundreds of these “legal spice blends” that mislabel their ingredients saying they’re made with x, y, and z plants with no other additives, but when they’ve been tested they’ve been found to contain none of the plants on the label, instead it’s just parsley laced with a dozen experimental chemical drugs, including HU-210 (800 times more potent than THC), WIN-55212, CP-47497, CP55940, JWH-073, JWH-081, JWH-250, and this giant chemical soup of drugs.

Anyways I digress. This is old news.
- mdh
  
  MDMA, for example is really quite safe. The only real danger is overheating or dehydration from dancing too long. That, and if you use it constantly all day every single day it can cause roughly the same amount of brain damage as alcohol.
  
  I heard it cures AIDS.
- Anonymous
  
  “The evidence is overwhelming that MDMA produces acute and long-lasting toxic anatomic effects in animals and humans. Anatomical and functional MDMA consequences must be better understood.” (Turillazzi E, Riezzo I, Neri M, Bello S, Fineschi V. MDMA Toxicity and Pathological Consequences: a Review about Experimental Data and Autopsy Findings. Curr Pharm Biotechnol. 2010 Apr 26.)
  
  The “this drug is totally safe, others should be, too” argument seems to me to be typicially based on nonsense, denial, or deliberate misreading of scientific evidence. An example would be the above “anatomical and functional MDMA consequences must be better understood,” read as “we’re not sure how it’s causing so much damage, so it might not be. Ergo, it’s safe.”
  
  To summarize the rest of the literature, MDMA turns serotonin-producing neurons up to 11, users feel awesome, but many of the so-stimulated neurons die, as in permanently, not to be replaced. More than just developing a tolerance to the drug, in the case of MDMA use one actively destroys one’s body’s capacity to respond to the drug, or to produce normal physiologic effects such as dulling painful sensations…or new memory production and learning.
  
  I’m all for legalizing “safe” drugs (a distinction that seems hypocritical given the “safety” of legal drugs like alcohol), but those that cause irreversible damage after only a few uses seem beyond the label “safe.”
snorpheus

get your pandemic, get your pandemic!

WMD… WMD…
- Anonymous
  
  right chyear right chyear
  
  oh shit omar comin
Anonymous

merely an excuse for young dudes at parties to act cool when in reality they cant score good drugs.
‘Designed’ for gullible fools.
pixleshifter

When prohibition is in force people will resort to moonshine.
I believe that’s what we’re seeing here.
So as a direct result of the war on drugs, we’re becoming inundated with dirty drugs.
Nice one politicians, very clever.
Anonymous

I had the good fortune to meet Dr. Shulgin, one of the pioneers of MDMA, and designer drug research, recently. I can say with confidence that his heavy, long-term usage of MDMA, the associated phenelythamines and tryptamines has done absolutely NOTHING to dull his extraordinary mind. At 85 years old, he can wander in conversation through chemistry, philosophy, child-rearing, or politics with ease and is far sharper than my grandfather was at that age.

For the designer of these so called ‘designer drugs,’ and most likely, one of the most voracious consumers of said drugs, I failed to notice any significant negative effects expressed in his behavior or intellect.

That said, YMMV. Play safely, people! Don’t Get Caught.
dogcow

No no, the reality is those drugs are in fact “plant food,” “bath salts” and “pond cleaner.” Mostly pond cleaner.
dole

In the realm of Spice and the recent JWH derivatives, what chaps my ass are the state and local governments (in my area, namely medium-sized towns and suburbs in Kansas and Missouri) who have already banned these products under the guise of “protecting children.” It’s not that I’m against protecting children, but:

1. kids are going to find the stuff they want if they seek it
2. local and state governments rely on “scientific authorities” such as the state police to deem what’s harmful to citizens
3. they’re jumping the gun in banning this stuff before the new stuff comes out next week. no, there’s no way to predict or really keep up with these new drugs, but it’s scaremongering for votes, plain and simple.

Not that I’d personally experiment with some of these because as many have said: most are bad news in comparison with the devils we know. I just hate that my tax dollars go to this type of futile, preventative crap.
Gilbert Wham

I strongly recommend no-one, if given the chance, goes anywhere near NRG-1/Naphyrone. I have taken many, many drugs, but nothing as awful as that stuff.
Eris Siva

This is silly, Xeni.
None of these are “new”, and most of them are manufactured in Europe and the USA. I know of at least 2 major manufacturers of Spice here in the US. I work for a company that gets offers to carry these products all the time. We don’t, but it helps to have that knowledge.
And “Meow Meow” is basically artificial Khat…which has been around for quite a while.

BTW, as far as legal highs are concerned, Spice is not too bad.

This sort of thing is just as absurd as the iDosing. People are smoking blends of stuff like Damiana and catnip that they ordered out of a 1993 High Times. Funny thing is, people have been doing so for hundreds of years.

And now we just banhammer everything, ensuring that kids, who don’t have the facts thanks to us adults ALSO banhammering most of the real information relating to these drugs, have to keep seeking more dangerous ways of getting high.

Disgusting.
Anonymous

Eris – some of these are not new, as you say, but you neglect to mention those you are not familiar with i.e. naphyrone, and while the drugs themselves might not be new, the mass production and legal distribution via internet mail order certainly is. my friends have moved almost entirely to these “legal” highs over more traditional illegal substances due mainly to ease of purchase and perceived reliability. that’s the new thing.
Clifton

Eris:

Khat contains a variety of chemicals in the same general family as the amphetamines. I thought cathinone and cathine were responsible for most of the effect, not mephedrone; I don’t think mephedrone occurs naturally. (Cathine is actually pretty nice stuff; I tried some from a legal source quite a long time ago.)
Anonymous

The ridiculous thing about drugs policy is that it seems to have prevented any pharmaceutical companies developing and testing safe highs. People want to get high. Governments want to minimise harm. Pharma companies want profits. Seems to me there’s room for all to be satisfied. But it will never happen because of irrational neo-Puritan hang-ups from a few vocal nitwits.
growf

Of course, not all ‘legal highs’ are as legal as you might think.

In the UK a few years back, the legal high du jour was a blend of the piperazines BZP and TFMPP. I think they were on fairly general sale for about 18 months.

And then someone finally noticed that TFMPP was a prescription-only drug – an anti-parasitic, in fact (I believe this is where the amphetamines-in-dog-worming-pills myth arose) – and the police had to write to all the manufacturers and ask if they could stop making any more.

Of course, none of this would have happened without prohibition. 4MMC (Meow-meow) is our generation’s bathtub gin.
Anonymous

“Designer drugs have been around since the 70′s”

They’ve been around at least a hundred years long than that. Heroin was a designer drug that was first synthesized in 1874, and then later sold by Bayer.
Blue

The war against any other externally induced state of consciousness other than ‘pissed’ is really rather baffling.
Anonymous

As someone who’s been taking MDMA for a while the arrival of drone was a nightmare. Almost the same effect, legal, cheap as chips and so much worse the day after. Legal MDMA would make so much sense, never seen anyone on MDMA start a fight or cause any aggro at all.

In the end I was glad to see ‘Drone banned and I’ve never seen it offered since.
Anonymous

Science has just retracted[*] a paper purporting to show that even one-time use of MDMA (“ecstasy”) brings with it damage to the dopamine system that creates a risk of developing Parkinson’s Disease later in life. [*] The paper, one of a series published by George Ricaurte of Hopkins Medical School and colleagues, was based on an experiment that intended to give MDMA to a group of primates. It now turns out, according to the experimenters, that the animals were actually administered methamphetamine instead.

The authors of the study insist that their earlier results showing that MDMA is toxic to serotonergic neurons remain valid. That work, combined with the now-retracted paper, formed part of the basis for such laws as the Ecstasy Anti-Proliferation Act and the RAVE Act, and have also led to an almost-complete blackout on human experimentation with MDMA in the US.

The account in the retraction letter seems plausible at a first reading. The laboratory ordered 10 grams each of MDMA and methamphetamine from the same supplier, and received two vials, one labeled “MDMA” and one methamphetamine, in a single shipment. Apparently the two labels were switched; at least, the vial labeled “methamphetamine” turns out to contain only MDMA. (The other was used up and has been discarded.) Moreover, analysis of frozen sections of the brains of two animals that died during the experiment show methamphetamine and its metabolites but not MDMA or its metabolites.

Accidents happen, and it would be churlish to cast too much blame on the scientists involved for not analyzing a chemical received from a reputable supplier to verify that it was what the label said it was. But the retraction letter leaves out or elides some important facts, which it seems to me should have troubled both the researchers and Science’s reviewers and editors.

The experiment was purportedly intended to represent in an animal model the consequences of human “recreational” MDMA use, and perhaps of therapeutic use of the drug were it ever approved for that purpose. In the experiment, two out of fifteen animals died. The death rate among human MDMA users is no more than one in a million.

Yet it appears that the researchers failed to investigate the causes of those deaths. Moreover, they went on to draw inferences about the effects of MDMA on humans from the observed damage to the brains of the remaining animals. That didn’t seem to trouble the reviewers for Science or the administrators at the National Institute on Drug Abuse who trumpeted the findings as evidence of the dangers of MDMA. (Science is published by the AAAS, whose president, Alan Leshner, was the Director of NIDA when the grant in question was awarded; he made MDMA his particular crusade.)

It is hard to escape the thought that many of the people involved were less cautious than they might have been because the results seemed to support their already strongly-held beliefs.

The now-retracted study was not the first by Ricaurte to attract severe scholarly criticism. The earlier work claiming large and irreversible losses in the serotonin system has also been contradicted by other findings, and brain-scan images that seemed to show large inactive areas in the brains of MDMA users — imagines heavily promoted by NIDA during the Leshner regime — have now been withdrawn from the NIDA website, and NIDA refuses to make them available to journalists.

Even before the retraction, then, Ricaurte’s work was under a cloud. One very senior figure in the field had said in an open scientific meeting “I will believe any result George Ricaurte comes up with as soon as it has been independently confirmed.”

The other detail not mentioned in the retraction letter is that Peter Jennings had gotten wind of the controversy, and had a special highly critical of Ricaurte’s work “in the can” and ready to show. (Ricaurte had refused to be interviewed.) That Ricaurte’s group had failed to replicate the now-retracted work is no doubt true; but that the paper would have been retracted had ABC not been ready to make an issue of it is much less clear.

Given all the circumstances, and especially given the huge policy superstructure that has been erected on the increasingly shaky foundation of MDMA neurotoxicity research, it seems to me that it’s time for a complete review of the bidding, in the form probably of a National Academy review. The panel for such a review ought to be charged with evaluating the whole body of MDMA research, with a special eye on the neurotoxicity work, and ought to be asked to make a recommendation about whether human preclinical and clinical trials ought to be allowed to go forward.

If the panel were to find serious flaws not only in this paper but in other work by the Ricaurte group and other NIDA-funded work on MDMA, then more serious questions ought to be raised about how to protect the NIDA funding and evaluation process from being unduly influenced by the political necessities of the drug war. Moreover, if I were the editor of one of the relevant journals I would want to take a close look at whether there were subtle pressures making it easier to publish results consistent with the national crusade against illicit chemicals than results inconsistent with that crusade.

Only rarely does a first-rank scholarly journal has to retract a published research report because of flaws in the data or analysis. Most of us hope that means that the disincentives for either faking results or making crucial errors are so strong, and the journal editors and referees sufficiently alert, so that few papers actually need retraction.

A less cheerful view would be that the common interests of the authors and the journals in not retracting means that many papers that deserve retraction don’t receive it. Probably the chances of retraction, among papers so flawed that they ought to be retracted, is higher when the results help one side or another in a political or policy controversy. The temptations to deviate from objectivity are also probably greater in those instances.

Update

A reader who has worked in research labs employing controlled substances makes the following observation. (Note that the Drug Enforcement Administration has regulatory authority over any place with a license to possess Schedule I drugs):

It is not clear to me WHEN or HOW the labels were switched. The first thing that came to mind when this story was released was that DEA inspectors of laboratories which use controlled substances suggest that labels (of stock compounds in the safe as well as working aliquots) be changed to mask the contents of the drug. I’ve seen “WP” for “white powder” (actually morphine sulfate) and single letter codes to distinguish between series of compounds. I’ve heard stories of inspectors reacting enthusiastically to sarcastic suggestions that the compounds be falsely labeled radioactive (a spectacularly bad idea). These things are supposed to decrease likelihood of diversion, a minor concern except by people who would already have access and knowledge of the coding.

Confusion caused by relabeling or diversion by a lab member seem more likely than an error by the manufacturer.

Second update and correction

Someone in a position to know informs me that pressure from ABC News, if it played any role at all, was secondary to pressure from NIDA. Apparently Leshner’s enthusiasm for Ricaurte’s work was not shared by the career staff or by the subsequent Interim Director and Director. (For example, though NIDA had funded the research reported in Science, it put out no press release when the article appeared. As noted above the “hole-in-your brain” images disappeared from the NIDA website some time ago.) NIDA was pressing Ricaurte for details about how the work was done, and word that the results reported in Science could not be reproduced in subsequent oral-administration studies was beginning to leak from Ricaurte’s lab.

Other questions are being raised: What happened to the rest of the 10 grams of methamphetamine purportedly mislabeled “MDMA”? What other studies might be compromised by the same error? Did Ricaurte continue to make public claims about the risk of Parkinsonism after his lab failed to confirm the earlier results?

One knowledgeable observer doubts that a National Academy panel is necessary. “All you need is a careful review of the lab notebooks.” The question now is whether Hopkins will stick with its “accidents happen” stance.
Anonymous

Opium Wars part Deux?
Anonymous

while the drugs themselves might not be new, the mass production and legal distribution via internet mail order certainly is.

Again, this is completely not new in any way. I remember friends of mine buying GHB online when it was legal, so that must have been before 2000. I recall sites selling 5-MeO-DMT off of geocities, complete with animated gifs and comic sans fonts. That must have been in around ’97 or so. There was a good decade of this before the cops started cracking down, and in 2003 they started operation web tryp and shut down any sites that specifically stated their products were for human consumption.

This sort of thing actually is much, much older than that even. There’s a little thing called “mail order” where people have been selling drugs for centuries. If you think this is in any way new or unusual, you live under a rock.

More reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Web_Tryp
- elfspice
  
  yeah just want to ‘me too’ on the point of mailed out drugs… there is forums and networks of producers who only sell via mail, and they get caught way less than your regular drug dealers… unless they flip out of course…
kip w

Prohibitionists and their narcs are addicted to fearemones that they get from reading and writing accounts of the scary new things that teenagers are getting high from.

After a while, they can’t get as scared as they want from the old ones, so they make up new ones, and associate them with scary ethnic groups for that extra thrill.
- kip w
  
  Fearomones, I mean.
  
  D*rn, can’t even spell my own made-up word right.
MrJM

Call me old-fashioned, but I’ll stick with stuffing balls of opium up my ass, thank-you-very-much.