The world is awash in synthetic recreational drugs—the ones that are made in a lab, not grown in a field or a greenhouse—thanks to their growing popularity in China, strong demand in the US, and tiny labs in countries like Mexico and Thailand that are distributing them around the world. Methamphetamine is by far the most common synthetic, but a confounding new class of drugs is growing at what the United Nations calls an “unprecedented pace” in a report released May 19.
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Called “new psychoactive substances,” or NPS, the drugs pose varying health threats but are hard to monitor and control because they’re often not classified as drugs or illegal substances in many countries. Often they are openly sold on the internet,sometimes as legal substitutes for illegal drugs.
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Thanks to a combination of relatively anonymous internet sales and international courier services, these drugs are showing up all over, and confounding drug enforcement officials and drug treatment centers. It’s “a whole new world,” Sarah Charlton, the head of an addiction clinic in Hobart, Tasmania, told an Australian news site in March. “Half the time people don’t know what’s in them – it’s Russian roulette.” In April, police on the island of Jersey seized three kilos of NPS. “You have no idea what is in it and no idea what damage it will do to you,” inspector Craig Jackson said.
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The UN Office on Drugs and Crime and its member countries have identified over 200 hundred new NPS in recent years
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