These drugs are often promoted or sold as if they are harmless and are called names like herbal highs, party pills, herbal ecstasy or bath salts. These new psychoactive substances are illegal because of the potential risk of harm they pose.

 

These drugs are often promoted or sold as if they are harmless and are called names like herbal highs, party pills, herbal ecstasy or bath salts. Many new psychoactive substances are illegal because of the potential risk of harm they pose.

 

These emerging or new synthetic drugs are so new that they have rarely or never been tested. This means that, if you experiment with these drugs, you will be at risk of serious harm because: 

 

• you don’t know where they came from

• you don’t know what chemicals and other compounds are in them

• you don’t know how you might react to them

• you can’t assume that just because you didn’t have a bad reaction last time then you are safe

• you don’t know how they might react to other substances you have taken including alcohol or other drugs

• you don’t know that the drug will be the same strength or same drug you had last time

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Constantly Evolving

 

LSD, PCP and Ecstasy (MDMA) were the earlier synthetic drugs and amphetamine and methamphetamine were even earlier than that. Now, this new market has been unleashed with a long list of new destructive chemical after another being introduced into the illicit drug market.

 

New synthetics arrive on the market constantly, so it is not possible to compile a complete list. Chemists who wish to evade arrest change the formula slightly and come up with something new that might not be listed in the text of laws that ban drugs.

 

Symptoms can last for hours or even days. Since these drugs are addictive, one of the signs of synthetics abuse is compulsive use despite the harm that is being experienced.

 

The difficulty with determining if a particular set of symptoms relates to synthetic drug abuse is that drug tests, like laws, are trailing behind the industry manufacturing these drugs.

 

There is one drug test, for example, that can identify fourteen drugs that might be included in bath salts, but there are eighty others that might make up the formulation. So a person could be tested for all known drugs and test negative but have abused a new chemical that was not included in the list.

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