Page 21 | ABUSE Magazine
Source: Wikipedia.org
abusemagazine.org
“...what is new is the wide range of substances now being
explored, the aggressive marketing of products that have
been intentionally mislabelled, the growing use of the internet, and the speed at which the market reacts to control
measures.”
The safety of research chemicals is
untested and little if any research
has been done on the toxicology or
pharmacology of most of these drugs.
Few, if any, human or animal studies
have been done. Unlike better known
drugs like cannabis, which have been
used by billions of people worldwide
for centuries or even millennia, research chemicals are new and may
have been used only by a few thousand people for a few months, although some of the more popular
drugs such as 2C-B, MDMA, and BZP
have been used by millions of people.
Many research compounds have produced unexpected side-effects and
adverse incidents due to the lack of
screening for off-target effects prior
to marketing; both bromo-dragonfly
and mephedrone seem to be capable
of producing pronounced vasoconstriction under some circumstances,
which has resulted in several deaths,
although the mechanism remains unclear. Even more common is that adverse incidents and overdoses arise
accidentally, from poor handling of
potent chemicals where the margin
of error is too narrow for guesswork,
or simply from excessive abuse of the
drug.
Due to the recent development of
many designer drugs, laws banning
or regulating their use have not been
developed yet, and in recent cases
novel drugs have appeared direct-
ly in response to legislative action,
to replace a similar compound that
had recently been banned. Many of
the chemicals fall under the various
drug analogue legislations in certain
countries, but most countries have no
general analogue act or equivalent
legislation and so novel compounds
may fall outside of the law after only
minor structural modifications.
In the United States, the Controlled
Substances Act was amended by the
Controlled Substance Analogue Enforcement of 1986, which attempted
to ban designer drugs pre-emptively
by making it illegal to manufacture,
sell, or possess chemicals that were
substantially similar in chemistry and
pharmacology to Schedule I or Schedule II drugs.
In the USA, similar descriptions have
been used to describe mephedrone as
well as methylone and methylenedioxypyrovalerone.
Combined with labeling that they are
“not for human consumption”, these
descriptions are an attempt to skirt
the Federal Analog Act which forbids
drugs that are “substantially similar”
to already classified drugs from being
sold for human use.
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