Suzanimal
05-04-2015, 03:07 PM
At midnight on a recent Friday, in a backroom at Chemsun Global pharmaceutical laboratory in Shanghai, a Chinese chemist who called himself Terry :confused:was eager to close a deal. Outside in the lab a bright yellow liquid whirred around a flask. The smell of fumes was so intense it left a bitter, chemical aftertaste.
The place was filthy: surfaces were strewn with discarded rubber gloves and in one corner a sack of white powder spilled onto the floor.
I was there to “inspect” the lab, to take stock of the wooden barrels full of drugs, but Terry wasn’t interested in small talk. “You just take the samples, right?” he said, near shouting. “Let’s just be quick. Tell me what you want, how much you want, then we can talk about price, we can talk about shipment.”
In the last decade, the global trade in drugs has changed in profound and unpredictable ways. The reality of drugs in the digital age is that on deep web markets any illegal drug, from marijuana to methamphetamine, is a click or two away.
Meanwhile the newly interconnected, globalised drugs scene has grown too complex and fractured for existing laws to control – a situation vividly illustrated by the rapid emergence of “legal highs”, or what official bodies call novel psychoactive substances (NPS).
Legal highs are chemical compounds synthesised in labs that stimulate or depress the central nervous system in a way that mimics banned substances such as cannabis or cocaine. Chemists tinker with the structure of NPS compounds so that they fall outside international drug controls – at least when they first emerge.
And more of them are reaching the market every year: since 2009, the number, type and availability of these drugs has seen an “unprecedented increase”, according to a report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA). Scores of new substances are reported in Europe and the US each year, and drug control agencies have now categorised more than 400 substances.
Drug policies in consumer countries such as the US and UK were conceived long before the internet and globalisation radically transformed the drugs market.
The deluge of toxic substances, hyperventilating media coverage and a recent spate of hospitalisations have shattered any illusion of government control.
In the last month, New York, Mississippi and Alabama have all issued state health alerts following a dramatic rise in NPS overdoses, while Arizona, Florida, New Jersey and Texas report a similar surge. In Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, where one person died and two dozen were hospitalised after taking “spice,” police declared a public safety crisis.
...
Local officials, if adequately bribed, would look the other way; the Chinese government was more concerned with rising domestic consumption of banned drugs than chemicals that are legal and headed abroad.
China, as one headline in Time magazine put it, soon became the “new front in the global drug war”.
...
One of the “unintended consequences” of prohibition, according to the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime, is “substance displacement”, whereby the control of one substance causes suppliers and users to move to another drug with similar effects but fewer controls.
...
Mike Power, author of Drugs 2.0, argues that the answer to the legal high dilemma does not lie in punitive controls and the annual spending of millions of taxpayers’ dollars. Drugs law should be progressively dismantled, he says, recommending the introduction of a controlled, regulated market of cannabis as seen in Colorado.
...
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/01/chinese-labs-legal-highs-west-drugs
The place was filthy: surfaces were strewn with discarded rubber gloves and in one corner a sack of white powder spilled onto the floor.
I was there to “inspect” the lab, to take stock of the wooden barrels full of drugs, but Terry wasn’t interested in small talk. “You just take the samples, right?” he said, near shouting. “Let’s just be quick. Tell me what you want, how much you want, then we can talk about price, we can talk about shipment.”
In the last decade, the global trade in drugs has changed in profound and unpredictable ways. The reality of drugs in the digital age is that on deep web markets any illegal drug, from marijuana to methamphetamine, is a click or two away.
Meanwhile the newly interconnected, globalised drugs scene has grown too complex and fractured for existing laws to control – a situation vividly illustrated by the rapid emergence of “legal highs”, or what official bodies call novel psychoactive substances (NPS).
Legal highs are chemical compounds synthesised in labs that stimulate or depress the central nervous system in a way that mimics banned substances such as cannabis or cocaine. Chemists tinker with the structure of NPS compounds so that they fall outside international drug controls – at least when they first emerge.
And more of them are reaching the market every year: since 2009, the number, type and availability of these drugs has seen an “unprecedented increase”, according to a report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA). Scores of new substances are reported in Europe and the US each year, and drug control agencies have now categorised more than 400 substances.
Drug policies in consumer countries such as the US and UK were conceived long before the internet and globalisation radically transformed the drugs market.
The deluge of toxic substances, hyperventilating media coverage and a recent spate of hospitalisations have shattered any illusion of government control.
In the last month, New York, Mississippi and Alabama have all issued state health alerts following a dramatic rise in NPS overdoses, while Arizona, Florida, New Jersey and Texas report a similar surge. In Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, where one person died and two dozen were hospitalised after taking “spice,” police declared a public safety crisis.
...
Local officials, if adequately bribed, would look the other way; the Chinese government was more concerned with rising domestic consumption of banned drugs than chemicals that are legal and headed abroad.
China, as one headline in Time magazine put it, soon became the “new front in the global drug war”.
...
One of the “unintended consequences” of prohibition, according to the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime, is “substance displacement”, whereby the control of one substance causes suppliers and users to move to another drug with similar effects but fewer controls.
...
Mike Power, author of Drugs 2.0, argues that the answer to the legal high dilemma does not lie in punitive controls and the annual spending of millions of taxpayers’ dollars. Drugs law should be progressively dismantled, he says, recommending the introduction of a controlled, regulated market of cannabis as seen in Colorado.
...
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/01/chinese-labs-legal-highs-west-drugs