ESR hunting down new psychoactive substances

ESR’s tracking of illicit drugs coming into the country is continuing to turn up a large and varied number of new psychoactive substances.

Research led by ESR senior scientist Cameron Johnson into the detection of illegal drugs at the New Zealand border has just been published in the Australian Journal of Forensic Science.

Scientists detected more than 130 such new substances at ESR’s border screening laboratory between 2014 and 2018. In a collaboration with the University of Auckland, analysts were able to use expensive state-of-the-art spectroscopy to assist in identifying these new drugs.

Mr Johnson says more than 730 new psychoactive substances were reported to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime between 2009 and 2016, a rate of one a week.

In New Zealand, scientists detected more than 130 such substances at ESR’s border screening laboratory between 2014 and 2018. In a collaboration with the University of Auckland, analysts were able to use expensive state-of-the-art spectroscopy to assist in identifying half of these new drugs.

With the emergence of “party pills” or “legal highs” in the past decade, the Institute of Environmental Health and Science (ESR) says illicit drug manufactures are increasingly “tweaking” designer drugs in a bid to help their products avoid detection when entering the country.

ESR says over the last 10 years, there has been an explosion of new psychoactive substances, or designer drugs, into the drug market.

Cameron Johnson is also leading a project looking to link up all the various parts of ESR’s extensive drug testing capabilities.

“We have our border screening lab which looks at what’s coming across the border through customs’ seizures, the seizures by the police that are analysed by the ESR drug chemistry team, we see the domestic manufacture of drugs with our clan labs, and we’ve got drug use in the population through our toxicology analysis.

“Although the substances that we see at the border lab have been seized by NZ Customs, it is likely that some importation of that substance may eventually make its way into New Zealand to be used as a psychoactive drug.

“We want all the drug testing capabilities within ESR to be able to detect that substance that was first seen at the border, so the early identification of new substances in the project is crucial to allow that to happen.”

Armed with this new information, ESR laboratories can ensure they have the capability to detect the substances in the analytical tests that are carried out.

“New designer drugs change very rapidly there are lots of different types and along with that comes the challenge in analysing them. They are also so new that they are largely untested so the risk they pose to users is very high,” Mr Johnson says.

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