Pubdate: Mon, 04 May 2015
Source: Guardian, The (UK)
Copyright: 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited
Contact:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/175
Author: Nicola Davison

BREAKING BAD COMES TO BEIJING IN FACTORY THAT PUMPS OUT 'LEGAL HIGHS' 
FOR THE WEST

Beijing Turns Blind Eye to Chemists Whose Drugs Mimic Banned Substances

At midnight in a Shanghai laboratory, a Chinese chemist who called 
himself Terry was eager to close the deal. In the lab itself, a 
bright yellow liquid whirred around in a flask, an intense smell of 
fumes leaving a bitter aftertaste.

"Let's just be quick," he shouted. "Tell me what you want, how much 
you want, then we can talk about price, we can talk about shipment."

"Terry" is not the only rogue Shanghai chemist looking to make a 
living from the surging global trade in "legal highs". China has long 
been the workshop of the world, for everything from iPhones to 
Christmas tree lights. So it was only a matter of time, perhaps, 
before it filled the same role for drugs, churning out huge 
quantities of the synthesised products for recreational use in clubs 
and streets across the western world.

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 compounds so that they fall outside international drug 
controls - at least when they first emerge.

Exact data on Chinese involvement is hard to come by, but a Guardian 
investigation found a proliferation of Shanghai labs where it was 
perfectly possible to order products in batches of up to 50kg. Local 
officials, if adequately bribed, look the other way. The Chinese 
government appears more concerned with rising domestic consumption of 
banned drugs than chemicals that are legal and headed abroad.

And so more products are reaching the market every year, often via 
shadowy websites: 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. Drug 
control agencies have now categorised more than 400 substances.

The deluge of toxic substances and a recent spate of hospitalisations 
have shattered any illusion of government control. In the past month, 
New York, Mississippi and Alabama have all issued state health alerts 
following a dramatic rise in legal high 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 a substance known as "spice", police 
declared a public safety crisis.

One in five Americans told the Global Drugs Survey that they had 
taken a legal high in the past year - more than any other country in the world.

Another Shanghai chemist  "Charles"  invited the Guardian to his 
company HQ on the 12th floor of a near-deserted office building on 
the edge of the city. His company offers 1kg of a cannabinoid called 
AB-Chminaca (AB-C), a substance that is banned in the US, but not the 
UK. The cost: UKP1,120 ($1,720). On a UK vendor site, 10g costs UKP60 
($92). Based on this sales price, the vendor makes UKP4,880 ($7,500) 
profit per kilo before shipping, processing and packaging.

"We divide into one-kilo packages and can ship all in one day," 
Charles says. "If you write down a couple of addresses, I can deliver 50kg."

After a lunch of prawns with rice noodles and pumpkin - Charles 
chainsmokes throughout - we drive across the city to an industrial 
park in Pudong.

At the door, a chubby woman in her 30s with cropped hair and a white 
coat greets us: she is the head chemist. We walk through a spotless 
lab of quietly industrious technicians ("I like a clean lab - I'm a 
girl," says the chemist) to an expensive-looking machine that 
performs gas chromatography-mass spectrometry analysis. "Our purity 
is above 99%," she says with pride.

A large plastic bag contains 50 samples of off-white powders and 
crystals - stimulants, depressants, opioids. "I'm afraid this 
[compound] is not good," the chemist says in accented English. 
"First, somebody give us the feedback that it's not strong. Second, 
it seems it has already [caused death] in Russia. Do you know the 
news? So why do you still want it?"

AB-C, first mentioned on drug forums in early 2014, is a synthetic 
cannabinoid that is typically dissolved in solvents before being 
packaged in 1g-3g foil packets with brand names such as Spice, K2 and 
Herbal Haze.

In order to keep ahead of the law, the legal high market must 
constantly evolve: a small variation on the chemical structure of a 
banned drug allows the new substance to skirt around most legislation 
- - but the tiniest molecular tweak can create a drug with dramatically 
different psychoactive effects.

On 2 April, Alan Jones, chair of the emergency department at the 
University of Mississippi Medical Centre in Jackson, received a phone 
call from a nurse in ER. "She told me that we were receiving our 
fourth patient by ambulance who had reportedly used spice - the 
fourth patient in two hours," he said. "We don't typically see that."

Over the next 72 hours, a further 25 patients arrived, and Dr Jones 
notified the state health department. "I have been working in 
emergency medicine for almost 20 years, and I've never seen anything 
like this," he says. Most arrive hallucinating, agitated and 
profusely sweating. Often, because they are confused, they are 
violent. "A couple of patients have had problems with their breathing 
- - not breathing sufficiently to maintain life," Dr Jones says.

A toxicological analysis of the Mississippi compound identified 
MAB-Chminaca, an AB-C derivative. Since the DEA first encountered 
AB-C in March 2014, it has caused at least four deaths in the US.

Soon after it was banned, users of online drug forums started 
discussing which compounds could be "compared to or better than" 
AB-C. MAB-Chminaca was considered a sound alternative, and the 
endless "game of whack-a-mole", as one DEA official has put it, continued.

[sidebar]

Too fast for legislators?

The emergence of legal highs has created an unprecedented challenge 
for drug policymakers worldwide. The UK and US use subtly different 
legislation to prohibit, though neither approach has proved 
successful. The US "analogue" controls can designate a substance not 
named in legislation illegal if f it is "substantially similar" to a 
drug already controlled - a system criticised for being ambiguous.

In contrast, the UK's "generic" controls list individual drugs or 
familieslies of drugs on the recommendation dan of the Advisory 
Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), a body of sci-scientists, 
academics and other experts.

But this system proved too clunky - it could take months for the 
experts to conclude that a drug was unsafe - so in 2011 the UK 
introduced new measures called Temporary Class Drug Orders, allowing 
the government to ban a substance temporarily while evaluating its 
harm harms. Despite these measures, only 60% of known cannabinoids 
are currently controlled in the UK.

Danny Kushlick, head of external affairs at Transform, a British drug 
reform thinktank, calls the UK's legislative res response to legal 
highs "terrible". "Legal highs appear to have arisen because of 
success in the enforcement on the supply side for cocaine and ecstasy 
particularly," tic he says. "The demand remains, and the 
entrepreneurs, whether they be criminal or legit, move in to exploit 
that demand."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom