The Draining Process of Dealing with Bath Salts

K2, Spice, ‘plant food,’ bath salts… keeping up with what’s popular in the legal, synthetic drug world can be a real pain in the ass sometimes. The problem’s especially difficult for law enforcement and regulators tasked with cracking down on drugs that are ostensibly legal but manufactured, packaged and distributed in the kind of convoluted yet above-the-table networks your neighborhood dealer dreams of. As far as users are concerned, the drugs are not only legal, but undetectable in current drug tests. So when you get fucked up off bath salts and start ripping cars in half with your bare hands, you can feel safe knowing your work or parole officer won’t find out about it.

Outlawing synthetic drugs has the same problems as the regular drug war does: it’s a hell of a lot more efficient to cut off the supply at the source, but who’s actually manufacturing the product can be extremely difficult to find. But a team of chemists, led by Dr. Oliver Sutcliffe of the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, has now developed a new series of tests that can help classify various designer drugs as well as identify their manufacturers and users.

"With the new method, we could work backwards and trace the substances back to the starting materials," Sutcliffe said at the 242nd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society this week.

The team uses a specialized mass spectrometry technique called isotope-ratio mass spectrometry. IRMS techniques analyze compounds by measuring the mixture of various stable isotopes present, which produces data and graphs that can be used as fingerprints for the specific compounds in question. This offers not only a high-resolution way to test for synthetic drugs, but also a way to identify the individual compounds used in their manufacturing, which means law enforcement can trace their propagation all the way back to the makers of raw chemical materials.

"This method was successful because the isotopic ratio of the starting material is transferred like a fingerprint through the synthesis," Sutcliffe said.

The presence of a readily available analysis tool is a big step forward for officials trying to curb the use of bath salts, which are supposed to provide euphoria and the occasional hallucination but have been described by ER doctors as combining the worst destructive aspects of meth, cocaine and PCP. The actual makeup of different brands vary, but often contain mephedrone, a synthetic analog of methcathinone, which is found in the illegal plant Khat. The substance should be technically banned, but because bath salts are labeled as such (and not as snort- or injectables) they get around the law. But with a better ability to identify producers and compound suppliers, regulators now may be able to get a more quality picture of the bath salt industry and legislate against it.

On the end-user side of enforcement, Sutcliffe has previously developed the first pure reference standard for mephedrone, which is the basis for making reliable tests for its presence. He’s already designed a liquid chromatography test for the compound, which is well within the reach of an average law enforcement lab. His team is now working on a color-change testing kit, which brings mephedrone testing within reach of an officer on the street. The kit should be available by the end of the year.

Testing for synthetic marijuana compounds is much more difficult, as Dr. Robert Lantz of Rocky Mountain Instrumental Laboratories discussed in another presentation at the conference. Tests for regular old marijuana use antibody assays to test for reaction with marijuana’s cannabinoid compounds. The assays are cheap, reliable and quick, which is essential for testing facilities who typically process thousands of samples a day. But unlike bath salts, whose makeup is variable but tend to have mephedrone specifically, there are myriad cannabinoid compounds that appear in all the different brands of incense, spice and potpourri that kids smoke these days. Any test designed to detect those compounds falls somewhere on a scale between incomprehensive and prohibitively costly.

The lack of data about the different synthetic cannabinoid compounds and their use has created some curious regulatory conundrums. There are about 200 synthetic cannabinoids being inhaled around the country, but the DEA has banned only five. States like Washington, Georgia and Colorado have also banned the compounds, although not necessarily all of the same ones or the DEA’s. Lantz touched on the seemingly-random bannings, saying "The states banned several specific compounds without a particular basis for their choices."

So what’s the end result? The problem in enforcing synthetic drug abuse is twofold. First, as the ongoing legislative game of ‘Pin the Tail on the Illegal Substance’ shows, drugs like synthetic weed are simply too varied chemically to reliably test for. Without reliable tests to pinpoint what compounds are getting people high, it’s really hard to actually make their use illegal and even harder to prosecute. And as far as bath salts are concerned, the nature of these types of drug fads means that by the time some brilliant scientists figure out how to test for a drug, young folks everywhere have moved on to shoving some other shit up their noses.