Forensic Chemistry of Substance Misuse

A Guide to Drug Control

Leslie A King, John Ramsey, Leslie Iversen, Geoffrey Phillips

• Publisher: Royal Society of Chemistry
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781849730235
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Applied Sciences
• Index: Technology & Engineering

This book builds on an earlier publication by the same author: The Misuse of Drugs Act: A Guide for Forensic Scientists. It provides a chemical background to the domestic and international legal controls on drugs of abuse and related substances and includes coverage of 'designer drugs' and generic/analogue controls from the UK, US and New Zealand perspectives. The content of the book has been fully updated and rearranged and the scope has been considerably expanded. More general chapters cover the recent history of the drug classification debate and a proposal for consolidating a wide range of legal controls on chemical substances. An account is provided of the Early Warning System on 'New Psychoactive Substances' in operation in the European Union. Technical and subsidiary material is placed in 20 Appendices, which list controlled substances and cover topics such as: precursor chemicals, related legislation, sentencing guidelines and detailed chemical/pharmacological profiles of the most commonly-abused drugs. There is a glossary and a bibliography, while extensive footnotes support the text and provide references to selected publications and Internet sources. The book contains a number of unique features, not found in any other single publication: * For the forensic scientist, the book contains a complete list of all drug substances controlled by UK and International law. It explains the chemical-structural definitions and the significance to the legislation of terms such as salt, base, stereoisomer, ester, ether, derivative, homologue and isotope * For the more general reader, there is an account of the history of domestic, European and International drugs control, the long debate about drug classification, the role of risk assessment and how the legal control of a wide range of harmful chemical substances might be consolidated * For the criminal lawyer, the book provides a useful adjunct to standard works on case and statute law This unique book has general appeal to anybody needing information on drugs of abuse including forensic scientists, researchers, teachers, criminal lawyers, customs officers, postgraduate and graduate students. It is of particular interest to those studying forensic science.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

1.1 DRUG MISUSE

Drugs whose possession or supply is restricted by law are known as scheduled or, in the UK, as controlled substances. They comprise both licit materials (i.e. those manufactured under licence for clinical use) and the illicit products of clandestine factories. Although many plant-based drugs have been self-administered for thousands of years (e.g. coca leaf, cannabis, opium, and peyote cactus), the imposition of criminal sanctions is mostly a product of the 20th century. Many of the drugs currently abused were once not only on open sale, but often promoted as beneficial substances by the food and pharmaceutical industries. A pattern developed whereby initial misuse of pharmaceutical products such as heroin, cocaine and amphetamine led to increasing legal restrictions and the consequent rise of an illicit industry. Nowadays, most serious drug abuse involves illicit products. Most fall into just a few pharmacological groups, e.g. central nervous system stimulants, narcotic analgesics, hallucinogens and hypnotics. The most prevalent of these are the plant-derived or semi-synthetic substances (e.g. cannabis, cocaine and heroin), but the view of the former United Nations Drug Control Programme is that wholly synthetic drugs (e.g. amphetamine, MDMA and related designer drugs) are likely to pose a more significant social problem in the future. There is an increasing recognition of the problems caused by misuse of medicinal products, primarily benzodiazepine tranquillisers. In a risk-assessment process carried out in the UK by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD; see Chapter 11), benzodiazepines were rated as more harmful than any of the other Class B or Class C drugs examined except the barbiturates. Mortality from drug abuse is largely associated with opiates¹. Thus, in 2004 in the United Kingdom, heroin or morphine was mentioned on 971 death certificates, methadone on 280, cocaine on 185 and ecstasy on 66.

On the basis of a recent Home Office report (Drug Misuse Declared: Findings from the 2006/07 British Crime Survey – see Bibliography), a third of the adult population in the United Kingdom (UK) admits to having used a controlled drug at least once in their lives; fewer than 10% use drugs on a regular basis and for the great majority of these the drug involved is cannabis. Table 1.1 shows the proportion of 16–59 year-olds who admit to using a specific drug in the past year. After cannabis, the next most commonly used drugs are cocaine and 3,4-methylenedioxymethylamphetamine (MDMA; ecstasy). Seizure data from police and customs show a broadly similar pattern. In 2007/8, there were over 228 000 drug offences² in the UK, the majority of which involved cannabis. In Europe, it is estimated that 0.2–0.3% of the population are regular heroin users. With few exceptions, the scale of drug abuse has steadily increased in most countries, but is still predominantly associated with younger members of the population.

Table 1.1 Drug use in the past year, 16–59 year-olds, England and Wales³.

Drug	% Population	Class in Misuse of Drugs Act
Cannabis	8.2	Class B pending (Class C in survey period)
Cocaine powder	2.6	Class A
Ecstasy	1.8	Class A
Amyl nitrite	1.4	Not controlled
“Amphetamines”	1.3	Class B (mostly amphetamine)
“Magic mushrooms”	0.6	Class A
“Tranquillisers”	0.4	Class C (Benzodiazepines)
Ketamine	0.3	Class C
Crack cocaine	0.2	Class A
LSD	0.2	Class A
Glues	0.2	Not controlled
Heroin	0.1	Class A
Anabolic steroids	0.1	Class C
Any drug	10.0	n/a

Drugs seized by law-enforcement agencies and suspected to be controlled (scheduled) substances are normally submitted to a forensic science laboratory for formal identification, and, where appropriate, quantification. In certain circumstances (the guilty plea policy), this rule is relaxed provided that a number of conditions are met and the substances (amphetamine, cocaine, heroin and morphine) have been provisionally identified by a field test (Appendix 11).

Profiles of the major drugs of misuse (amphetamine, cannabis, cocaine and crack cocaine, heroin, LSD, MDMA and methylamphetamine) are provided in Appendix 10. Typical purities and common adulterants are listed in Appendix 12, while typical street prices and wrap (i.e. street deal) sizes are shown in Appendix 13.

1.2 ABBREVIATIONS

In the abbreviations and acronyms listed below, only the more frequently mentioned drug substances are included. Acronyms for many phenethylamines and tryptamines can be found in the publications PIHKAL and TIHKAL resp...