Designer drug detective work

Abstract

Sitting in his office in Baltimore, neurochemist Michael H. Baumann eagerly flipped through a spreadsheet. It listed hundreds of chemical names of suspected drugs seized by local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies over the past three years. “When police bust people with some white powder or a baggie full of pot-looking material, it gets sent to forensic laboratories, and they test what’s in it,” he says. All of that data gets dumped into a database cataloged by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and Baumann asks for a rundown of what’s been found. That rundown provides Baumann, head of the Designer Drug Research Unit at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), with a guide to the ever-changing world of designer drugs. As of December 2014, 541 new psychoactive substances—the preferred term for synthetic designer drugs—had been reported. And it’s reasonable to think that the number is higher now. The