New Psychoactive Substances

Abstract

The emergence of new psychoactive substances (NPS) has become an increasing problem in recent years as they are designed to circumvent legislation. There has been an exponential rise in the number of chemicals that are currently available with 101 NPS reported to the EU Early Warning System in 2014 alone. NPS is a global concern and a number of different legislative changes have been introduced around the world. However, as these controls are brought into effect, clandestine laboratories develop new products which are not controlled. Therefore, law enforcement agencies and analytical laboratories are in a permanent state of playing catch up. NPS may be classified into a framework by their clinical effects including stimulant-type NPS such as synthetic cathinones, sedative, psychedelic/hallucinogenic, dissociative drugs and synthetic cannabinoids. Historically, drug screening strategies in clinical and forensic toxicology laboratories have used immunoassay and a mass spectrometry based confirmatory technique, often gas chromatography - mass spectrometry. However, the emergence of NPS and the difficulties in their detection using traditional techniques has led to a realignment of screening protocols to include liquid chromatography - tandem mass spectrometry and high resolution - mass spectrometry.