New breed of drugs poses fresh challenges
Print Edition
INCREASING abuse of psychoactive substances, especially among young people, is challenging Chinese police and legislators more used to controlling traditional drugs like heroin and cocaine.
China lacks experience in controlling synthetic substances produced in labs, a top academic has said.
The huge diversity of psychoactive substances makes it hard for the authorities to place all of them under surveillance, said Li Wenjun, with the People’s Public Security University.
China’s list of controlled psychotropic medications covers many commonly abused drugs including cathinone and ketamine, but slight changes in formulae mean the drugs are no longer classed as controlled and therefore escape surveillance, Li said.
Struggling
The development of new psychoactive drugs is so fast that the list of controlled substance is struggling to keep up.
By the end of 2014, 541 new psychoactive substances had been reported to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes, 69 of them in 2014, according to that office’s 2015 World Drug Report.
In October, China adopted a regulation on the control of narcotics for non-medical use and psychotropic medications. A total of 116 psychoactive substances were listed as controlled substances.
Li said the administration should shorten the review of controlled substances. The three months that the expert panel is given to complete assessment on the abuse risk of a psychoactive substance may be too slow to respond to invention of new drugs, she said.
She also called on the government to raise awareness of psychoactive substances abuse among young people.
Her research indicates about a third of teenage users of synthetic drugs were told the drug was not addictive when they first tried it, with dealers often claiming that a product was safe and legal.
Schools should allocate more resources to educating students and better preparing them to identify and refuse drugs, Li said.
As of July, almost 60 percent of the 3.2 million registered drug users in China were 35 or younger.
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