Culture - The ambigious contents of legal highs- what to do about it?

[catchdog]

I've heard the arguments against the producers of legal highs putting the actual ingredients on their packaging, but I don't really buy them. As far as it leading to swifter scheduling of the substances in question, this might be true. However, I find the case of methylone interesting. I'm not sure exactly when it appeared on the RC scene but I believe it was around 2001 or so. It became relatively popular but as of yet there are few places which have restricted it (though I am sure this is coming eventually). I don't really follow the whole party-pills phenomena so I'm not sure, but am I right in thinking that they tend to make it about 2 years at most before their formula is found out? (Especially recently with the growing realization that "herbal" forumlations often aren't herbal at all). Have substances which came to light in this way been subsequently banned in many places, and if so, about how long did it take after the formula was made public? I'm not sure but I'm skeptical that this practice really protects the legality of the chemical for a significant length of time, and suspect that it could even do the opposite since it distributes new, poorly understood, and questionable safe substances to a much wider demographic and encourages them to use them in an irresponsible way. Except in (many) notable exceptions, people who purchase research chemicals tend to be a much smaller group, usually much more knowledgable about drugs in general, and more likely to approach new substances with the appropriate care. With the "legal highs" you have large groups use them more casually and wrecklessly - they're legal, after all - and no doubt that is more likely to catch the gaze of government officials.

A more convincing argument is the one that some companies have put forth: if they make the ignredients public then the market is likely to be flooded with copy cats, and the investment that they (hopefully) put in to testing the product for safety is lost. In the current system there is no way for them to protect their work. I can sympathize with this position but to me it does not justify putting profit over the safety of your customers.

As a final point, I think this practice is in direct opposition to what I believe the goals of the forum to be: harm-reduction and the collection and synthesis of information. How can we learn anything about these substances when we don't know what they are?

I'm not sure how others feel about this but I was wondering if there is anything we could do about this situation. Few if any of us have the resources to perform chemical analysis and comparisons of subjective experiences are hardly science or reliable. I don't really have any good ideas, but I was thinking that it might be helpful if there was a single place where one could check the ingredients in the legal highs we do know. There's a bit of information out there but it all seems to be rather scattered about as far as I can tell, and it might be helpful to try to compile it in one place. Any thoughts?

SWIM is not actually a user of any of these products, as he would rather know what and how much he is taking, but this situation seems ridiculous. It's another example of how the war on drugs and the cultural taboo against conscious altering actually makes things less safe. I'm sure most of those who take legal highs would purchase mdma or another established and relatively well understood drug if it was legal and as easily available, but instead they are taking something, possibly untested, safety profile unknown, and which they don't even know what is. And often it seems like they treat them even more carelessly because of the "legal" label.

[Alfa]

THC Pharm published an analysis of spice in December 2008. As a reaction, Austria banned Spice the same month. Germany banned the next month. And after that many countries followed.

Methylone was banned in the Netherlands 6 weeks after it became known to be the ingredient of the product explosion.

[akack2]

Never going to happen mate,from the horses mouth.