Legal dance drug faces ban amid fears over side-effects

[Lunar Loops]

This article come from The Guardian (UK). The EMCDDA report that it refers to (along with annex 1 & 2 of the report) can be found in the Piperazines section of the Drug Information archive.

Legal dance drug faces ban amid fears over side-effects

Alexandra Topping
Monday June 18, 2007
The Guardian

A legal dance drug known as legal XTC, Jax, Pep Twisted or Pep Love could be banned across Europe following a report from the EU's drugs monitor calling for tighter controls because of the substance's side-effects.
A joint report from Europol and the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) warns that the substance, benzylpiperazine, which is available from websites and "head candy" shops, can cause a series of negative side-effects. Its authors say: "Users have reported a range of adverse reactions such as vomiting, headache, palpitations, poor appetite, stomach pains/nausea, anxiety, insomnia, strange thoughts, mood swings, confusion, irritability and tremors. Some of these occurred in the 'comedown' period, and some persisted for 24 hours after use."
The report says that due to its "stimulant properties, risk to health and lack of medical benefits" benzylpiperazine, or BZP, should be a controlled substance.
At present, it is not illegal in Europe to take BZP, a drug sometimes marketed as a "safe" alternative to ecstasy. A loophole in the law also allows retailers to sell the drug as a soil fertiliser, marked "not for consumption". It can be bought from websites, many operating from New Zealand, where "herbal highs" are a multimillion-dollar industry and 20% of the population has taken the drug.
Roumen Sedefov, the report's project manager, said there had been concern that banning BZP could lead people to use more dangerous drugs. He said there was not much data available but that they had "worked on a precautionary principle".
The European commission has six weeks to decide whether to follow the EMCDDA's recommendation.
David MacKintosh, a policy adviser at the London Drugs Policy Forum, said the monitoring centre had made the right decision. "It's a substance that not much is known about but that is being sold in the thousands. It's not regulated at all."
According to John Ramsey, a toxicologist at St George's hospital in London, websites selling BZP could already be a step ahead of the regulators. Some sites have been advertising "BZP-free" stimulants as the next generation of legal alternatives. Tests on the pills, known as "London Underground", showed one tablet containing BZP, but another with a compound found previously only in a Bulgarian cough suppressant. "It hardly inspires you with confidence," said Mr Ramsey. "The drugs are untested. I imagine they will sell anything they can make a buck out of."

Reputation Comments on this post:

Thanks for sharing the news.

[Abrad]

"London Underground", showed one tablet containing BZP, but another with a compound found previously only in a Bulgarian cough suppressant.

Anyone know what they are referring to here?

[Durd1e]

said Mr Ramsey. "The drugs are untested. I imagine they will sell anything they can make a buck out of."

Basic economics means you dont kill off your customers.

Reputation Comments on this post:

Good point

[toe]

Originally Posted by Abrad

Anyone know what they are referring to here?

Ooo! ooo! Google glaucine hydrobromide and browse through a couple of pages worth of links. Most of what you will come up with are commercial links, but-

It evolves from a cough expectorant into the next generation of sexytime partypants pills.

In Pubmed it says it was previously classified under "Methyl Esters", if that means anything to you chemistry people.

The chem is the subject at least one paper I can only access the title page to at maik.ru

It also appears in a bibliography that was skimmed and didn't *seem* to hold much appeal.

I have a thousand trained monkeys who, given a thousand typewriters, could probably translate scholarly articles from Russ->Eng. Since their primary background & training is in philology, though, they would gracefully back away in the likely event that there are any Russian speaking monkey chemists around.

Assuming the articles are accessible or even relevant, that is. . .

Reputation Comments on this post:

Thanks for the info!

[Abrad]

Thanks toe. After a quick google search I came up with this.
So if I understand correctly LU are putting a relatively unknown opioid into their pills.
Isn't that just marvellous!

[Bajeda]

Originally Posted by Durd1e

said Mr Ramsey. "The drugs are untested. I imagine they will sell anything they can make a buck out of."

Basic economics means you dont kill off your customers.

The point is that the suppliers really have no idea whether their products are safe, and whether they are likely to hurt or kill their customers.

Some of these companies show a remarkable lack of ethical standards, though I wouldn't generalize this to all legal ecstasy alternative vendors of course.

[starboy]

Hi

Sorry I may have missed the connection here, but how does anybody know that glaucine is what LU are using?

Is this just a guess?

If they are and it is a medicine with known risk profile, then one could postulate that they do have some idea of the likelihood of an adverse event?

With BZP we had a good idea of what it was going to do from its past history as a metabolite of antidepressant trelibet. TFMPP didn't share the same history, but if this product did contain a previously marketed medicine then it would appear that there has been some attention paid to selecting something with some history as opposed to a completely new untested drug analogue.

[Abrad]

I have emailed the journalist responsible for the article. Will post any reply I get here.

[toe]

Originally Posted by starboy

Hi

Sorry I may have missed the connection here, but how does anybody know that glaucine is what LU are using?

Is this just a guess?

Oh, yes- it was just a guess, Sorry. Implying certainty was not the intention. Process of elimination, going through the ingredients of cough syrups on a Bulgarian pharmaceutical site. Glaucine was the only ingredient that was both unfamiliar to me and did not pop up under the formularies for sites in any other countries. So it was an educated guess, but yes- just a guess.

Toe will now go and write, I am not a chemist 1000 times.

[Lunar Loops]

SWIS is presuming that the article is referring to London Underground's "Neuro Blast Pure Energy" and "Head Candy E-sensory" pills which are marketed as being BZP free and containing varying amounts of what they refer to as "D.O.M.S. Proprietary Herbal Blend" ( as discussed here: http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/sho...highlight=DOMS ). It would be very interesting to find out exactly what this "blend" contains.

Is it just a co-incidence that D.O.M.S stands for Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness?