New drug fashions | Special reports | The Observer
The next Big High?
[FONT=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Attempts to dodge the Law meet cutting-edge science in new drug fashions [/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif] Carl Wilkinson
Sunday 21 April 2002
The Observer
[/FONT] Recently a handful of off-white tablets called Blue Mystic were found by French customs at La Chapelle in the Ardennes. The discovery was not a major drugs haul but it pointed to the possibility of a new, European, source of manufacture. Two months earlier three-and-a-half Blue Mystic tablets had been found in a London club’s amnesty bin. This could signal the birth of what may well be the drug of tomorrow and raises questions over how British laws might deal with it.
Blue Mystic or 2C-T-7 as it’s officially known (street names include T-7, 7-Up and Tripstacy) originated in California, designed as a possible therapeutic drug. It has since found underground notoriety on the US dance scene, and been held responsible for a number of teen deaths. Now it is finding its way into Britain
.Is it legal? This is where things get complicated. In the US, press concern centred on the fact that T-7 seemed to be perfectly legal. As for Britain, it appears to slip down a dark alley of blurred legality. When The Observer approached the Home Office and the Department of Health’s Medicine Control Agency, the bodies which deal, respectively, with the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and the Medicines Act 1968 – the two pillars of British drug laws – neither had heard of T-7.
After some checking, 2C-T-7 was found not to be a controlled substance under the Misuse of Drugs Act and therefore legal to possess. Nor is it listed under the Medicines Act: it ‘does not hold marketing authorisations in the UK and has not been licensed for use in clinical trials’, says the MCA. This means that while illegal to supply as a medicinal substance, it could be supplied – as it has been through websites in the US – as an ‘experimental, raw material’ of a ‘non-consumptive, non-ingestive, non-food, non-culinary, non-medicinal nature’.
But what makes T-7 important – besides pointing to trends in the creation and use of illicit substances – is how it highlights (along with other similar substances) the rather clumsy, arbitrary nature of British drug laws and points up the laws’ grey area. Ecstasy (MDMA) is outlawed as a Class A substance; T-7 is completely uncontrolled and borderline legal; Prozac is heralded as a wonder drug; yet the three drugs alter the brain’s chemistry in similar ways.
In the US there is a curiously sloppy amendment to their Anti-Drug Abuse Act (1986) called the Controlled Substance Analog Enforcement Act (or more commonly, the Designer Drug Act). This law was brought in as a catch-all to mop up any future substances with compositions or effects similar to currently outlawed drugs, which might otherwise slip through current laws. Under this act, T-7 could theoretically be outlawed if it is proved to be an analogue, but whether the law is actually applicable – considering the wording of the vending website’s disclaimer – remains to be seen. There is no British equivalent of the Designer Drug Act, but it is accepted that all hallucinogens are automatically classified as Class A drugs.
The search for new drugs, and especially ones that tiptoe around current laws, is ongoing. Though now it is felt by many pharmacologists that the creation of new substances from scratch has become far less likely simply through the exhaustion of possibilities. What is more likely is for a previously discovered substance, created through bona fide medical research, to be uncovered in an obscure academic journal and recreated in an underground lab in much the same way as T-7.
As those on the fringes of the drug-using pack continue their search for something new, the Law has difficulty keeping up with the underground chemists. There have been attempts to speed up official recognition of new substances. In 1993 the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) was set up in Lisbon. It is meant as an early warning system that keeps track of the drug situation across Europe and provides an information-sharing platform for individual countries within the EU.
But despite these attempts to cover all bases, drug trends are fluid and unpredictable. No matter how distasteful some might find it, fashion works in drugs as much as it works in other ‘consumer’ areas. What is big this year may well be shunned the next. Or, alternatively, this year’s drug craze could be the next decade-defining drug. What is certain, though, is that wherever grey areas in the Law exist, someone, somewhere, will be exploiting them.
