By now you've heard that "spice" and "bath salts" are designer drugs and not seasoning or soaks. But what about 2C-E? DOM? 2C-I? 2C-T-7? 3C-Bromo-Dragonfly? 2C-Bromo-Fly?
Those names -- and many more -- are just the tip of the iceberg of new designer drugs. Many of them are easily available online; others can be created in home laboratories from freely available recipes. Makers of these drugs, some of which are not yet illegal, have been staying a step ahead of the law.
"We are trying to keep ahead of it, but it is not always easy," David Shurtleff, PhD, acting deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), tells WebMD.
The Drug Enforcement Administration has the same problem, says DEA Special Agent Gary Boggs.
"We have a whole staff of scientists whose job is to look at these different chemicals and at whether they are being abused," Boggs tells WebMD. "Some were developed only as research chemicals, not for human use. But unscrupulous individuals decided they would rather make money than be concerned for public safety."
Knowing the difference between one of these similar-sounding drugs and another can be the difference between life and death.
Earlier this year, a 19-year-old Minnesota teen died and 10 others were injured after taking large doses of 2C-E -- a drug with far more potent and dangerous effects than the 2C-I they thought they were taking at a spring break party. The 21-year-old who supplied the drug -- police found him unconscious in a snow bank -- has been charged with third-degree murder.
Last May, in Oklahoma, two young people died and six were injured when they took what they thought was 2C-E, but which seems actually to have been the extra-dangerous 3C-bromo-dragonfly.
Most of the new designer drugs have psychedelic properties, although many have mixed features of psychedelics and other drug classes such as stimulants or amphetamines. They are dangerous for users who don't know what they're getting -- or getting into. And it's casting a pall over the renaissance of scientific research into legitimate uses for psychedelic drugs.
Both of these dangers worry Purdue University pharmacologist David E. Nichols, PhD, a leading figure in psychedelic research.
"These newer so-called 'legal' highs, we really don't know anything about them. They have never been tested. People are playing a game of Russian roulette with these things," Nichols tells WebMD. "These are proliferating now. A lot of them came from my lab. We may have done one or two rat studies, but we know nothing about what these compounds do in humans."
What's new about the new drugs? In one sense they are not terribly new.
"A lot of these drugs have been around for a while, and many of them are derivatives of existing compounds," Shurtleff tells WebMD. "Take this 2C-E that resulted in the death in Minnesota, for example. That is the third, or fourth, or fifth of a line of compounds coming from ecstasy or MDMA."