More than 130 new designer drugs found

An explosion of designer drugs in the past decade has seen more than 130 new substances identified at New Zealand’s borders between 2014 and last year.

Drug manufacturers were increasingly ‘‘tweaking’’ their products to avoid detection when entering the country, the Institute of Environmental Health and Science (ESR) said.

ESR senior scientist Cameron Johnson said manufacturers would take the structure of a drug they knew worked, such as methamphetamine or MDMA, and try to replicate the effects by changing parts of the chemical structure. That could be dangerous for users, he said, as the effects and risks were unknown.

It also created challenges for scientists responsible for detecting illegal substances at borders.

New drugs were being manufactured so quickly, there wasn’t always something to compare a substance with so it could be identified, Johnson said. ‘‘We might suspect that it’s something controlled or psychoactive or potentially harmful, but we can’t say definitively what it is.’’

Johnson was leading a project that aimed to solve that problem, linking up the various parts of ESR’s drug-testing capabilities.

If ESR was seeing substances at the border, similar drugs would be making their way into society, he said.

The project involved sharing knowledge across all of ESR’s drug-testing capabilities, from the toxicology team and criminal case work to police seizures, and updating libraries when new substances were found.

‘‘Not only are we updating our capabilities, but also we’re very aware of what the new drugs are and what the new trends might be,’’ Johnson said. ‘‘They change very quickly and if you don’t know they’re out there, you’re not really looking for them.’’

He said while manufacturers would carry on developing new products, the rate was likely to slow, and public awareness of the harms of synthetic drugs could dampen demand.