On June 6, 2017, one of the nation’s largest databases of chemical signatures, NIST, announced that it had added 25,000 chemical signatures to its already massive database of 240,000 signatures. NIST stores the molecular “fingerprints” of various natural and man-made compounds and substances.
Why does this matter, and what does it have to do with drug charges?
NIST stores, in addition to the chemical signature of foods and other everyday items, information on man-made chemical compounds used to produce both legal (prescription, namely) and illegal drugs. The addition of some 25,000 chemical signatures now means that NIST has the ability to identify a whole range of synthetic and semi-synthetic drugs and drug compounds. NIST makes it data available to law enforcement agencies, which, in turn, means that labs that test substances seized by police and suspected to be illegal drugs now have the ability to test for a much wider range of illicit substances.
So, for example, a synthetic cannabinoid or synthetic opioid that could previously not have been detected or identified by a state lab potentially now can be. As I have previously discussed, the law lags science by decades in most areas (and by half-centuries or more in some instances), so the Government had struggled to identify, and then prohibit synthetic drugs with the same pace that such drugs appeared on the shadow market. When the Government would identify the active ingredient or compound in, say, synthetic marijuana or bath salts, the chemists who manufactured these drugs would simply change the formula and the race would begin again. The Governments frustration led to the establishment of “catch-all” type provisions that outlawed unlisted (in the existing Schedule or Penalty Groups) “mimetic agents”—substances that were designed to produce the same effect as outlawed substances. (For example, in September of 2016, the Texas Commissioner of the Department of Health Services issued amendments making mimetic agents of UR-144, XLR-11 and other common synthetic cannabinoids illegal, as well as mimetics of fentanyl.
The obvious downside to NIST’s additions—drug arrests will rise, incarceration for drug offenses will rise, etc.—is inevitable. However, there is a positive side to these additions.
With the increased ability to determine the molecular makeup of a specific drug, the ability to develop effective treatment for overdoses on that drug are now possible. This could (and indeed should) lead to a decrease in the number of overdoses and fatal overdoses on synthetic drugs.