To Stop Designer Drugs, an Early Warning System Is Born

When she’s not reading High Times or combing through directories of Chinese chemical manufacturers, Jill Head, the supervisory chemist in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Special Testing and Research Laboratory, is replicating new designer drugs.

The Virginia lab where Head works is the center of an international effort to stop a multibillion-dollar market for what have become known as legal highs. These are synthetic drugs that duplicate the experiences of LSD, marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, and amphetamines. Because the lab-created compounds differ slightly in chemical structure from the illegal drugs they mimic, consumers of the drugs can claim their purchases from websites or head shops are legal. Many national governments have declared some of the new compounds illegal, but they have trouble keeping up. Since 2008 drugs with names like 2NE1, after a Korean girl band, and STS-135, which was NASA’s final space shuttle mission, have been popping up at a rate of one a week, according to the United Nations-affiliated International Narcotics Control Board.