In 1971, President Richard Nixon began what became known as the war on drugs. That year, 6,771 Americans died of overdose. In 2024, around 80,000 did, an increase of nearly 70% from just a decade earlier.
What has changed are the drugs. In the 1970s, the main targets — coca, poppies, marijuana — came from farms. Today, most illegal drugs are made in unregulated labs around the globe, from big enterprises in China and India to single-person operations run from apartments.
The drugs include fentanyl, but it is just one of hundreds of synthetic, ever more potent compounds known as novel psychoactive substances. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime now lists 1,446 new psychoactive substances, up from 643 a decade ago.
Experts refer to this trend as the ‘digitisation of drugs’. Today, with the internet, virtually any esoteric molecular structure or chemistry study that is published online is instantly available to armchair chemists and illicit drug suppliers the world over.
In 2001, AM-2201 — a lab-made molecule that mimicked properties of cannabis but with greater potency — was discovered as a drug to treat pain, glaucoma, epilepsy, nausea, AIDS wasting, multiple sclerosis and other potential ailments. A pain drug never materialised, but within several years, illicit drug-makers had copied and manipulated AM-2201 to create the basis for an illegal, addictive and sometimes deadly synthetic compound called Spice
Dr Laura Bohn, an associate dean of research, Morsani College of Medicine in University of South Florida, who develops new opiate molecules for medical research, described the internet as the “cookbook” for the drug trade, offering “thousands of papers, proceedings and books with different molecules.”
It has also made the drug supply dangerously unpredictable. Compounds are now mixed, substituted and adulterated almost continuously. A recent study from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which tests illicit drugs from around the country, found that 42% of samples that contain fentanyl include five or more psychoactive compounds, up from 23% three years ago.
The supply is so reliably polluted that even careful users like Raydon are operating blind. “You have almost no chance of knowing what you’ve got,” said Edward Sisco, a research chemist at NIST.
For scientists, the new reality is all too clear: The best-intentioned research discovery, if published, could quickly give rise to the next deadly street drug. “We had no idea these compounds would be used illicitly,” said Prof Alexandros Makriyannis, Medicinal Chemistry at Northeastern University, Boston, and director of the Center for Drug Discovery there. “It didn’t occur to us.”
In 2001, Makriyannis published his discovery of AM-2201, a lab-made molecule that mimicked properties of cannabis but with greater potency. The patent for AM-2201 — a chemical name taken from Makryiannis’ initials — suggested that it might be used to develop a drug to treat “pain, glaucoma, epilepsy, nausea, AIDS wasting, multiple sclerosis” and other potential ailments.
A pain drug never materialised, but within several years, illicit drug-makers had copied and manipulated AM-2201 to create the basis for an illegal, addictive and sometimes deadly synthetic compound called Spice.
As novel drugs continued to emerge, well-intentioned scientists tried a new tactic to get ahead of the problem: They would try to predict what deadly drugs might emerge next. This is what drug experts call ‘prophetic’ research. But as scientists are discovering, illicit drug-makers can pirate this literature, too.