BENGALURU: After ganja, the city police are now looking into arresting people selling synthetic drugs — created using manmade chemicals rather than natural ingredients. Senior police officers and doctors dealing with drug addiction cases are now trying to understand and research on new entries of such drugs into the market.
Speaking to City Express, Mohan Kumar, Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP), Women and Narcotics Squad, says, “The number of young adults getting addicted to synthetic drugs is appalling. The information we get from parents, or many times from addicts themselves, on the kind of such drugs in the market is shocking.”
The department is now working on gathering more information on such drugs and train their juniors in identifying such drugs, which look just like small tablets, but also can easily be mistook for routine medications.
“Earlier, we used to get drugs like ecstasy, heroin, cocaine, hash LSD, codeine, ife, ephedrine and marijuana, but now there are different compositions, which reportedly have more than 50 chemicals mixed in. We need to understand these drugs better ourselves,” says another senior officer.
Doctors finding it challenging to identify drugs
Doctors in the city dealing with drug addiction cases say there are numerous synthetic drugs entering the market, and even finding out their compositions has become a challenge for them.“There are many young adults coming to us with synthetic drug addictions. It is definitely a challenge to treat them effectively without knowing what they have taken. Many times, reports also don’t show exact compositions,” says Dr Pratima Murthy, director, Centre for Addiction Medicine, NIMHANS.
Though K2 or Spice are commonly seen synthetic drugs, doctors claim to be seeing a rise in new kinds of chemical compositions, which even labs are finding difficult to identify. “There are many young adults who come with emergency cases of psychotic breakdowns and acute withdrawals with the use of synthetic cannabis and synthetic opioids. But detecting the exact compositions has been a challenge,” says Dr A Jagadish of Abhaya Hospital. When patients arrive at an emergency room with a suspected overdose from synthetic cannabinoids, an effective diagnosis — which includes a drug test — is crucial in determining how to treat them. But because new synthetic cannabinoids are created in labs almost every week, doctors and drug test manufacturers simply can’t keep up.
Explaining this, a doctor, under condition of anonymity, said, that even experienced doctors and forensic toxicologists in the city find it difficult to identify these drugs. Synthetic cannabinoid mixtures have so many new chemicals in them that doctors simply can't test for them all. “Even our best efforts are no match for the rate that new drugs are appearing on the streets. When someone comes in with an emergency - like a psychotic breakdown - it becomes extremely difficult to start immediate treatment without knowing the composition of drugs in the body,” the doctor said.
Meanwhile, Dr Mahesh Gowda of Spanda Rehabilitation Hospital, said, "We don’t really call it 'synthetic marijuana' now because these drugs act so differently from marijuana, despite stimulating the brain’s cannabinoid receptors. “What you’re using now are new chemicals that no one has ever tested to see what the effect are on human beings.”