Are synthetic drugs new?Lab-made or “designer” drugs have been around for decades. LSD is synthetic, and so is methamphetamine. But what’s new is the dizzying scale and variety of synthetic intoxicants and their increasing dominance of the drug market.How many synthetic drugs are there?More than 1,460 new psychoactive substances have been recorded by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime since 2013, tripling in just over a decade. And new compounds are popping up with staggering speed, leaving law enforcement scrambling to keep up. “Once a month or every other month, we’re encountering something that we’ve never seen before,” said Ed Sisco, a research chemist who tracks street drugs for the federal government. One reason traffickers keep inventing new drugs is to stay ahead of the law: the moment a compound is identified and made illegal, narcochemists—sometimes aided by artificial intelligence—tweak its molecular structure to get around the law. “Each time we get rid of one substance,” said forensic scientist Alex Krotulski, “they come up with something more potent.”
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