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China struggling to police psychoactive drugs

Xinhua, March 20, 2016 Adjust font size:

Increasing abuse of psychoactive substances, especially among young people, is challenging Chinese police and legislators more used to controlling traditional drugs like heroin and cocaine.

China has made great progress in policing drug trafficking across its borders but it lacks experience in controlling synthetic substances produced in labs inside the country, a top academic has warned.

The huge diversity of psychoactive substances makes it hard for the authorities to place all of them under surveillance, said Li Wenjun, with the People's Public Security University, in an interview published in Sunday's China Youth Daily.

China's list of controlled psychotropic medications covers many commonly-abused drugs including cathinone and ketamine, but slight changes in formula can mean the drugs are no longer classed as controlled and therefore escape surveillance, Li said.

The development of new psychoactive drugs is so fast that the list of controlled substance is struggling to keep up.

By the end of 2014, 541 new psychoactive substances had been reported to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes, 69 of them in 2014, according to that office's 2015 World Drug Report.

In October, China adopted a regulation on the control of narcotics for non-medical use and psychotropic medications. A total of 116 psychoactive substances were listed as controlled substances.

The list not only includes psychoactive substances that are under international control or widely abused in China but also those that are produced in China but abused in other countries.

Li suggested that the administration shorten the review of controlled substances.

The three months that the expert panel is given to complete assessment on the abuse risk of a psychoactive substance may be too slow to respond to invention of new drugs, she said.

The academic also called on the government to increase awareness of psychoactive substances abuse among young people.

Her research indicates about one third of teenage users of synthetic drugs were told the drug was not addictive when they first accessed it, with dealers often claiming that a product was safe and legal.

Schools should allocate more resources to educating students about narcotics and better preparing them to identify and refuse drugs, Li said.

As of July, almost 60 percent of the 3.23 million registered drug users in China were 35 or younger. Endi