The title
Radical overhaul to ban synthetic drugs is both extravagant and sensational. Either my interpretation of a
synthetic drug is too literal or unorthodox, and is not congruent with Australia's government's definition or there is a disparity between their definition and the more intuitive and conventional one I use. But it seems, to the chemistry neophyte like me, logically valid to define the term
synthetic drug thus:
a compound mostly or entirely synthesized by man with precursors naturally-derived or otherwise and does not occur in nature or as a precursor, intermediary, or final result of any known biosynthetic processes (to wit, LSD, MDMA, PCP).
Rather than there being a soi-disant "radical overhaul" of synthetic drug legislation, there is instead —insofar as the excerpt isn't just bravado or political wheedling—a "radical overhaul" of novel drugs that are the product of minute molecular changes and alterations to preexisting drugs for the purpose of circumventing drug laws. However, envisage a truly novel compound—not just some tweaked form of another drug—that is as molecularly dissimilar and incomparable to any hitherto existing compound as is sufficient to preclude it being called a derivative or analogue of some other compound. In the way that cocaine and ketamine are sufficiently dissimilar in molecular structure as to render arguments of one being a derivative of the other asinine and preposterous.
In this case, the new "radical" legislature could not be applicable and thus the drug would require the use of many meticulously conducted and laborious scientific studies to collect enough data or evidence for its being banned.I don't know if my objection is well-taken and valid, as I'm not an expert on Australia's law nor am I exactly a chemistry maven. The excerpt and its malapropros title just seems to have been constructed with the intent of seeming more substantive and consequential than reality allows it to be. And so I felt an urge to comment on it.
Therefore, this "radical overhaul" doesn't seem to bode well for the Shulgin and Nichols epigones who, since lacking the intelligence and expertise of their idols, can only modify the structures of existing drugs and lack the capacity to actually make something original and novel. But, what of those laudable few, say, David Nichols, the late Alexander Shulgin, and the late Albert Hoffmann who can synthesize unknown compounds and not just infinite dizygotic twins, so to say, of compounds (each roughly the same, but distinguishable)?
For those three and the presumably many more others tantamount in talent, the law (that is,
the law; not a law, or this law or that law, etc., but laws as they fundamentally all are) is ill-equipped to regulate their compounds without many thousands of dollars and extraordinary amounts of time to meticulously analyze and study the compound for enough evidence to ascertain and justify its appropriate scheduling and legal status.
