USA/Deutschland. Data-Sharing Website May Speed Response to New Illegal Drugs - The ‘NPS Data Hub’ will help forensic chemists identify new types of fentanyl and other narcotics more quickly.
USA/Deutschland. Data-Sharing Website May Speed Response to New Illegal Drugs - The ‘NPS Data Hub’ will help forensic chemists identify new types of fentanyl and other narcotics more quickly.
The drug overdose epidemic currently gripping the nation is so tenacious in part because it’s being driven by fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that comes in many forms. Each form has a slightly different chemical structure, and clandestine chemists are constantly cooking up new ones. From a law-enforcement perspective, this makes fentanyl a moving target and very difficult to control.
To help with this situation, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the German Federal Criminal Police Office (the Bundeskriminalamt, or BKA) and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency have launched a website where forensic chemists can share data on new drug variants, also called drug analogs. Described in Forensic Chemistry, the NPS Data Hub (NPS stands for Novel Psychoactive Substances) includes the chemical structures of drug analogs and their chemical signatures, which are the keys to identifying them in the lab. (National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), USA, 05.07.2018)