Report on characterisation of New Psychoactive Substances (NPS) : identification and characterisation of new drugs including physicochemical properties

The main objective of this report is to give an overview of the analytical strategies and modern laboratory techniques needed to perform a fast unambiguous identification and characterisation of unknown organic chemical substances such as New Psychoactive Substances (NPS). The "routine" analytical methods applied in Member States control laboratories are generally efficient for recognition of already known substances. However, the chemical identification of many unknown substances found by customs and suspected to be NPS requires the use of more sophisticated analytical techniques such as Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and High Resolution Mass Spectrometry (HR-MS). These approaches have been tested in the laboratory of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the efficiency of the proposed approach has been successfully demonstrated in several study cases. There is a need for developing methods for fast recognition and identification of New Psychoactive Substances (NPS) and unknown chemicals especially because of the increasing possibility to purchase these substances via internet. Numerous products imported from non-EU countries are often mis-declared as 'bath salts', 'ferilizers', or as 'research chemicals' and may in fact contain so-called 'legal highs', analogues or precursors of known psychoactive substances or of licit or illicit (medical) drugs. The chemical identification of these new substances is a challenge for forensic and customs laboratories. Moreover, physicochemical, toxicological information or psychoactive properties are not known since no data is available for these compounds. Customs, at the forefront of control of imported products need access and sharing of data on a broader range of new chemicals including eventually NPS or precursors. Electronic platforms such as European Customs Inventory of Chemical Substances (ECICS) or SINAPSE, a free web communication platform provided by the European Commission offering tools to promote expertise in EU policy making (already used by the Customs Laboratories European Network (CLEN)) have been suggested as potential repository of such information for EU customs laboratories. Furthermore, the use of certain seized materials as possible common analytical standards after their appropriate chemical characterisation would help the routine control work of customs laboratories. There remains a need of fine-tuning for harmonisation of proposed Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and completion with other analytical methodologies, as well as setting up efficient channels and protocols of communication and sharing of data based on electronic format as already proposed in the present document. These aspects will be thoroughly examined during the next meeting of the CLEN/TAXUD working group on determination of NPS and unknown substances that will be hosted by EMCDDA in Lisbon on 5 and 6 February 2015. This meeting will also examine the possibilities for a more integrated data based exploitation of NPS uses chemoinformatic format and tools. Computer-aided modelling systems based on the similarity principle of chemical structures can be proposed to facilitate the classification of chemical substances. This will also facilitate the classification of NPS in one of the chemical families (i.e. phenethylamines, tryptamines, and cathinones), to be reported to EMCDDA through the Early Warning System (EWS).