Do Punishment for Addiction Work?,

Do Punishment for Addiction Work?, Punishment for Addiction Does not Work
As was one of the original purposes for distributing designer drugs, it’s difficult for law enforcement agents to prosecute that which they know little about. If a substance has not been scheduled, a law enforcement agent cannot, in most cases, pair its sale or use with a punishment. Creators and dealers of designer drugs stay ahead of the law enforcement curve by periodically changing the chemical structure of the designer drugs that they sell in order to evade legal repercussions. It seems as though no matter how quickly the documentation of known designer drugs and the scheduling of them moves, the development of new designer drugs moves even more quickly.

The term “research chemicals,” which was once just clever marketing jargon, has muddled the issue further. The term might seem scientific and safe by association to users when the drugs are anything but. Meanwhile, the term might throw off law enforcement agents or others (employers, Google, SEO professionals who help to get the websites that sell these drugs noticed, parents, teachers, coaches, etc.) who are under the impression that research chemicals are somehow different from designer drugs.

When a research chemical is finally discovered, studied and legally banned, another research chemical soon emerges if it hasn’t already. Creators of these chemicals make a point to create a drug that is different enough from the structure of the preceding drug to avoid legal repercussions. In the US, the Federal Analogue Act of the Controlled Substance Act of 1986 was written in an attempt to ban these designer drugs before they were even created by banning the manufacturing, selling or possessing of any drug that was considered to be substantially similar to the chemistry of a Schedule I or Schedule II substance. “Substantially similar,” however, is a gray area.