Humans for some reason like to get high. It would be great if we could expand our minds without any hangovers, car accidents, unwanted Internet posts of what stupid things we did or an early death. Up until recently, there was a fairly stable number of products which could give us our high. Included among these alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine, mushrooms, LSD any many other substances. Every few years a new one would pop up and like lemmings intent on proving Darwin right, we gladly tried these.

Recently chemists, with help of sophisticated  chemical compounding devices, have been able to produce vast numbers of new substances. The way it works is relatively simple: These shady chemists figure out what the chemical structure of say the active ingredient in marijuana (THC) is. They then synthesize it in the lab and add a carbon chain or two and voila! a new legal high is created!

Legal? How can that be? Well, they market it not for human consumption instead perhaps as plant food, but it is found on sites where experienced users read between the lines to buy the stuff. The FDA finds out and by law has to determine that the substance is dangerous, and really marketed for human consumption. A trial occurs where long chemical names bore the jury to death and hopefully, the site is shut down and the product banned.

The next step is that some other chemist changes the chemical ever so slightly and the new chemical-structurally very similar to the old one- is now legal until the process occurs over again. Thus, the good guys are playing a game of cat and mouse with Internet chemists based here or perhaps say in Pakistan.

At this point there’s not much the government can do about it short of shutting down all internet sites which sell chemicals (obviously not feasable). There are task forces locally and nationally being created to address this growing issue.

Many of the users are teenagers, who are adept at searching the Internet for things they want and who also like to experiment with drugs. If your teenager comes home high and you don’t know what he took, be aware that it might just be one of these substances. If you are concerned about his or her behavior and the possibility of drug abuse, talk with your doctor.