ANTWERP, Belgium—When the housing market crashed in 2008, David Llewellyn’s construction business went with it. Casting around for a new gig, he decided to commercialize something he’d long done as a hobby: making drugs.
But the 49-year-old Scotsman didn’t go into the illegal drug trade. Instead, he entered the so-called “legal high” business—a burgeoning industry producing new psychoactive powders and pills that are marketed as “not for human consumption.”
Mr. Llewellyn, a self-described former crack addict, started out making mephedrone, a stimulant also known as Meow Meow that was already popular with the European clubbing set. Once governments began banning it earlier this year, Mr. Llewellyn and a chemistry-savvy partner started selling something they dubbed Nopaine—a stimulant they concocted by tweaking the molecular structure of the attention-deficit drug Ritalin.
(Read more from online.wsj.com)
According to my friend, esoteridactyl, this wouldn’t fly in the U.S. because substances are banned based on their effect, instead of on their chemical composition.
well, sort of. federal law is extremely vague, surprise surprise. in chemistry, a structural analog is a substance that is identical to another, but with only molecule or functional group substituted. but the fed “chemical analog” law basically outlaws anything structurally similar OR anything similar in fun-ness ;)
similar in fun-ness ;) I wonder if there are any non-chemical activities which might be outlawed under this clause.