The increasing number of synthetic compounds that are similar to traditional drugs either in their structure and/or in function poses a major challenge to the legislature and public health. They are called new psychoactive substances (NPS) for which universal understanding of their pharmacological properties is still inadequate. These compounds are easily accessible also via the internet, often misleading due to the advertised legality, therefore their usage can pose serious consequences for potential users because of the resellers who put faulty or deficient labels on the packaging to effectively avoid legal control.
This research work is a review of the situation and the development of trends of occurrence of new psychoactive substances between 2014 and 2017 in Slovenia. We initially focused on the five most extensive groups of NPS that were most representative throughout the years: synthetic cannabinoids, synthetic cathinones, phenetylamines, tryptamines and synthetic opioids. The latter, in particular, experienced the biggest rebirth in the last year of the research when the most new synthetic opioids appeared. We reviewed the work of international organizations working in the field of drugs, also NPS, and public health related to them, and we also became acquainted with organizations and policies in the field of drug control in Slovenia. Greater attention was placed on the annual reports of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), which provided an overview of the status of NPS at the European level which we later on compared with the one in Slovenia.
With this research work we wanted to present an insight of the situation in the field of NPS in the Republic of Slovenia and to find individual groups of NPS, which appeared most frequently. With data provided by the National Institute of Public Health (NIJZ), we examined a four-year review of seized and collected NPS, the ones that appear in biological material of the poisoned individuals and we also monitored the increase in the number of representatives in individual NPS groups.
It is of great concern that the total number of present NPS in Slovenia from the beginning of 2014 to the end of 2017 increased by as much as 200 new compounds. The increase was the highest between 2014 and 2015, all groups of NPS, with the exception of aminoindanes, piperazine derivatives and plants, including their extracts, in the period covered by our survey, had the number of representatives increased. The number was the highest with synthetic cannabinoids, which were also the group which NPS were most often seized by the police, namely 34 of those cases. Together with synthetic cathinones (51 collected samples) they were the most commonly collected group of compounds (30 collected samples) at the assigned collection points and both groups throughout the years gathered most of the new compounds – synthetic cannabinoids 44 in total, synthetic cathinones 49 new compounds in total. The final number of all collected NPS during the four-year period landed at 201 collected NPS, total of seized NPS was 136.
Despite a small proportion of all drugs in the Slovenian market, the increasing occurence of alternative synthetic opioids (their number increased the most between years 2016 and 2017 – 14 new compounds), this group currently poses a serious risk to users' health and therefore requires more rigorous monitoring of competent authorities.
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