Synthetic drugs have been making people do the darndest things. A new synthetic drug in Florida, called “Flakka,” for example, has seen a man violate a tree while calling himself “Thor,” made another impale himself on a fence, and has sent others into mad episodes of paranoia.
The problem with Flakka is a problem with synthetic drugs, in general. In order to dodge the law, chemists continue churning out new drugs. These new drugs in turn, often have unknown effects, and put lives in danger with their unknown dosages.
And it turns out that even some chemists in China who are fueling the synthetic drug problem don’t themselves know what the drugs do—let alone what would be a safe dosage.
Nicola Davison, a freelance journalist in Shanghai, recently visited a couple of these Chinese chemists, and documented her encounters in a May 1 article in The Guardian.
One of them was a chubby woman in her 30s who ran her lab from a nearly empty office building near the edge of Shanghai. What she told the interviewer is something definitive of the entire synthetic drug problem.
“We know nothing about the performance side,” she said. “We are just chemists.”
