 is a prodrug that becomes LSD inside the body after the removal of two carbon and one oxygen atom. And because they don't fit recognisable compounds for recreational drugs, they've been very hard for law enforcement to detect and seize. As Dr Ponce puts it, this feature has allowed drug traffickers "to trick enforcement agencies". Writing for The Conversation , Dr Ponce explained: "Police forces need reference samples to compare the drug with, or advanced equipment to discover its molecular structure. "Since the list of these compounds is not known and minute chemical changes can lead to different patterns to be analysed, these new drugs are easy to miss." They're also hard){kind=link}
A NEW generation of illicit street drugs are virtually undetectable to authorities and only start working once they’re digested and broken down.
Called prodrugs, their particular molecular structure makes use of our body’s metabolism, meaning they work differently to typical recreational drugs.
Most illicit drugs interact with brain cell receptors and last for a short amount of time, before being transformed into inactive or less active chemicals that are flushed out of the body through urine, according to Julio de Carvalho Ponce, a lecturer in forensic science at the University of Winchester.
But these new generation substances only are only converted into drugs once they’ve been broken down by enzymes in the digestive system or gone through other chemical reactions in the body.
These reactions will remove a small part of the substance’s molecular structure, after which the prodrugs begin to taken an effect.