W-18 and U-47700 are the latest designer drugs among thousands created and smuggled into the US that have yet to be outlawed as controlled substances

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Adolphe Joseph, 34, is serving a 10-year prison sentence for smuggling fentanyl – an opiate 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine.

But he has not been charged for the nearly three pounds of a synthetic opiate more than 10,000 times as powerful as morphine investigators found in his South Florida home last Fall. Nor will he be, say prosecutors.

W-18 is one of thousands of synthetic opiates that is not scheduled as a controlled substance and thus not subject to criminal drug penalties, and one of a handful of drugs that law enforcement officials and scientists say they have seen in increasing numbers in the last six months, as use, abuse and overdose deaths continues to rise.

Another, U-47700, which is seven to eight times stronger than morphine, has been the source of overdoses over the past year in at least 10 states since the first US incident was discovered in Knoxville, Tennessee, in June 2015.

The UN’s war on drugs is a failure. Is it time for a different approach? Read more

Barry Logan, the executive director for the Center of Forensic Science and Education, said his lab has been able to track down 17 overdose cases of U-47700. And several other overdose deaths and hospitalizations have been identified by local law enforcement in Florida and northern Texas.

Even self-described drug connoisseurs are airing their concerns about W-18 on online forums.

“I don’t think any sane drug user would ever consider playing with this substance,” said a man identified as Trippman on Bluelight.org. “Sounds incredibly dangerous, even for those with opioid tolerances.”

But it’s unclear exactly how pervasive these drugs are. Overdoses on synthetic opioids “may be reported as a heroin overdose death unless the medical examiners dig down deep”, said Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman Russ Bare. He said forensics scientists often will not take steps to search for existence of a specific compound unless an individual overdoses near drug paraphernalia, or there is other environmental evidence.

The prevalence of these drugs is “substantially under-reported”, he said.

The uptick in overdoses and drug seizures involving opiates like W-18 and U-47700 follows actions taken by the Chinese government to criminalize more than 100 chemicals on 1 October 2015, according to Bare.

Once more traditional synthetic drugs were outlawed, chemists looked to more novel substances instead.

“There was a little bit of a shift at that point,” said Bare, of the kinds of drugs coming into America.

The banned chemicals included the makings of acetyl fentanyl, an illicit version or analogue of the powerful prescription painkiller fentanyl that is drastically exacerbating the opioid epidemic in the US. Flakka, a cathinone similar to bath salts, was also banned.

Jim Hall, a prominent South Florida epidemiologist, said the chatter he’s been hearing from experts and law enforcement about U-47700 in the last few weeks reminds him of the beginning of the Flakka epidemic. Flakka caused panic in the Broward County area over the last few years due to high fatal overdose rates and its affects of causing violent hallucinations paired with superhuman strength.

The Chinese government outlawed the chemicals after Florida DEA agents visited with officials in China. Since the ban, Flakka has all but disappeared according to law enforcement.

My uncle and heroin: ‘What surprises me most – you have no teeth’ | Sarah Resnick Read more

New synthetic opiates have proven more difficult to keep out of the country, said Bare. In May 2015, when the Department of Justice bumped acetyl fentanyl up to a schedule I controlled substance, chemists made slight alterations to produce new, but functionally similar analogues.

“They tweak a chemical here, add a molecule there,” said Bare, of chemists staying one step ahead of the law.

After the ban in China, chemists began to produce drugs that weren’t fentanyl, but claimed to have similar effects, at an increased rate, said Bare.

Because there are so many different kinds of synthetic opiates and variations, the DEA is constantly “trying to play catch up” to track them down, said Bare.

Most of the time buyers in the US don’t know what they’re purchasing, “All they know is they are getting a chemical somehow connected to fentanyl.” He added that unlike with fentanyl, popular overdose remedies like naloxone have not been proven to work with these substances.

Logan said chemists are finding the recipes for these drugs from research books from the 1970s, when scientists were trying to invent alternatives to morphine.

“In order to find one drug like that you have to test hundreds of them,” said Logan. The result is that there are thousands of variations of research opiates, most of which were never meant to be tried on humans.

U-47700 was declared a controlled substance in Finland in September 2015, in Sweden it was declared a narcotic in January of this year.

Though U-47700 has not been specifically criminalized in the US, prosecutors can still file charges under the Controlled Substance Analogue Act if the compound is “substantially similar” to a controlled substance. Still, even if the prosecutor has a strong case, these arguments can be difficult to make to a jury. “It’s very difficult to get jurors to understand the complex science behind that,” said Hall.

When Broward prosecutor Anita White was charging Joseph, she found that W-18 was too chemically different from any other controlled substance to make a case at all.

Joseph had been purchasing fentanyl from China by way of an associate in a Canadian prison who arranged the bitcoin transactions with a smuggled cellphone. White believed she had a strong enough case without charging him for the W-18. She addressed W-18 in sentencing instead.

“The W-18 was kind of out of the blue,” said White, who was surprised to find after his arrest, that the majority of the white powder in Joseph’s home was not fentanyl. “I had never heard of W-18 before it.”