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drinkanddrugsnews
| January 2014
Profile |
John Ramsey
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
ExpErt
opinion
Analytical chemist Dr John
Ramsey of TICTAC is the
media’s go-to man for an
authoritative voice on new
psychoactive substances.
He talks to
David Gilliver
‘I
t’s a really difficult phenomenon to name,’ says Dr John Ramsey of
the new drugs he’s constantly adding to his organisation’s database.
‘None of the terms really work, and nobody understands them in any
case. “Legal highs” is inappropriate because a lot of them don’t
remain legal and a lot are depressant rather than highs, and “new
psychoactive substances” nobody understands. We used to call them
designer drugs, which I suppose is pretty much accurate but, again, nobody really
understood it. It’s a bit like “Hoover” and “Biro” – we revert to “legal highs”
because that’s what everyone understands.’
TICTAC Communications is a commercial company that’s part of St. George’s,
University of London. It collects drugs into a huge database used by both the
health and criminal justice sectors, and has existed in various guises since the
early 1980s. ‘It was originally set up because the laboratory I was running at the
time investigated deaths on behalf of coroners who needed to identify tablets
and capsules, so it seemed a good idea to have a filing cabinet with samples and
just look for them,’ says Dr Ramsey. ‘TICTAC is actually older than the personal
computer and the CD-Rom. All the changes in technology have allowed us to
deliver the same data in different ways, but it’s still the same filing cabinets full
of drugs.’
The plethora of new substances, however, means that he’s become a regular on
drug-related news items, ‘purely because we’ve got them all here,’ he says. ‘We
don’t do much else apart from collect drugs, legal and illegal, so we’re a source for
news stories – a one-stop shop for drugs, I suppose.’
The speed at which new drugs are emerging makes it hard for people to keep
up – treatment services and, particularly, legislators – and users often have
absolutely no idea what’s in the substances they’re taking. ‘And even if we know
what’s in them, we don’t know what they do,’ he adds. ‘It’s not too difficult to
analyse drugs and find out chemically what they are, but knowing what the
hazards and dangers are – and indeed whether they work as drugs – is a fairly
major undertaking.’
*****
As compounds are tweaked to stay ahead of the law, people are exposed to an
ever-changing list of new chemicals, he points out. While there’s always the
chance of another compound like MPTP – accidentally made by someone trying to
make the analgesic MPPP and which led to irreversible Parkinson’s-like symptoms
in everyone who took it – determining the scale of the risk is a challenge.
‘Everybody concentrates on deaths, and we all pick the alarming effects
because they’re easy to talk about and dramatic, but there’s a lot of scope for
harm below that,’ he stresses. ‘They could cause birth defects, all sorts of issues.