New psychoactive substances seized at the New Zealand border

ABSTRACT

New psychoactive substances (NPS) are an ever-evolving group of drugs, designed with slight modifications in chemical structure to evade detection and legislative controls while maintaining pharmacological activity. During the period 2014 to 2018, New Zealand border seizures of NPS submitted to a border screening laboratory identified 134 different NPS, and comprised 18% of all submissions to the laboratory. Some NPS had associated package labelling, which was determined to be accurate in 93% of samples, indicating that labelling may be useful to inspection and testing personnel when dealing with suspected NPS.

KEYWORDS:

• New psychoactive substance
• NPS
• New Zealand
• package labelling

Acknowledgements

The New Zealand Forensic Science Society (NZFSS) branch of the Australian and New Zealand Forensic Science Society (ANZFSS) and ESR provided financial support for the author to present this research at the ANZFSS 24th International Symposium.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.