Designer drugs make up a larger proportion of the illegal drug market and although they don’t have a specific definition, it's a term that’s used to describe illegal and abused drugs such as ketamine, fentanyl, LSD, PCP, quaaludes, methcathinone, and amphetamine derivatives such as ecstasy and cocaine. Chemists are continually trying to solve the growing problem of designer drugs – whose regulation is elusive because they involve ever-changing formulas. This is one of the topics which has been discussed at a session at the 250 th ACS National Meeting & Exposition this summer in Boston U.S.A. “ It is relatively simple to take a drug that has a known psychoactive effect and change one substituent group to make it into another drug that is not yet classified as illegal but provides the same or similar psychoactive high”, explains William Hoffmann , a postdoctoral student at West Virginia University’s forensic and investigative science department. Hoffmann a...