New Psychoactive Substances Analysis

New psychoactive substances (NPS) are proliferating at an unprecedented rate, posing a significant risk to public health and a challenge to drug policy. Often, little is known about the adverse health effects and social harms of NPS, which pose a considerable challenge for prevention and treatment. Monitoring, information sharing and risk awareness are needed to counter this new drug problem. NPS have become a global phenomenon with over 110 countries and territories from all regions of the world having reported one or more NPS.Beyond the routine contributions to solving forensic casework, the discipline of analysis of drugs provides data and information which enriches trend analysis, and contributes to a better understanding of the drug situation and to more effective policy decisions. Such as, the route of synthesis of drug substances, effectiveness of precursor control measures and price–purity analysis, and thus enable a better understanding of the dynamics of drug markets. With regard to the emergence of new substances, forensic data are important in identification to facilitate effective law enforcement and health interventions for the problem. Research on the new substances subsequently plays a pivotal role in raising awareness of and providing the basis for development of methods and tools for identifying NPS.There are specific challenges in the analysis of NPS. These included difficulties in acquiring NPS reference standards, and in determining which reference materials are required to enable the identification of unknown NPS and the number and diversity of NPS continue to increase, and there are no signs of this slowing down in the immediate future. So research is needed to understand the scope of the problem, and to develop and standard methods of analysis.