💾 Archived View for gmi.noulin.net › mobileNews › 2788.gmi captured on 2023-06-16 at 19:56:33. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
2011-01-06 05:04:55
By Neil Bowdler Science reporter, BBC News
Professor David Nichols Professor David Nichols says his work was
misappropriated
An American chemist has spoken out against the misuse of scientific research to
create designer drugs.
Writing in the journal Nature, Professor David Nichols of Purdue University,
Indiana, says he is "haunted" by deaths linked to a drug based on his own
research.
MTA or "flatliners" used a blueprint published by the professor and was sold as
a "legal high", drugs which mimic the effects of illegal substances. It has
since been banned as a class-A drug in the UK.
Back in the 1990s, Professor Nichols and colleagues were experimenting with
chemicals similar to the one used in the drug ecstasy.
The hope was they the research might lead to new drugs to treat depression. He
published three papers on the effects on rats of one chemical called
4-methylthioamphetamine or MTA.
It later emerged the work had been used to create pills dubbed "flatliners",
which were linked with at least six deaths.
But it is only recently that the professor has become fully aware of how the
designer drugs industry has been systematically mining his work for recipes.
"It's not like you took a gun and shot somebody because then you would know
you'd been responsible," he told the BBC, "but people were taking something
that you had published and I was alerting them that this might be an active
molecule."
Kitchen lab
Professor Nichols says MTA, and other chemicals he has developed, can be
created in a kitchen laboratory.
"It is something that someone with a PhD, if they're really determined to do
it, could probably set up in a laboratory in their kitchen.
"If they could get the necessary chemicals, they could make some of these
things, but these drugs are being made on a much larger scale than just the
occasional chemist with the curiosity.
"It sounds like these things have really become a small industry."
The professor is by no means the only scientist to have his work plundered by
the drug makers.
He says several synthetic drugs which mimic the effects of cannabis have been
developed using data from publicly available scientific literature.
The British authorities have moved to ban a host of "legal highs" in recent
years including GBL, BZP and mephedrone.
Mephedrone, also known as "meow", was banned last year, after it was associated
with a number of deaths.