2025 Analytical Science Horizon Prize: awarded for the application of portable technologies to identify synthetic drugs with positive impact on policing and harm reduction.

The government is banning the sale of single-use disposable vapes in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland

The government must provide an emergency fund for families waiting for the ASGSF

Synthetic cannabinoids (SCs) are novel psychoactive substances (NPS) that are highly potent and associated with a range of severe toxicities. SC use, which is common in UK prisons and homeless communi...

The evidence points to changes in the drug supply

Police say they tested the gnome after finding it among suspected narcotics.

Synthetic cannabinoids (SCs) make up a class of novel psychoactive substances (NPS), used predominantly in prisons and homeless communities in the U.K. SCs can have severe side effects, including psychosis, stroke, and seizures, with numerous reported deaths associated with their use. The chemical diversity of SCs presents the major challenge to their detection since approaches relying on specific molecular recognition become outdated almost immediately. Ideally one would have a generic approach to detecting SCs in portable settings. The problem of SC detection is more challenging still because the majority of SCs enter the prison estate adsorbed onto physical matrices such as paper, fabric, or herb materials. That is, regardless of the detection modality used, the necessary extraction step reduces the effectiveness and ability to rapidly screen materials on-site. Herein, we demonstrate a truly instant generic test for SCs, tested against real-world drug seizures. The test is based on two advances. First, we identify a spectrally silent region in the emission spectrum of most physical matrices. Second, the finding that background signals (including from autofluorescence) can be accurately predicted is based on tracking the fraction of absorbed light from the irradiation source. Finally, we demonstrate that the intrinsic fluorescence of a large range of physical substrates can be leveraged to track the presence of other drugs of interest, including the most recent iterations of benzodiazepines and opioids. We demonstrate the implementation of our presumptive test in a portable, pocket-sized device that will find immediate utility in prisons and law enforcement agencies around the world.

Testing hundreds of confiscated vapes in 38 schools in England reveals 1 in 6 (16.6%) contained spice

The exodus is real.