Published
Wed, Mar 20, 2019, 20:45
- It also tracked the emergence of new psychoactives that weren't common in these regions until recently.
A new report from the United Nations on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) says that ecstasy use in South America is on the rise, and that it's due in part to electronic music events.
It claims that ecstasy (which includes MDMA as well as new synthetic drugs that mimic it) is "becoming increasingly popular" in South America, "particularly among secondary school and university students and at electronic music festivals." It also claims that 178 new psychoactive substances have emerged in the 14 Latin American and Caribbean countries they've been studying for the past 10 years.
Ketamine is at the top of the list behind what they call "classic hallucinogens," followed by a synthetic compound called NBOMe. In Colombia in particular, authorities have analyzed seizures of what is marketed as a psychedelic called 2-CB, which actually contained mostly ketamine, and zero 2-CB. These findings are the result of a program called Global SMART (Synthetics Monitoring: Analyses, Reporting and Trends), which was created in order to analyze and identify the many new synthetic drugs that have hit the market in recent years, some of which little is known about.