Army targets designer drugs, bans spice - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Army targets designer drugs, bans spice

The Army is ratcheting up its war on designer drugs, putting its seven-month-old ban on spice, a synthetic form of cannabis, into the service’s anti-drug regulations and issuing warnings about “bath salts,” the street name for the stimulant mephedrone.

Bath salts are “on our radar,” said Lt. Col. Shaun Bailey, chief of the Army’s drug testing branch. “It’s an emerging drug of concern to us and we’ve already blasted out [the message] that commanders need to be aware of it.”

Bailey said he hoped “very soon” to have the same prohibition against mephedrone as for spice.

Although Army regulations already contain a blanket ban on substances that cause “excitement, intoxication or stupefaction,” including designer drugs, the revision will explicitly ban synthetic cannabinoids alongside heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamines for Army, Guard and Reserve personnel.

Army Secretary John McHugh signed an order in February banning synthetic cannabinoids and ordering the revision to AR 600-85, the regulation governing the Army substance abuse program. The Army had issued warnings and banned spice piecemeal at a number of commands.

The change also codifies a move to have soldiers tested for spice at the request of Army Criminal Investigations Command, ongoing since March.

Les McFarling, director of the Army Substance Abuse Program, said the Army’s drug testing program is about protecting soldiers from harmful drugs.

“Soldiers think we have a drug testing program for testing and deterrence, and there is truth in that, but the larger part is protection,” McFarling said. “The drugs we’re talking about are not good for you. They’re dangerous, as are any of the other drugs that we test for.”

Dozens of manmade chemical compounds can be described as synthetic cannabinoids, so their effects on users are unpredictable, said Buddy Horne, Bailey’s deputy at the drug testing branch.

“When you have something with no quality control, no inspection processes, the majority of one batch can be sprayed with more concentration than another part,” Horne said. “Somebody’s making a product to sell, and they don’t care how toxic it is.”

Nevertheless, spice is not going to join cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamines in the standard, twice-annual drug tests many service members take because the tests have not been perfected, according to Col. Timothy Lyons, top forensic toxicology expert at the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System.

AFMES, a joint agency that performs medical investigations, has conducted individual spice urinalyses since March for each of the services, at the request of their individual criminal investigation agencies.

In the Army, 164 soldiers have tested positive for spice, of the 242 tested. In the other services, 113 of 183 sailors and Marines tested positive, and 45 of 86 airmen tested positive.

These positive rates emerged from a population already under investigation, Lyons said, and are not indicative of rates among service members.

Individual states began to ban spice in 2009, but the Drug Enforcement Agency did not outlaw it until March.

Because spice emerged only in recent years, too little is known about it to add it to the standard battery of drug tests for service members, Lyons said.

Scientists cannot tell from a urinalysis, for example, whether a person was exposed to secondhand smoke or intentionally smoked the drug, Lyons said.

“We don’t have a cutoff that is below what you get from a primary inhalation, and that’s a major obstacle,” Lyons said. “We don’t have any known studies. We don’t know what the cutoff should be.”

AFMES began to develop its tests for spice after the drug first appeared in Europe in 2008, and it is periodically “tweaking” its tests as it finds new compounds on the market, Lyons said. It has developed tests for five spice metabolites.

Because mephedrone is a single compound and less sophisticated, drug tests for it have been much easier to develop, Lyons said.

AFMES officials said it has been testing for mephedrone for several weeks, but only in special cases, such as air mishaps and crashes involving military vehicles.

Leaders of the Army substance abuse and testing programs said they are not proposing soldiers be tested regularly for spice because the technology is not mature.

“When you give someone a random drug test, we take the rights of the soldier very seriously,” Bailey said. “We don’t want to subject a soldier to a test unless it meets an absolute platinum standard of accuracy.”