Law
Due to the recent development of many designer drugs, laws banning or regulating their use have not been developed yet, and in recent cases novel drugs have appeared directly in response to legislative action, to replace a similar compound that had recently been banned. Many of the chemicals fall under the various drug analogue legislations in certain countries, but most countries have no general analogue act or equivalent legislation and so novel compounds may fall outside of the law after only minor structural modifications.
In the United States, the Controlled Substances Act was amended by the Controlled Substance Analogue Enforcement of 1986, which attempted to ban designer drugs pre-emptively by making it illegal to manufacture, sell, or possess chemicals that were substantially similar in chemistry and pharmacology to Schedule I or Schedule II drugs.
Other countries have dealt with the issue differently. In some, the new drugs are banned as they become a concern, as in Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Sweden. In Sweden, the police and customs from April 2011 may also seize drugs that are not on the list of drugs covered by the anti-drug laws if the police suspect that the purpose of the holding is related to drug abuse. Following a decision by a prosecutor, the police may destroy the seized drugs.
Some countries, such as Australia, have gone the opposite direction and enacted sweeping bans based on chemical structure only, making chemicals illegal even before they are created — if a theoretical chemical fits a set of rules regarding substitutions and alterations of an already-banned drug, it too is banned. The controlled substance analogue law under both Australian Federal law and that of some individual states such as New South Wales is so broad that it would cover millions of compounds that have never been made, simply on the basis that they bear a vague resemblance to one of the drugs on the illegal list. However, it would still not cover drugs that have no structural similarity to any controlled drug, even if they produced similar effects.
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