Designer Drugs: An Evolutionary Pathway of Synthesis, Classification and Regulatory Challenges
June 5, 2025 Rima Shah, Apurva Agrawal, Darshil Shah et al.
Designer drugs are synthetic analogs of controlled substances engineered to replicate pharmacological effects while circumventing legal restrictions.Their emergence can be traced to the 1960s, with the synthesis of novel psychoactive compounds by chemists like Alexander Shulgin, followed by the proliferation of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) in the 1980s and synthetic cannabinoids and...