Steve Robinson

And the timeline that I've observed is, you know, it's maybe a product shows up in a gas station or a convenience store and word spreads very quickly amongst the drug using community.

They figure it out real quickly what makes you feel good and what simulates the feeling of whether it's cannabis or heroin.

And they know where to get it.

They know the

stickers and the logos and the brand names that kind of subtly communicate what they're looking for and then these things start to turn up at law enforcement raids so local police sheriff state police dea whatever they'll go in for a regular fentanyl raid heroin or you know oxycon whatever it is

And they'll start to notice these other things are turning up and they don't really know what they are They've got weird labels weird names and they kind of brush them aside but then they start to see more of them and then they realize that there's a pattern here and The same people who are using maybe fentanyl or heroin or prescription opioids are also using some of these other products and so from that point

That's maybe a five-year window, and then when it trickles up to the level of state policymakers or federal policymakers or people who are at the DEA, it takes maybe another two years or three years for there to be any kind of policy formulated that's going to limit the import of these drugs.

And in a lot of cases, like with the case of 7-OH, it's incredibly difficult to regulate it because it's hard to test for.

You don't really have a test right now.

If someone dies in a parking lot and they have an autopsy,

they're not immediately going to test for 7-OH.

I don't even know if they have the capability to look for the metabolites in their bloodstream to say like, oh, this person might have died from 7-OH.

In most cases, their deaths will probably just be attributed to a regular opioid overdose.

7-OH is, I think, most comparable to bath salts.

Oh man, that shit was nasty.

I haven't heard about that in a couple of years.

They successfully regulated it out of existence, but it took a while.

And the similarity between 7-OH and bath salts is that it's a molecule, like bath salts was just a molecule.

And so regulators, beginning in Florida and some other states, would say, okay, this molecule is now illegal.

And so the chemists in China and in the United States and in Mexico, they would just figure out a way to add another hydrogen atom to that chemical.