Synthetic drugs bill gets hearing

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Prosecutors would no longer have to enlist pharmacologists to attest to the psychological effects of synthetic drugs in cases against sellers of the banned substances, under a bill heard by the Senate Committee on Judiciary and Labor on Wednesday.

Senate Bill 325, which received a hearing before the state Senate Committee on Judiciary and Labor on Wednesday, is an attempt at preventing makers of illegal synthetic drugs from altering the chemical formulas of their products in a way that circumvents current prohibitions. To that end, the bill would outlaw 16 basic chemical compounds and the various methods that can be used to alter those compounds’ chemical structure without taking away their intoxicating effects, said Karie Cattanach, an assistant district attorney at the state Department of Justice. It would also add about 150 substances to the list of synthetic drugs the state bans, she said.

“I think chemists may still come out with new compounds that are not listed here,” she said. “I think this catches up the prosecutors so they can be on the same playing field.”

Cattanach said SB 325 is needed to fulfill the intent of a 2011 law that explicitly banned 10 synthetic substances. Even though the same legislation banned chemically similar analogs of the explicitly outlawed drugs, prosecutors have found it difficult to enforce.

Part of the difficulty, Cattanach said, is that the 2011 law forced prosecutors who wanted to prove a substance was an analog to hire experts who could testify about a substance’s intoxicating effects.

The experts used for that purpose have mainly been pharmacologists, who seldom offer their testimony for free, said Brad Schimel, Waukesha County District Attorney.

“If it costs $1,000 to bring in an expert,” he said, “for some of our smaller counties, that could burn up a large part of their entire expert witness funding.”

To become law, SB 325 must still be passed by the state Senate and Assembly and signed by Gov. Scott Walker.

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