Abstract

New psychoactive substances (NPS) are an ever-evolving group of drugs, designed with slight modifications in chemical structure to evade detection and legislative controls while maintaining pharmacological activity. During the period 2014 to 2018, New Zealand border seizures of NPS submitted to a border screening laboratory identified 134 different NPS, and comprised 18% of all submissions to the laboratory. Some NPS had associated package labelling, which was determined to be accurate in 93% of samples, indicating that labelling may be useful to inspection and testing personnel when dealing with suspected NPS.

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