Finnish Customs officers say they intercept designer drugs in mail entering the country from abroad on a daily basis. Alongside traditional substances, officials say they have detected a flood of new synthetic designer drugs imported from abroad in small and large batches.
“The range of designer drugs is currently very wide. It has exploded over a period of a few years,” said head of the airports mail monitoring team, Sami Tammisto.
Officials say the rapid growth in imports of synthetic drugs is fueled by the internet, where the designer drug business takes place for the most part. The substances are often cooked up in a regular laboratory, before being sold in online drug deals across the world.
“In the past there was no internet, so the market for these designer drugs was a lot smaller. At the time there wasn’t this open channel for orders,” explained Customs anti-crime chief Hannu Sinkkonen.
Competition among chemists
So far customs lab workers have been able to identify some 100 different designer drugs. However they aren’t all illegal, since Finland only adds compounds to its list of controlled substances individually. This means that legislation is always lagging behind the designer drug trade, which expands every year when scores of new compounds enter the market.
“This is a competition involving chemists”, Sinkkonen observed.
Manufacturing synthetic drugs is easy, according to law enforcement officials. Adding even one new substance to an illegal designer drug creates a completely new compound which – in the eyes of the law - is not considered to be illegal. Sinkkonen said it’s time for Finland to adopt more general legislation to combat the problem.
“From the perspective of a preliminary investigation it would be easier to have a "generic classification". If the substance has no other purpose than to be used for the purpose of intoxication, then it’s a narcotic,” he concluded.
Customs likely intercepting only a fraction of imports
Finnish Customs displayed a catch of over one dozen packets containing designer drugs - which were seized over two-day period - from masses of incoming mail.
The packages contained a range of different substances: amphetamine, methadone, cannabis, BB-22 - used in synthetic cannabis - ethylphenidate, a psychostimulant and synthacaine, a stimulant said to be similar to cocaine. Officials also found illegally imported diazepam, used to treat muscle spasms and seizures, and temazepam, used to treat insomnia. One unlabeled packet contained a mysterious white powder.
The find represents just the tip of the iceberg of what may be entering the country. Some 40 million packets pass through the Helsinki-Vantaa airport annually; customs officials x-ray and examine just a fraction of that traffic.
