CHAPTER 10: Generic Control: A Critique

Structure-specific generic controls provide an efficient way of capturing large groups of substances. In the UK, they now cover 17 drug groups, but this approach is not without problems. Generic definitions can be criticised for: only being intelligible to chemists; for capturing inactive substances, thereby further blurring any attempt to relate penalties to harm; for inadvertently capturing existing medicinal substances; inhibiting the development of novel substances by the pharmaceutical industry; and for creating a problem with the availability of analytical reference compounds. Drafting concise generic definitions is difficult, and experience over the past ten years has shown a number of failures in the UK legislation. The attempted generic control of benzofurans and related compounds in 2014 is one such example. Synthetic cannabinoid receptor agonists (SCRAs) illustrate an extreme case of the rapid obsolescence of controls as entirely new groups regularly appear. To a certain extent that obsolescence is driven by those very controls which simply encourage clandestine chemists to develop other compounds. Apart from the SCRA saga, no new generic controls have been introduced since 2014 even though the 2017 listing of 12 phenidate analogues of methylphenidate could have been dealt with by a simple generic definition.