The law is a mysterious thing. How is it that someone can be convicted in Federal Court for a crime that wasn’t a crime when he was arrested? That’s how it appears at first glance in the case of a Kansas man arrested in October of 2010 after a traffic stop.
Steven Sullivan was pulled over for speeding and found with so-called “bath salts” in the car. The product, K-2, is labeled and sold as bath salts, but buyers know it’s really a form of synthetic narcotic and they can get high by misusing it. The feds and police also know this. At the time, the product wasn’t illegal in Nebraska, nor at the Federal level. Except maybe it was.
The official ruling from the DEA came as an emergency order in October 2011 – almost a year to the day after Mr. Sullivan’s arrest. The ruling outlawed the class of substances sold as bath salts and put them in the same category as heroin and LSD. But surely that order could then go back in time to convict Mr. Sullivan…
It turns out the regulations on what is legal and what is illegal to possess includes a provision for “dangerous analogs.” That’s a catch-all chemistry term for molecules that are related to the ones on the list, but not specifically listed. So, for example, if you take LSD and tweak it a bit chemically, it’s not technically LSD anymore, but might still be considered an analog.
In Mr. Sullivan’s case, the federal government alleged that the substance he had was an analog of an already regulated substance. And that brings the full force of the law to bear. He was convicted with the additional charge of intent to distribute.
In a sense, this puts the word out that even without a specific ruling on a molecule, designer drugs and drug analogs will be prosecuted, and may be prosecuted successfully.
