CEFIC makes recommendations on ‘designer precursors’

Following public consultation, CEFIC has presented a paper with six recommendations in support of the European Commission’s proposals to update the existing EU regulation on pharmaceutical precursors.  These are:

1. Effectively tackling illegal trade online, for instance, by requiring licences for private platforms wishing to trade sensitive substances
2. EU-wide harmonisation for implementation between Member States, regulations and with customs practices. This would include a more harmonised approach to thresholds for scheduled substances in mixtures
3. Digitalisation: Fully digitising all steps of the process of compliance
4. Legal clarity: Continuing to list for monitoring individual substances, clearly identifiable ideally by CAS numbers, rather than listing chemical groups or families based on their molecular structure
5. Avoiding hindering innovation: Ensure that potential bans do not inhibit legitimate R&D activities based on the same chemicals. Ideally, operators with a licence for activities involving drug precursors would be excluded from the ban
6. Improving information sharing for economic operators, including via e-learning tools and trainings.

In the past ten to 15 years, the association noted, ‘designer precursors’ have appeared on the European market as part of the illegal drug trade. These are described as “close chemical relatives of traditional drug precursors, purpose-made to circumvent controls”, which “usually do not have any known legitimate use”. The existing paper-based implementation system  to control the trade drug in precursors has become increasingly ineffective.