The chemical industry is committed to safe, secure, responsible, and sustainable production and use of chemicals. Therefore, any misuse of chemicals towards the production and trade of illegal drugs, is unacceptable and needs to be effectively combatted.  

The arrival on the market of so-called designer-precursors in the past 10-15 years represents a new challenge to EU lawmakers and authorities. Designer precursors are described by the European Commission as “close chemical relatives of traditional drug precursors, purpose-made to circumvent controls and usually do not have any known legitimate use”. At the same time, illicit online trade in sensitive substances and an outdated, paper-based implementation system reinforce the need for modernised approaches. To address these challenges, the European Commission submitted a proposal to update the existing EU regulation on drug precursors.  

In full support of the Commission’s efforts, Cefic outlines 6 top recommendations in a view paper submitted to the public consultation that ended this Thursday: 

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

Our industry highly welcomes the opportunity provided by the public consultation to provide its views and stands ready to provide further support to ensure EU legislation on drug precursors is fully fit for the 21^st century.  

Read the full review paper here.