Professor Hits Out at Drug Industry for Misusing His Work

An American chemist has hit out at the drugs industry after he found out that one of the blueprints that he had published long back is being used to produce legal high drugs which have already claimed six lives.

Professor David Nichols worked on a drug which produced effects similar to the banned drug ecstasy. Professor Nichols and colleagues were looking to produce a drug, known as 4-methylthioamphetamine, in order to treat depression and had also published three papers detailing the effects of the drug on rats.

However Professor Nichols later found out that his experiments and research papers were used to produce legal pills known as flatliners which are known to have caused at least six deaths by 2002.

"It's not like you took a gun and shot somebody because then you would know you'd been responsible. But people were taking something that you had published and I was alerting them that this might be an active molecule", he said adding that he is haunted by the deaths caused by the drugs.


Source: Medindia