An industrial chemical used in plastic products has been cropping up in illegal drugs from California to Maine, a sudden and puzzling shift in the drug supply that has alarmed health researchers. Its name is bis (2,2,6,6-tetramethyl-4-piperidyl) sebacate, commonly abbreviated as BTMPS. The chemical is used in plastic for protection against ultraviolet rays, as well as for other commercial uses.
In an analysis released Monday, researchers from UCLA, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and other academic institutions and harm reduction groups collected and tested more than 170 samples of drugs that had been sold as fentanyl in Los Angeles and Philadelphia this summer. They found roughly a quarter of the drugs contained BTMPS. Researchers called it the most sudden change in the U.
S. illegal drug supply in recent history, based on chemical prevalence. They found that BTMPS sometimes dramatically exceeded the amount of fentanyl in drug samples and, in some cases, had made up more than a third of the drug sample.
It was also a growing presence in fentanyl over the summer: In June, none of the L.A. fentanyl samples tested by the team contained BTMPS, the analysis found.
By August, it was detected in 41% of them. "This is effectively unprecedented," said Morgan Godvin, one of the authors of the study and project director for Drug Checking Los Angeles, a UCLA project that works in partnership with the L.A.
County Department of Public Health to analyze illicit dru.