New psychoactive substances in Turkey: Narcotics cases assessed by the Council of Forensic Medicine between 2016 and 2017 in Ankara, Turkey.

New psychoactive substances (NPS) are synthetic compounds launched within the last decade as legal alternatives to common drugs of abuse. Despite the rapid growth of the NPS market and associated concerns of widespread use, narcotics departments are struggling with many unknown issues including substance diversity and analysis problems. This study provides the first information about NPS-related substance diversity in Turkey. For this purpose, 1357 narcotics confiscated by the police between 2016 and 2017 were investigated at the request of the judicial authorities by the Narcotics Department of the Ankara Forensic Medicine Institute. The total amount of confiscated NPS-containing substances was 1725.23g and 1332.52g in 2016 and 2017, respectively. Eighteen members of synthetic cannabinoid group, six cathinone compounds, three different tryptamine compounds, and two compounds from the phenethylamine group were detected in this study. A total of 2311.405g, the synthetic cannabinoids ranked first among the evaluated NPS confiscated in two year period. The highest amount of 5-F-ADB was confiscated out of the NPS followed by 5-MeO-MiPT and ADB-FUBINACA. The first results on NPS revealed that the NPS-containing products in the Turkish drug market varied considerably in amount and content.