Question: are there drugs out there that no one knows about that could seriously damage peoples health

Roisin Jones answered on 5 Nov 2016:

Hey again Fintan! There are almost definitely drugs out there that the general public/law enforcement are currently unaware of, all of which could be potentially harmful to people’s health. The main reason for this is that as law enforcement make certain drugs illegal, the people who make drugs look for loopholes by creating new compounds that haven’t been restricted yet. Some of these drugs are very potent, and some aren’t: practically none of them are in mass distribution (seizures of these so-called ‘designer drugs’ are quite rare, although they have been on the rise recently), mostly because they tend to be more expensive to make and there are already highly successful illegal drugs out there that they already know how to make.

The main threat from these drugs is actually generally that people take them thinking they’re something else: because active doses and lethal doses (i.e. how much you have to take for it to work/kill you) vary massively depending on the drug, people can accidentally overdose, which tragically is sometimes a fatal mistake.