I remember the exact brand name printed on the zip bag. I remember the appearance, the texture, the taste. I remember the effects too, which I unfortunately don’t feel as much anymore due to tolerance. But what I remember most clearly is the uncertainty. I am used to risk, just as anyone who uses drugs is, but this felt different. It felt like I was participating in a live experiment authored by the state without informed consent.
I call it the Chemical Red Queen’s Race, borrowing from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, where the Red Queen tells Alice: “it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place”. The state is trying to outrun the very chemistry that prohibition has helped create.
I have been using N-ethylnorpentedrone (NEP) daily for around two years. NEP is a synthetic cathinone that’s considered a new psychoactive substance (NPS) with stimulant effects. It all started with speed (street amphetamine), which I began using more frequently for reasons that are, honestly, hard to fully articulate. Because I enjoy it, because it helps me work, because it serves as a form of self-regulation during periods of emotional instability, because it offers comfort and meaning in ways that are not possible to quantify or measure. However, the volatility of street speed supply, the risk of adulteration, and the legal pressures created by prohibition made the digital NEP market a more predictable, and by my own standards, more rational option.
So when I say the recent decision to ban NEP affects me directly, I mean it affects my daily routines, my rituals, my access to a substance I’ve integrated into my life, my relationship with risk, and my safety. Ordering from another country, especially when it comes to a scheduled substance, means I risk becoming a criminal for ‘drug trafficking’, with all the consequences this would have in my life, despite not having committed any real crime. The reduced supply created by this ban can also further harm my health by forcing a shift to whatever new substance comes next.
But I also mean it in the political sense, because I’ve spent years working in harm reduction and drug policy, and I know exactly how this story ends. Each new ban promises more control, but often produces the exact opposite: more uncertainty in supply, more volatile substances, and more dangerous markets.
An endless game of cat and mouse
On 12 January 2026, the European Union (EU) classified NEP as a controlled substance following a risk assessment highlighting harms associated with its use.
Member states have until 12 July 2026 to implement national legislation, and Portugal has already approved Law Proposal n.º 42/XVII/1.ª. This is the 34th amendment to Decree-Law 15/93, and the 34th time Portugal has banned a new group of psychoactive substances with little success. Its own preamble acknowledges that NEP has been “replacing previously identified substances” in the illicit market.
The emergence of substances like NEP is itself a consequence of previous bans. Synthetic cathinones like NEP have become popular in recent years precisely because earlier stimulants like penthedrone were banned. Now synthetic cathinones, which are more potent, are the second largest group of NPS monitored in Europe, according to the European Drug Report 2025. The European Web Survey on Drugs found that 9% of respondents had used synthetic cathinones in the last year. EUDA’s Drug Market Analysis highlights that local production is increasing and availability is on the rise, with seizures going from 4.5 tonnes in 2021 to over 37 tonnes in 2023.
Even the term “NPS” is revealing. Rather than a pharmacological category, NPS is more a regulatory one, classifying substances that emerged precisely because their predecessors were banned, with the goal of mimicking traditional and controlled substances’ effects while avoiding legislation.
Here, the word “new” does not reflect desire for novelty from consumers, but rather the market’s adaptation to prohibition: when a substance becomes illegal, chemists modify it just enough to avoid existing legislation. But while it takes a chemist just a few hours to slightly modify a substance, it takes the state months or even years to identify and regulate it. In 2024 alone, 47 new psychoactive substances were notified for the first time.
It’s an endless game of cat and mouse that the state cannot win against a market that is faster, more decentralised, and more motivated than any legislature. This is the central paradox: we are legislating the market into becoming more clever and dangerous.
Consequences for people using drugs
Just as laws don’t eliminate supply, they also do not eliminate demand.
When a drug is scheduled, it restricts people’s ability to access the substances they have chosen within the limited options available under a prohibitionist system, pushing them into more volatile and uncertain markets.
Consumers are the first to feel immediate impact, as suppliers withdraw stock quickly, causing prices to fluctuate and substitutes emerge. These new substances are sometimes weaker, sometimes stronger, and sometimes from entirely different pharmacological classes but sold under familiar names.
The result is that people who use NPS are subjects in an involuntary laboratory, where toxicological data is limited, clinical studies are scarce, and official information (when it exists) is often either alarmist or outdated.
28% of NPS users acquire their substances online (the highest for any drug category), which explains why many also fill the vacuum created by prohibition through online peer communities, including Reddit, Bluelight, and PsychonautWiki, where real-time data on dosage, interactions, and warnings circulates long before any official guidance. When a substance gets banned, these spaces face crackdowns too, which dismantles one of the few functioning harm reduction networks available to NPS users.
Lawmakers claim they are protecting our health, but removing “grey market” supply increases risks of drug use. People who use drugs (PWUD) know that psychoactive substances carry risks, but grey markets provide some level of predictability, transparency and safety. Vendors care about their reputation and profit, while users can avoid street transactions and access community feedback, even if imperfect. Prohibition pushes people to illegal and more hidden networks where harms are far more damaging than the substance itself. Prohibition increases risk of criminal consequences, discourages help-seeking, restricts information exchanges, and increases prices and uncertainty on drugs’ content.
PWUD are often portrayed as reckless, yet most PWUD I know are not seeking chaos. They seek continuity of experience, of effect, and of availability, all of which are undermined by the constant disruptions that force them into unregulated markets where purity is inconsistent. Autonomy and vulnerability can coexist, as I choose to use substances, but I do not control these conditions. Still, the resulting harms are attributed as inherent to “the drug” or as a personal failure of the individual. The system avoids any accountability and laws remain unquestioned.
As someone who uses drugs and works in harm reduction, I experience this contradiction daily: we tell people to make informed choices while maintaining a system that systematically withholds reliable information about what people are consuming. We are warned about the dangers of new substances by the same institutions who structurally produce them.
Beyond infinite criminalisation
The constant bans on NPS are not public health measures, but proof that “something is being done” about the “drug problem”, when the real problem is a system that still ignores the reality of drug use and forces citizens to lie, hide and run to survive.
From where I stand, both inside harm reduction services and inside my own body, I know this ban will not eliminate use, nor will it make me safer. What it will do is lead to a more expensive, less predictable and more dangerous supply.
In fact, this reality was even acknowledged in the new Portuguese law proposal, which quotes research that acknowledges that prohibition-based approaches in Europe have failed to reduce consumption and in some cases increased poisoning episodes and deaths. The note continues to say that generic drug legislation diverts markets toward more unstable and dangerous substances.
If policymakers genuinely care about universal health equity and want to reduce the emergence of NPS, the solution is not infinite scheduling or criminalisation of the people they claim to be protecting, but to share decision-making power with them. Control is not realistic unless we address the structural and social conditions that drive harm and ensure safe supply through a regulated market.
As for me? I’ll keep making my own choices and fighting for our rights. NEP might become more expensive and dangerous, and I am aware of that. But don’t forget that these harms are produced by policy choices. And those choices are not mine.
