A peek inside China's sketchy 'legal highs' drug laboratories, from the BBC

In 2012, a synthetic drug sold as "bath salts" became briefly famous in the U.S., when the quasi-legal substance was blamed for a crazed cannibal attack on a homeless man in Florida. In Britain, these so-called designer drugs are called "legal highs," even though they were made illegal in May under a law called the Psychoactive Substances Act. Some U.S. states have also banned the sale of these synthetic drugs, even as the Supreme Court last year narrowed the scope of the main federal law used to prosecute sale of the drugs.

Most of these "legal highs" are believed to be made in China, before being sold as "bath salts" or incense in head shops and convenience stores under such names as "Bliss," "Spice," and "Ivory Wave." On Tuesday, the BBC's File on 4 program published an investigation into these synthetic cannabis, narcotics, or other psychoactive drugs, showing footage inside a "legal highs" factory in China's Hebei province and illustrating how easy it is to import the drugs into Britain (and, presumably, the U.S.). The drug lab did not look terribly hygienic.

"Well, this is obviously a dilapidated building, so you wouldn't ordinarily associate a modern chemistry laboratory with this," drug specialist Peter Cain tells the BBC. "And the equipment that they're using is quite dirty, covered in filth. And so any contaminant that's present, that they haven't cleaned out from a previous reaction, ends up in the new reaction. And you don't know what the toxicity of that potential new compound they've made could be." Learn more about the Chinese lab, the designer drugs, and how they're still kind of legal in the video below. Peter Weber

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