Identification of the synthetic cannabinoid-type new psychoactive substance, CH-PIACA, in seized material

Synthetic cannabinoids (SCs) remain the largest class of new psychoactive substances (NPS), and while the number of NPS that are reported to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) for the first time each year declines, the number of newly reported SCs still exceeds other NPS classes. This decline can be seen as a result of legislative changes by different jurisdictions which have sometimes transitioned to a more generalized approach when controlling substances by defining common structural scaffolds rather than explicit structures. While the consequences of such legislative changes have been expected over the years, the introduction of so-called "class-wide" bans puts further pressure on clandestine laboratories to synthesize compounds which are out of the scope of the legislation, and thus, these compounds are initially harder to detect and/or identify in the absence of analytical data. Recently, a SC with an indole-3-acetamide core-linker scaffold, AD-18 (i.e., ADB-FUBIATA or ADB-FUBIACA), was reported for the first time in China in 2021. Here, an additional cannabinoid with the indole-3-acetamide scaffold, N-cyclohexyl-2-(1-pentyl-1H-indol-3-yl)acetamide (CH-PIACA), is reported which was identified for the first time in a seized material in Denmark. Structural characterization was performed using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), liquid chromatography-high-resolution mass spectrometry (LC-HRMS), and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy.