EU moves to crack down on designer drugs

BRUSSELS, May 26 (Reuter) European Union justice ministers said they had
made progress on Monday on a system to plug loopholes which make it easy to
make and sell socalled designer drugs like ecstasy in the EU market.

Under the system, which has still to be firmed up, EU countries would create
an early warning system and improve exchanges of information on new types of
drugs, increasingly made in nonEU eastern European states where the lists of
banned products are laxer and production cheaper.

``What's happening is that the production has moved from Holland or Belgium
to the Czech Republic or Poland,'' the EU's Justice Commissioner Anita Gradin
told reporters.

As things stand, clandestine producers can run rings round lists of banned
products by slightly changing the chemical makeup of the drugs.

According to the plan, EU members would have to send detailed information on
the production, trafficking and use of new synthetic drugs to the drugs unit
of the EU police agency Europol and the bloc's drugs monitoring unit in
Lisbon.

If the EU's experts during a risk assessment find a substance is dangerous
the EU ministers can agree to put it on the banned list and EU governments
will have to comply.