The person presenting it thinks "it might be ketamine?", but admits the subjective effects are different to what they're used to. How do we find out if it's what they think it is? And what are the consequences if it isn't?

This is a typical scenario for the people working at CanTEST—Australia's first and only fixed-site, face-to-face drug checking service, located in Canberra.

And in this case, it led chemists to discover a drug never before seen in Australia, and with no associated clinical information from anywhere in the world.

Identifying 'chemical X'

The identification of new psychoactive substances—drugs made to resemble established illicit drugs—presents a major challenge when pill-testing. Testing a chemical provides us with its "fingerprint" that will hopefully match one of the thousands stored in databases available to analysts.

But what happens when a fingerprint doesn't provide a match and we have come across "chemical X"?

That brings us back to the original baggy of powder.

Patrick Yates, a Ph.D. candidate from the Australian National University's Research School of Chemistry, ran the sample through the first piece of equipment, the Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometer—a workhorse of many drug-checking programs around the world.