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3. ASSESSING THE EXPERIENCE OF USING SYNTHETIC CANNABINOIDS BY MEANS OF INTERPRETATIVE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS (STUDY 2) 3.1. BACKGROUND New psychoactive substances (NPS) have been increasingly used by people who use drugs in recent years, which poses a new challenge for treatment services and researchers (Corazza et al., 2013). NPS are sold as replacements to illicit drugs, but they often contain unknown compounds. They are produced in small laboratories or on a commercial scale in clandestine factories by organized crime groups (EMCDDA, 2015). One of the largest groups of NPS is synthetic cannabinoids (SCs), which are intended as a replacement to cannabis (Bretteville-Jensen, Tuv, Bilgrei, Fjeld, & Bachs, 2013). SCs appeared on the drug market in the mid-2000s and were sold as herbal smoking mixtures; since then, hundreds of different compounds have appeared (EMCDDA, 2015). In Hungary, NPSs appeared in 2010 and rapidly dominated the illicit drug market (Racz, Csak, et al., 2016). The number of seizures of SC - also known as “herbal’, “bio-weed’, or “sage” - was nearly double the number of seizures of herbal cannabis in 2014. The range of substances found in the products follows the changes in legislation: between one and two dominant active substances could be found on the market in each individual period. After the individual substances had become regulated, their presence on the drug market dropped considerably and their places were taken over by new substances (that were not yet regulated) within 1-3months in the period of 2011-2014 (Hungarian National Focal, 2015). The dynamics of these processes changed in 2015, as the scope of the substances that could be traded without any criminal consequences was narrowed drastically by the expansion of the generic regulation. By the end of the year, the place of ADB-FUBINACA, which was legal until then and dominant in seizures, was overtaken by AMBFUBINACA and 5F-AMB, regardless that these substances had already been controlled since October 2014 (in Hungary substances are banned compound-by-compound (Hungarian National Focal, 2015)). Users obtain drugs from acquaintances and friends or from the internet (Hungarian National Focal, 2015). Motivations to use SCs include their easy availability, legal status, low price, and inability to be detected by standard drug tests (Arfken et al., 2014; Cas
