New and emerging drugs in state crime lab evidence: Quarter 1, 2019
Data source, utility, and limitations
Crime lab data are a partial indicator of the supply of illegal drugs or prescription drugs that are controlled substances and suspected of being purchased or sold illegally. The data presented here are the results of the Washington State Patrol’s Crime Lab chemistry testing of samples submitted by law enforcement. While the data provide important insights into the supply of drugs, in part due to the use of precise chemical testing which indicates exactly which substance is present, they also have numerous important limitations that are described at the bottom of this page.
On this page, quarterly data provided by the Forensic Laboratory Services Bureau are used to identify drugs that appear to be increasing in law enforcement seizures in the most recent quarter. (Data are preliminary and will change. For more on the data, see the details at the end of the page).
Emerging drugs in the first quarter of 2019
There were no large increases in positive results for any drug or drug type statewide in the first quarter. All of the notable jumps over the average quarter in 2016-2018 were among opioids:
- Prescription-type opioids: We refer to opioids legally available by prescription, but the particular specimen seized may or may not have originated from a prescription and been diverted. Four of Thurston County's
5 cases of prescription opioids involved buprenorphine, a drug that can be given for pain management but most often is used for treatment of opioid use disorder.
- Hydrocodone: Snohomish County
has averaged 3 cases of the common pain medicine hydrocodone (found in drugs like Vicodin, Lortab, and Norco) per year over the past 4 years. The 2 cases in the first quarter of 2019 may or may not represent an increase.
- Fentanyl: Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid many times more powerful than heroin or morphine. Here we highlight cases of fentanyl itself, which is legally available but can be made illicitly, and not any of the many analogues. The single case in Cowlitz County matches the total there for 2016-2018. Skagit County saw 2 cases of fentanyl total from 2010 through 2017, but then 8 in 2018. In the state's most populous county, there were 14 total cases of fentanyl for 2014 through 2016, 18 in 2017, 24 in 2018, and 13 so far in 2019. See the King County crime lab page for more insight.
Prior editions of this page:
- Quarter 4, 2018
- Quarter 3, 2018
- Quarter 2, 2018
- Quarter 1, 2018
- Quarter 4, 2017
- Quarter 3, 2017
- Quarter 2, 2017
Data notes
In order to smooth the jumps, we now compare the current quarter to the average quarter over the prior 3 years. This means that an unusually low number of cases in the prior year no longer creates what looks like a substantial increase, which is particularly an issue with relatively rare drug categories and/or small counties.
As we describe elsewhere, there are many limitations of the data, including: county being an imperfect geographic unit to report the data; changes in law enforcement policy, practice and resources over time; and often substantial lags between when drugs were seized by law enforcement and when they were submitted to the lab and then further lags due to testing and reporting.
Truly new drugs present a challenge for crime lab testing: the need for a standard to which to compare the lab sample for identification. Cannabimimetics and novel psychoactive drugs (for example, variations of MDMA), for example, are constantly changing. Often when a particular formulation gains enough notoriety--usually, being made illegal or causing a widely reported death--to warrant a standards company producing a chemical standard and a crime lab buying it, the formulation is changed. Thus, time trends in identified crime lab cases do not capture the initial rise of such a novel substance, but at best its peak and decline. Here we just focus on significant counts of new or rarely-before-seen substances.
In addition to the above issues with crime lab case counts, there are difficulties with reliably assigning a case to a particular quarter. First, the date entered as the received date for a particular case may be a few days after when the case actually arrived at the lab, which might put it into the next quarter. This date clearly comes after the actual arrest. Furthermore, testing takes time, and so results may not come until a subsequent quarter. Sometimes the initial request is for only some of the evidence from a case to be tested, and so the other items might be tested later at prosecutor request, adding further delay between submission and result.
In sum, "quarter" does not mean when law enforcement seized the drug, and counts will likely change. All data presented here are preliminary.
Please refer to the other crime lab data pages for other insight: