The ANSM calls on laboratories to make drugs used for chemical submission more identifiable

Coloring, bitterness, unusual odor… The National Medicines Safety Agency (ANSM) must call, at the beginning of January 2025, on pharmaceutical laboratories to facilitate the detection of drugs at risk of chemical submissions, according to a press release from the agency published Friday December 20. The change in recipe should make it possible to alert potential victims of chemical submission, thanks to the unusual appearance of their drink when a medication is administered without their knowledge.

The substance administered by the attackers is most often a medication. These include antihistamines, sedatives, benzodiazepines, antidepressants, opioids and even ketamines. In the case of chemical submission, these products are administered without the victim’s knowledge for criminal or tortious purposes, most often with a view to rape or sexual assault. Attackers also turn to non-drug substances (MDMA, cocaine, 3-MMC, GHB and its derivatives or alcohol).

To protect potential victims, the ANSM therefore calls on manufacturers to modify, on a voluntary basis, the taste, odor or visual appearance of risky drugs in order to alert potential victims. “The objective is to be able to modify the AMMs (marketing authorizations), then the drugs actually placed on the market, on the basis of proposals from manufacturers and the collegial discussions that will follow,” specifies the agency in its press release. . Initial discussions have already taken place on the subject between the agency and manufacturers during an interface committee.

Several years before arriving in pharmacies

Manufacturers will notably have to request a new marketing authorization for their modified medicine. It should therefore take several years for the new formulas to arrive in pharmacists’ drawers. In 2007, Roche laboratories agreed to color oral Rivotril blue, a drug dedicated to the treatment of epilepsy, then one of the most used drugs in chemical submission cases. Its blue version arrived in pharmacies six years later, in 2013.

Sad observation: reports of chemical submission have almost doubled between 2021 and 2022. In total, 1,229 suspicious reports of chemical submission in France were recorded by the AP-HP addictovigilance center in Paris in 2022, compared to 727 in 2021 and 539 in 2020, according to the establishment’s latest survey published in November 2023. Coincidence of the calendar, the ANSM, which wanted to warn before the festivities at the end of the year, published its press release the day after the conviction of Dominique Pelicot and 50 other men for the sedated rapes suffered by Gisèle Pelicot near ‘a decade.