Aims: (i) To collect data on the consumption patterns, purchase patterns and motivations of the online NPS community, and (ii) engage this specific group of NPS users in an exploration of recent policy developments in the UK focusing on their experiences of new legislative controls and the perceived harms they may cause, and eliciting their suggestions for future policy developments in this area. Methods: We employed an exploratory online methodology comprising a survey and participatory online research designed to interact and engage with experienced users of NPS. Findings: The findings of our small-scale exploratory study illustrate that what we term the cyber-psychonauts are well equipped to make a valuable contribution to NPS policy debates in general, and are ideally placed to report on the effects of recent policy changes on NPS-related harms in particular. The majority of NPS users in our study supported the introduction of a regulated market for NPS, which would not criminalise users and which would focus on the reduction of NPS-related harm. Conclusions: We argue that the cyberpsychonauts are well placed to contribute to NPS-related drug policy debates and, furthermore, that there may be a role for them in disseminating emerging information about NPS-related harm.

Novel psychoactive substances (NPS) have been a dominant feature of drug discourse for many years now and, in academic, policy and public discourse, have become established as a newand by implication, distinctcategory of drugs. We argue that this understanding of NPS is fundamentally problematic. Differences within the category are obscured, as are similarities between NPS and more established categories of drugs. Focusing on NPS as something new, different or particularly special is misleading and counterproductive and can have serious consequences in terms of understanding the bigger picture in relation to illegal drugs more generally. This has led to overestimations of the size of the NPS problem, obfuscation of the common underlying causes of dependent drug use and the implementation of significant and problematic policy changes. Furthermore, a failure to see the rise in NPS as just one of a number of emerging trends in contemporary drug scenes, alongside the development of online markets or the rise in domestic drug production operations, for example, impairs our ability to understand the wider societal, cultural and theoretical underpinnings of drug use. NPS are not particularly special: treating them as such can have dangerous and far-reaching consequences. ARTICLE HISTORY

Additional information:Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Kent Academic RepositoryFull text document (pdf) Copyright & reuseContent in the Kent Academic Repository is made available for research purposes. Unless otherwise stated all content is protected by copyright and in the absence of an open licence (eg Creative Commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher, author or other copyright holder. Versions of researchThe version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. Users should always cite the published version of record. EnquiriesFor any further enquiries regarding the licence status of this document, please contact: researchsupport@kent.ac.ukIf you believe this document infringes copyright then please contact the KAR admin team with the take-down information provided at http://kar.kent.ac.uk/contact.html (EMCDDA & Europol, 2015) and the rate at which they are emerging, suggests that the problem is escalating at an exponential rate. Danis, Glynn, Waters & Fitzerald, 2015). Furthermore, Coulson & Caulkins (2011) failed to find significant violent markets associated with NPS. Citation for published versionNevertheless, NPS are being used as a catalyst for the rapid development of new policy responses (Chatwin, 2014; EMCDDA, 2016b;Measham & Newcombe, 2016;Stevens and Measham, 2014). NPS tend to emerge rapidly, and sometimes in tandem with each other, making it difficult for existing reactive systems of drug control to keep pace with them. Under systems that modify or adapt existing laws and processes, once legislation is passed to prohibit a named substance or group of substances (generic control), compounds can be easily moderated to create others not covered by Finally, Dunn, in his critical review of DMAA research evidence, demonstrates that issues around policy implementation and associated unintended consequences and/or harms for this HED are similar to those posed by the increase in range and availability of NPS and new drugs more widely.For example: there is a very limited existing evidence base on which to draw; the potential for harm is demonstrated but there is very little understanding of the nature of these harms; and scheduling of DMAA in many countries will now impede the ability of future research to provide a stronger evidence base. This special issue therefore offers tentative evidence of the merit of studying NPS and HED, not in isolatio...

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