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Last updated on Thursday, October 8, 2015
(INDIANAPOLIS) - The Indiana Supreme Court has upheld two critical parts of the state’s effort to crack down on synthetic marijuana, better known as spice.
The state's highest court ruled Wednesday that two Indiana laws outlawing spice and other similar drugs are not unconstitutional.
Those laws ban synthetic cannabinoids and so-called "look-a-likes", drugs with a similar, but slightly adjusted, chemical compound.
The court's unanimous ruling said the laws allow an ordinary Hoosier to "determine through appropriate testing whether he was attempting to sell any products containing it. That is what we demand of our penal statutes."
Lawmakers and other anti-drug advocates have said the rapidly changing chemical formulas in the drugs make it difficult for lawmakers to write laws covering all of them.
The court also upheld Indiana's law allowing the state Pharmacy Board to create emergency rules to ban those new versions of synthetic drugs, finding the "Pharmacy Board has merely been given the power to determine, via emergency rule, whether additional substances should qualify as 'synthetic drugs'."
Wednesday's decision overturns a previous decision by the Indiana Court of Appeals, which ruled allowing the Pharmacy Board to create emergency rules created a "Where's Waldo" approach to determining what qualifies as a synthetic drug.
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