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The term designer drugs was originally used todescribe the illegal analogues of the popular painkillersmeperidine (Demerol) and fentanyl (Sublimaze®). However,in the 1980s, various analogues of the powerful stimulantamphetamine also started to emerge, most notably Ecstasyand methamphetamine. Since these drugs were largely usedby teenagers and young adults at dance clubs, parties, andall-night raves, the term designer drugs was often replaced bythe name “club drugs.” Today, the terms club drugs anddesigner drugs are often used interchangeably.The term designer drugs was a parody of the termdesigner jeans, according to J. Morgan and his colleagues intheir discussion about designer drugs in the book SubstanceAbuse—A Comprehensive Textbook. During the 1970s and1980s, Levi Strauss, Inc., was the leading manufacturer ofdenim blue jeans and was dominating the blue jean market.Hoping that consumers would pay little attention to thedifference, other clothing designers started to produce“designer jeans” that were cheaper imitations, or copycats, ofthe original Levi brand.Making designer drugs was legal for years, because atthe time, U.S. drug laws only prohibited synthesizing exactcopies of approved drugs, while altering the chemical structureslightly and producing a closely related analogue wasstill perfectly legal. Thus, a basement drug laboratorycould synthesize huge amounts of a designer drug withoutgetting into trouble with the law. The same was true afterthe U.S. government banned the sale of AK-47 assault rifles,leading gunmakers to manufacture copycats with slightmodifications so they were not technically AK-47s, but servedthe same purpose.In 1970, the U.S. government passed the ControlledSubstances Act, which classified all drugs into one of fivecategories, or “schedules.” In effect, this law classified drugs9