Canadian Drug and Substance Watch : New and emerging substances

The Canadian Drug and Substance Watch (CDSW) is a drug early warning system designed to highlight new and emerging substances on the illegal drug market.

  • Last updated: 2025-06-26

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Emergence timeline

The emergence timeline shows the first and subsequent detections of a new or emerging psychoactive substance for each data source. The timeline also tracks the substance over time and, where possible, by location.

Filter by pharmacological class and substance from the dropdown menu. Hover over or tap the location or tiles of the timeline to display the number of identifications in that location and during that time. To breakdown the identifications by data source, filter by location.

The number of identifications in for {{classSubstanceText}} was .

Emergence timeline: Text description

The text description table data for the emergence timeline figure can be found in the psychoactive substances table below.

Notes
  • Only provinces and territories with at least one substance identification have been included within the emergence timeline.
  • Canada and online is the number of identifications across Canada, including those found via web monitoring.

Psychoactive substances table

This section describes new and emerging psychoactive substances detected by the CDSW. It includes information about when and where substances were found.

The table can be searched and sorted by substance, pharmacological class, data source, location, and time.

Substance Pharmacological class Data source Location Year and month
Notes
  • Counts and trends may be influenced by the number of sites reporting in a given time period.

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