The old saying is that if something “looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck.” The same can be said for drugs.

Earlier this week Lawrence County saw its first case of someone being found guilty of selling a synthetic drug, a charge that likely wouldn’t have been possible if the Ohio Legislature hadn’t taken the decisive steps that it did in recent years.

The details of this particular case really aren’t that important. The precedent it sets certainly is though.

This shows that, now that legislators have armed them with laws that have some teeth, law enforcement officers in Lawrence County and the rest of the state take the distribution of these substances just as seriously as other drugs.

Not only are these synthetic drugs still considered illegal, as they have been for a couple of years, recent changes in the law stop drug manufacturers from finding loopholes by slightly modifying the chemical makeup.

Essentially, if the synthetic substances are similar and designed to imitate illegal drugs, then these substances become illegal, too.

This is a very important change. Hopefully, one day, this will be adopted by our two neighbors in the Tri-State and, ultimately, across the nation.