ISSUES
: Drugs
Chapter 2: UK drug laws
31
Spice (synthetic
cannabinoids)
Remember how horror stories of
meow meow, m-kat and benzo fury
made headlines after a spate of
deaths, and was quickly banned?
Spice was poised to be the next
dangerous drug at the centre of such
a controversy after it was linked to
several deaths.
Many of the chemicals in
cannabinoids, which can be ordered
online and have a variety of stupid
names such as clockwork orange,
black mamba, annihilation and devil’s
weed, are illegal under the Misuse of
Drugs Act. But because police can’t be
sure of the exact cocktail of chemicals
in the packets, the Government
thought it best to ban everything.
Alcohol substitutes
Prof. David Nutt, the drugs adviser
fired by the Government for his
views on ecstasy, is part of a team
developing ‘alcosynth’, billed as a
safer alternative to alcohol.
Nutt says the pill mimics the tipsy
sensation felt after a few lagers,
without the street brawling and liver
damage. But although alcohol is
exempt under new regulation, the
synthetic alcohol is not, so Nutt’s new
drug will be banned.
29 May 2015
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Legal highs: regulation
won’t work – the only
answer lies in prevention
An article from
The Conversation
.
By Fabrizio Schifano, Chair in Clinical Pharmacology and
Therapeutics, University of Hertfordshire
I
n one respect, the world’s drug
problem is not getting much
worse. The UN believes that the
use of drugs such as cocaine and
heroin has stabilised, for example.
In fact, the ground in the drugs
battle has just shifted. The focus is
now increasingly on legal highs.
People might be aware that altered
versions of ecstasy or cannabis
are available nowadays, but the
true range of what we in the trade
call novel psychoactive drugs is far
more varied. There are derivatives
of everything from ketamine
to cocaine, from opiates to
psychotropics. Their use is rising,
and so is the number of fatalities.
Some people fear that the figures
are only going in one direction.
Enforcers vs chemists
Why has this happened? In recent
years there was a worldwide
decrease in the purity of drugs like
amphetamine and cocaine and the
MDMA content of ecstasy. This
decrease helped fuel demand for
alternatives (though admittedly
there are signs that this purity
decrease is now reversing). The
internet has also made possible the
sort of sharing of information that
makes it much easier to sell these
substances nowadays. And as has
been well documented, banning
these drugs is difficult because
the manufacturers can constantly
bring out new varieties with slight
alterations to the chemistry.
It has turned into a battle between
the drug enforcers and the drug
chemists, who are typically based
in the Far East, for example in China
and Hong Kong. There are many
databases online with information
on the molecular structures of
existing drugs. This makes it easier
for these people to modify them to
create a new product.
The market is very strong in the UK.
You might think it is because the
information online is often written
in English. This would explain why
Ireland has a big problem too, but
then again the US does not. And
other problem countries include
Latvia, Hungary, Estonia and
Russia.
The big worries
Certaincategoriesparticularlyworry
us. One is the ecstasy derivatives
known as phenethylamines. One
of the well-known ones in the UK is
PMA, which has been nicknamed
‘Dr Death’ because of the number
of fatalities. Another is known
as ‘blue mystique’. These have
been made illegal in a number of
European countries, but many more
keep appearing. A related group is
known as NBOMe, which are very
powerful and therefore also a great
concern.
Then there are cannabimimetics,
which are sometimes known as
the ‘spice drugs’. There are a few
hundred known variations, many of
which are very powerful, sometimes
thousands of times more than
cannabis. They were behind the
‘spiceophrenia’ epidemic in Russia,
but are prevalent closer to home
too. Last week a new HM Prisons
report mentioned them among a
number of legal-high concerns in
British prisons. To make matters
worse, they are very easy to modify
and have the big selling point that
they can’t always be traced in urine.
Sometimes
legal
highs
are
marketed as a solution to a problem
that an illegal drug might cause. For
example ketamine (‘special K’) is
known to damage the intestine and
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