ISSUES
: Drugs
Chapter 2: UK drug laws
32
bladder, so a new drug reached
the market called methoxetamine,
or ‘special M,’ which claimed to be
bladder-friendly. But in fact it is still
toxic for the bladder and also the
kidney and central nervous system.
And after it was made illegal,
a number of other derivatives
appeared such as diphenidine.
The health risks associated with
this class makes the new versions
particularly scary.
The unwinnable battle?
We often don’t know how these drugs
affect people. Researchers like myself
are working on this, but the number
of new substances is increasing
too quickly for us to keep up. By the
time we publish papers focusing on
more popular versions, the market
has changed. When something goes
wrong, doctors don’t know how to
treat the effects – in many cases they
can’t even ascertain the exact drug.
We have reached the point where I am
now more worried about legal highs
than illegal drugs. Whenever I see a
heroin client inmy clinic, I knowexactly
what to do. That is often not the case
with legal highs. And as a psychiatrist
I know that they potentially have far
more psychiatric consequences than
heroin. Whenever you tamper with
very sensitive mechanisms in your
brain, it’s difficult to know what will
happen.
One argument is that we should
keep these drugs legal since we
are facing an unwinnable battle.
But the big drawback with this is
that it makes adolescents and other
susceptible people think that the
drug must be safe. New Zealand
tried this approach by permitting
drugs to remain in circulation if
the producers could demonstrate
they were low risk, but this year the
Government U-turned after there
were a number of adverse incidents.
Now its approach is similar to the
UK with its expanding prohibition
schedule.
The problem with the New Zealand
low-risk policy is that establishing
the safety of a drug is a very slow
process if you are going to do it
properly. Proving through clinical
trials that a drug works, is safe
and is not toxic takes upwards of
ten years. Anything less would be
cutting corners. If a manufacturer
were to go through that process
and prove that a drug was low
risk, that might be a different
Men
are more likely to take
drugs than
women
5.4%
in the
last
year
11.9%
in the
last
year
Source:
Drug misuse, findings from the 2014/15 Crime Survey for England and Wales
, Home Office
discussion, but it’s not going to
help with today’s problem.
Similarly there has been some
debate about permitting the supply
of legal highs but keeping it tightly
restricted – perhaps allowing one
distributor per town, for example.
But this both ignores the reality of
the Internet and offers no answer to
the safety problem.
Another possibility is to legalise the
illegal drugs that we know much
more about, so that people are
encouraged to take them instead.
But even if this was politically
possible, it doesn’t sound like
the right course of action either.
I see disasters from drug-taking
on a daily basis. And it wouldn’t
necessarily stop people from taking
legal highs anyway.
The answer to what we actually
should do is complex. The answer
probably lies in prevention: we
need dedicated resources and
funding, we need new ideas to try
and convince youngsters that these
drugs are not safe just because they
are legal. This requires a big change
in how we see these substances.
These are not just some marginal
concern. This is the new drug battle
for the decades ahead.
29 October 2014
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