Fewer people sought hospital treatment for the toxic effects of so-called legal highs following temporary restrictions, a study based at an Edinburgh hospital suggests. The research has been welcomed by Scottish Conservatives health spokesman Miles Briggs MSP, who said figures are ‘very encouraging’. Continue reading Curbs on legal highs cut need for hospital care, study suggests
Stock worth £50,000 seized to be destroyed
The City of Edinburgh Council is cracking down on the sale of dangerous NPS (Novel Psychoactive Substances) – so-called ‘legal highs’. Continue reading Council cracks down on ‘legal highs’
‘Sadly, too many have paid the ultimate price from taking these risky substances and this change will go a long way to stop further deaths’ – Maryon Stewart, Angelus Foundation
Action to protect young people from the dangers of so-called ‘legal highs’ and target those who profit from their trade was announced by the UK government today.
The Psychoactive Substances Bill will prohibit and disrupt the production, distribution, sale and supply of new psychoactive substances (NPS) in the UK. They are often sold online or on the high street.
The ban will extend to the sale of nitrous oxide for human use, known as ‘laughing gas’ or ‘hippy crack’, although its legitimate sale will not be affected.
Minister of State for Policing, Crime, Criminal Justice and Victims, Mike Penning, said: “Young people who take these substances are taking exceptional risks with their health and those who profit from their sale have a complete disregard for the potential consequences. That’s why we are targeting the suppliers.
“The landmark bill will fundamentally change the way we tackle new psychoactive substances – and put an end to the game of cat and mouse in which new drugs appear on the market more quickly than government can identify and ban them.
“The blanket ban will give police and other law enforcement agencies greater powers to tackle the reckless trade in psychoactive substances, instead of having to take a substance-by-substance approach.”
The government has already taken a range of action against so-called ‘legal highs’, including banning more than 500 new drugs and creating the Forensic Early Warning System to detect substances not seen before in the UK. There is also ongoing work to enhance the response to prevention, treatment and information sharing.
Last year the government established an expert panel on New Psychoactive Substances to look at ways of further enhancing the enforcement response. Having carefully considered the evidence, ministers decided to act on the panel’s recommendation to explore the feasibility of a blanket ban and are now introducing this new legislation.
Under the Bill:
In 2013, there were 120 deaths involving NPS in England, Scotland and Wales.
National Police Chiefs’ Council Lead for New Psychoactive Substances, Commander Simon Bray said: “When people buy dangerous drugs they will generally have little idea how potent the drug is or what it may contain. Sadly we have seen too many people losing their lives or becoming seriously ill after taking so-called “legal highs” under the impression that they are safe.
“A blanket ban on new psychoactive substances (NPS) will make it simpler for law enforcement to deal with those drugs which are potentially unsafe but which may not yet be controlled.”
Founder of the Angelus Foundation, Maryon Stewart, said: “Angelus very much welcomes these important legal changes on restricting the supply of so called ‘legal highs’ or new psychoactive substances.
“We expect the law to impact very significantly on the high street trade. The open sale of NPS has led to dangerous experimentation with many young people being badly affected by their unpredictable effects and some ending up in hospital.
“Sadly, too many have paid the ultimate price from taking these risky substances and this change will go a long way to stop further deaths.
“No law can offer the perfect solution to protect people from drugs; it is equally vital we all concentrate our efforts of making the public, young people in particular, more aware of the harms of these substances in schools, at university and during festivals.”
Local young people short-listed for learners award
Late last year I spent time with a bright and enthusiastic group of young adults at Royston Wardieburn Community Centre to plan a piece of work. Their mission? To choose a subject of relevance to young people, research and then write an article on that subject for North Edinburgh News.
The group has now produced their article (see below) – and all their hard work is to be recognised too!
Community Learning & Development tutor Karen Riddell, who supported the group during the project, explained: “They really were a vibrant group of young people with strong opinions and it was great to see them engage with the topic and undertake the various activities related to building their skills and putting the article together.
“The group was nominated for an Edinburgh Adult Learners Achievement Award and I’m delighted to say that they have been short-listed for an award in the Young Adults Category.”
The Tomorrow’s People team will learn their fate at an event at the City Chambers on 20 May. Fingers crossed for you, guys – and here’s your article …
LEGAL HIGHS: Is It Worth It?
Local young people speak out against ‘legal highs’
We are a group of young people from Pilton who have just spent 16 weeks on the Tomorrow’s People employability programme. Part of our course helped us brush up on our literacy and critical thinking skills through a weekly CLD Practical Journalism course held at Royston Wardieburn Community Centre.
Dave Pickering, the editor at the North Edinburgh News, very kindly gave us the opportunity to write an article for his paper, so after much debate we decided to research and write about Legal Highs.
We compiled a local survey and found out that most of the young people who responded to the survey had either used Legal Highs or knew someone who had. The main reasons cited were: they were easy to get, friends were trying them, they’re cheap – at least half the price of illegal drugs, they give you a really good high, taking them gives you something to do, boredom and peer pressure.
Even although a high percentage of young people surveyed had used them without any serious long term consequences, we did find out that at least 68 people died last year as a direct result of using them, so they are not quite as harmless as some people think.
We found that their name made them quite misleading and people thought it meant they were pretty safe to use. The truth is that drugs councilors now advise their clients to stick to their heroin as legal highs are even more dangerous, burning the skin as it is injected and causing blistering and serious infection.
Most people who completed the questionnaire had also tried illegal drugs and strongly felt that these were safer than Legal highs. As a group, we definitely agreed with that.
We also feel that the government are failing to make drug taking safer. No matter what you might feel about drugs, a lot of people from literally all walks of life use them and are going to continue to do so. David Cameron dodges the issue for fear of losing votes and insists that ‘What is in place is working’ despite the fact that over 2500 people died from drugs-related causes last year in the UK.
Is it not time to follow Portugal and make drugs a health issue rather than a criminal one so that people are offered more protection? In Portugal they found that de-criminalising it didn’t bring about any increase in the level of drug use by people and also that millions was saved on the essentially ineffectual enforcement of drug laws.
Across Europe clubs have drug-testing facilities so that people can test substances before they take them – surely that must offer people more protection than kidding on that ‘what is in place is working’!
A recent Home Office report that we looked at said that having tough drugs laws didn’t make any difference to the level of drug use but Home Secretary Teresa May had this part of the report removed and it was only found out about when Norman Baker revealed the findings after he resigned! This just goes to show that governments make useless drug laws to kid on they are in control of the problem when they’re really just doing it as a vote catcher.
Present policy bears no relation to the reality of people’s recreational drug use and it’s time for the government to introduce some new policies to protect its citizens and not put their own vote-catching first.
We need much better drug education to help us keep ourselves safe, and the obvious place for this to take place is in schools. We felt strongly that a peer to peer support programme in schools would help young people make informed choices about drug use and help keep them safer.
Our research found that young people felt there needed to be far more opportunities for young people in the work-place and much better affordable or subsidised recreational facilities to offer them the chance to experience other kinds of ‘legal highs’, their own ‘natural highs’ like ski-ing, skating, abseiling, snow-boarding, canoeing, dirt-biking, go-karting etc. Risk-taking is part of brain-development for young people and we need to offer them the opportunity to explore this in a safer environment.
Drugs become a problem when there is little else in the drug users lives. We found out that in an experiment, mice which were separated from other mice kept going back to drink the drug-laced water whereas mice that lived in groups didn’t. The experiment showed that lack of strong emotional bonds in your life can drive you to bond with legal highs or drugs instead.
They say it takes a community to bring up a child so that’s why it’s very important for us to work together to stop the reckless experimentation that can lead to addiction, to value the young people of Pilton and provide them with the support they need to keep their use of drugs and alcohol to an acceptable level and help them realise their potential.
It seems to us that one of the worst thing about legal highs is the hypocrisy of supposedly ‘respectable’ shop-keepers who are prepared to stock them in the full knowledge that people, especially young people, buy them to consume them. We feel a local campaign should be set up to stop these shops from selling them.
Good websites:
(1)Anyone’s Child; Families for Safer Drug Control – www.anyoneschild.org
(2) Release.org
Two groups of dangerous ‘legal highs’ were banned by the Coalition Government yesterday.
The stimulant compound drug 4,4’-DMAR, which is linked to the deaths of more than 20 people in the UK, mainly Northern Ireland, and the synthetic opioid MT-45, have both been outlawed as Class A substances.
It is part of a concerted range of action taken by the government to respond to the challenges caused by new psychoactive substances (NPS) – known as ‘legal highs’.
General ban
This action includes developing proposals for a general ban on NPS following a recommendation by an expert panel commissioned by the Home Office.
The bans come into force on the same day as a letter was sent by the Crime Prevention Minister to summer festival organisers warning them of the risks posed by so-called ‘legal highs’ and new guidance was published for local authorities and the police on tackling NPS.
Crime Prevention Minister Lynne Featherstone said:
“The Coalition Government has taken the lead in tackling new psychoactive substances, or so-called ‘legal highs’, both in this country and internationally.
“We created the Forensic Early Warning System to identify substances previously unseen in the UK and we have banned more than 500 new drugs, including those controlled today.
“We are also developing proposals for a general ban on the supply of ‘legal highs’ across the UK. This would give law enforcement greater powers to tackle the NPS trade as a whole, instead of a substance-by-substance approach.
“I will be working right up until the dissolution of Parliament to ensure we have done as much as we possibly can to pave the way for a general ban. This will mean the next government can act quickly to clamp down on this reckless trade.
The Coalition Government has also been taking international action to respond to the threat of ‘legal highs’.
On Friday (13 March), a UK-led proposal to internationally control the drug mephedrone is expected to be passed by the United Nations’ (UN) Commission on Narcotic Drugs in Vienna. Mephedrone is already controlled as a Class B substance in the UK.
If it goes ahead, this would be the first time a NPS is controlled by all UN members.
This is in addition to the UK’s continuing work with other countries and overseas agencies to share best practice on tackling NPS and to build closer law enforcement cooperation.
Commander Simon Bray, National Policing Lead for New Psychoactive Substances, said:
“The government’s decision to develop proposals for a blanket ban on new psychoactive substances (NPS) is a very positive step forward.
It highlights the government’s commitment to supporting law enforcement, including the police, in their efforts to combat dangerous drugs.
A blanket ban would make it simpler to deal with those drugs, which are unsafe but which may not yet be controlled. It will also make it easier to tackle so-called ‘legal highs’ which may contain mixtures including already illegal drugs.
We are also encouraged by further prevention and education measures which have been proposed, as NPS cannot be addressed by law enforcement alone.”
One of the drugs being banned yesterday – 4,4’-DMAR – which is known by the street name Serotoni, is usually bought in tablet or powder form, and samples have shown it being mixed with other drugs such as mephedrone and synthetic cannabinoids.
MT-45, a morphine-like drug, is not currently available in the UK, but has been linked to deaths elsewhere in Europe and the United States.
Separately, the Home Office has accepted advice from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs to ban new types of manmade cannabis as Class B drugs.
Draft legislation is being prepared to take action against the latest generation of synthetic cannabinoids in the next Parliament.
The Home Office is also taking forward a comprehensive action plan to further enhance our response to prevention, treatment and information sharing. For example, Public Health England has published a new toolkit to help local areas to prevent and respond to the use of NPS.
The toolkit gives a broad overview of the challenges and provides commissioners with resources and advice to inform a suitable local response.
A NPS clinical network is also being established to share intelligence on NPS and drug-related adverse reactions and harms, and develop a more systematic way of sharing information.
Plans on how to tackle New Psychoactive Substances (NPS) – so-called ‘legal highs’ – and the health and social problems associated with them will be presented to city councillors next week.
“Unfortunately, as they are sometimes not illegal, it is very difficult to stop shops from selling them. We’re talking to the Procurator Fiscal’s office about what we can do to change that.
Shop raids mark start of ‘legal highs’ campaign
Police in Edinburgh yesterday executed search warrants at three premises following intelligence that New Psychoactive Substances – so-called ‘legal highs’ – were being sold there.
Around 70 officers from across the city were involved in the activity, which took place in the Leith Walk, Newington and Wester Hailes areas as part of a national operation to stem the sales of these items and to raise awareness as to their risks.
Representatives from Scotland Fire and Rescue, City of Edinburgh Council Trading Standards and Environmental Health also carried out visits to a further eight premises to provide appropriate guidance on legislation and licensing issues relating to NPS.
Over 3,000 sachets of substances were seized from the three stores and have been sent for further analysis.
The operation is being backed by a two-week nationwide campaign to help raise awareness of the dangers of taking New Psychoactive Substances.
The campaign is aimed at young people aged 11-18 year-old as well as their parents and teachers. It also targets young professionals aged 25-35 years and will include a national radio commercial.
Posters and screens highlighting this issue will also be on display in train stations and on local buses across the country.
Furthermore, a range of initiatives are taking place with local community officers visiting schools, youth groups and community events to help raise awareness and educate young people on the dangers of NPS.
Detective Chief Inspector Stuart Houston, who led yesterday’s activity said: “Police Scotland is committed to keeping people safe and to stopping the sale of any substances, which may cause harm to our communities.
“The items seized during the operation will now be subject to detailed analysis and we will be continuing to engage with our various partner agencies throughout.
“Enforcement, however, is only a small part of this operation and we are keen to educate the public on all the associated risks of NPS so that less people are inclined to buy and consume them.
“School Liaison Officers and Community Policing Teams will be engaging heavily with the public in the coming weeks in relation to the dangers of New Psychoactive Substances.
“I would strongly urge our communities never to consume any of the NPS material currently being sold at premises across the country. They may contain extremely harmful chemicals, which could seriously impact upon your long-term health.”
Further information on NPS can be found at:
If you have any information about NPS, or indeed any drug activity, contact the police on 101 or, in an emergency by dialling 999.
