Legal highs 'becoming bigger issue than illegal drugs'

Legal highs 'becoming bigger issue than illegal drugs'


Legal highs are becoming a bigger problem than illegal drugs, with many young people wrongly believing they are safe, a drugs worker claims.

Alan Andrews, an ex-heroin addict who runs a Llanelli-based drug intervention centre, said some legal drugs were stronger than illegal counterparts.

He told BBC Wales' Week In Week Out that legal did not mean safe.

The UK government plans to bring in temporary banning orders for legal highs to be tested.

The programme has investigated the issue of legal highs, more than a year after the drug mephedrone, or meow meow, was banned.

Undercover recording has found shops breaking the law by selling some of these drugs for human consumption.

Mr Andrews, managing director of Chooselife, said: "It's becoming a bigger problem than illegal drugs because... the message 'legal' means safe, which it's not.

"And... some of them are stronger, more potent than the illegal drugs and it's quite scary.
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So-called legal highs can be extremely dangerous and anyone taking them is playing Russian roulette with their health”

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"There's a generation of young people who are being sold a lie that legal means safe."

Secretly recorded Week In Week Out footage shows a 17-year-old girl being sold a drug called salvia.

She is also sold equipment and shown how to use it to smoke the drug.

Salvia, derived from a Mexican plant, is legal to possess but it is against the law to sell it for human consumption.

A toxicologist and former member of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs said the drugs laws needed to be reviewed.

John Ramsey says salvia has not been banned because the fact it is so potent means very few people take it more than once.
Unprecedented pace

"There has been a lot of talk about whether things are appropriately classified and I think the development of these new compounds at the rate they're being developed probably warrants a second look at how we control all drugs," he said.

Legal highs are not new but there are more of them and there are concerns they are getting more potent.

Last month the monitoring centre which records drug use across Europe said new highs were appearing at an "unprecedented" pace.

Some 41 new substances emerged in 2010, 16 of which were first reported in the UK.

The most high profile has been mephedrone which has been linked to a number of young people's deaths.

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