Why the UK Stance on Legal Highs Misses the Point

History has a bizarre way of repeating itself, and frustratingly it always seems to be the most questionable ideas that crop up, over and over again.

Back in November, I wrote a piece about drug testing in UK clubs, discussing whether it made sense to allow drug testing facilities into UK clubs; to let people find out what was in the substances they were taking. The topic had first got my interest because of the increase in the number of cases where people died, or were hospitalised, after taking unknown substances, and because throughout Europe there are a number of active drug testing schemes, but none in the UK.

The difference in how the UK and the rest of Europe deals with drugs has cropped up in the news once again, this time in showing up the UK for it's arguably illogical policy decisions. The UK has decided to opt out of an European Commission proposal that was intended to allow a more balanced, quicker response to banning legal highs, as well as introducing a grading system that would mean new substances would be treated differently, depending on how much risk they posed and if some of the chemicals can be used for legitimate uses. The UK government has decided not to go down this route, even though the UK is the largest consumer of legal highs in the EU.

If you Google "legal highs", you'll be met with rafts of tragic news stories of people dying after taking legal highs, or mixing them with a cocktail of illegal drugs and alcohol. It's a horrible recurring theme; grief-stricken parents, completely unaware that their sons or daughters would take drugs at the weekend, telling stories of police turning up at their houses in the early morning to deliver the news no parents ever want to hear.

Mephedrone; One of the first legal highs to break into the wider public's consciousness

"Legal highs" is one of those frustratingly blanket terms that covers pretty much any chemical that isn't illegal. Anything from synthetic cannabis to a whole load of powders, all intended to try and re-create the high you'd get from real weed, coke, MDMA or whatever's your favoured vice for staying up and chatting shit to your mates.

And that's the crux of the government's problem when it comes to dealing with these things. It used to be a lot more simple. There were certain drugs that were illegal, and we all knew where we stood with them. Get caught by the police with a wrap of cocaine in your pocket, and you're going to be in trouble. Nowadays though, you can get caught with a shiny pack of 'GOGAINE' in your pocket, and nothing will happen. Sellers can use the excuse that it's a research chemical and it's not intended for human consumption, and the police can't do shit.

The problem with this in turn though? Like any drug, there are going to be side effects. With drugs that we're familiar with, we broadly know the dangers and risks of taking them but with most of these legal highs, no one really has a clue about what they'll do to you in the long run. Generally speaking, people who take drugs have at least a sense of what kind of tolerance they have to drugs: how much they'd like to take, or how much is too much. Legal highs are an unfamiliar territory for a lot of people, which can lead to a lot of potentially fatal mistakes. This is reflected in the statistics. There were 52 deaths linked to legal highs in 2012, a big increase from the 29 deaths that happened in 2011. It's a very dangerous combination of people not knowing what they're taking, and not knowing how much is a fatal amount or not.

The Welsh Emerging Drugs & Identification of Novel Substances (WEDINOS) project is a service that lets people take their legal highs to be tested. They'll give you a report back about your sample, including the chemical make up of it. It's a pretty great project; another step, along with the Warehouse Project's initiative, that's attempting to make life that little bit safer for those who want to take drugs. Having a click through the sample results page, it also highlights one of the big problems with legal highs. Most of these drugs don't have names, beyond their scientific names, so the average person doesn't have a clue what the results mean. It's all well and good if you get some cocaine tested and they tell you it's ketamine, that's a language everyone can understand.  But if you send in a legal high and they tell you that "Sample Upon Analysis: 5F-PB-22. STS-135", you're not really going to have a clue what to expect if and when you decide to take it.

Unexpected effects not looking too appealing…

There's also the assumption that if something's considered a legal high, it must be okay to take it. Even though the packages are sold with clear warnings that the contents aren't fit for human consumption, that's about as useless as the warnings on alcohol asking you to "Please Drink Responsibly". If you want to get fucked up, you're going too, especially if there's a few reviews on the product website implying that it's  fine to take.

Legal highs really came to the fore in the UK around 2009, when the purity of cocaine dropped to a low of 20%, and nearly half of all ecstasy pills that had been seized were found to contain no MDMA at all.  This combination led people to trying all types of different things to get high, and it mephedrone was both the cheapest and the most easily available. Our very own Sam Wolfson wrote this piece on his thoughts about the highs and lows of the summer of 'drone. Eventually of course mephedrone was made illegal, but it's still pretty widely available, and there's still countless other legal highs still on the market.

As soon as one drug is banned, it's pretty easy for producers of legal highs to introduce a new chemical and re-brand it, once again circumventing the law. This is where the EU Commission's approach to legal highs makes more sense than the UK's. If you're going to try and control something as wild and unpredictable as the legal high market, blanket bans just don't work. There are far too many chemicals to ban and by outright making so many chemicals illegal, it also makes it extremely hard to conduct research, because they become so tightly regulated.

By having a graded system where different chemicals can be treated depending on the danger they pose to the consumer, it could bring an end to the constant one-upmanship of legal high producers trying to continually make stronger drugs, using newer combinations of chemicals. Allowing proper testing of legal highs could also lead to some being granted the freedom to be sold and taxed, if they were deemed not to be too dangerous.

Norman Baker, having been appointed as the new Crime Prevention Minister by the Home Office in October, made a statement saying he was looking forward to continuing work into international drug policy, and "have an open mind when it comes to deciding what is working, and what isn't, in other countries". It turns out an "open mind" when it comes to politicians actually means doing exactly what the person before you did, regardless of how unsuccessful the policies were. He's continued the scare tactics about legal highs, rejecting the EU Commisions proposal and saying that there are legal highs that are as dangerous as cocaine and heroin.

I'm sure that's true, and there are drugs out there that are more dangerous, but scare-mongering isn't going to help and the reality is, the Government and the police can't stop people taking ecstasy, cocaine, or heroin. Using further legislation to introduce wholesale bans of other drugs is only going keep all of them running in circles trying to catch up with the latest craze, before banning it, only to find there's another that's already taken it's place. The words from Norman Baker are just another example of politicians pandering towards their misguided notions that they need to appear tough on drugs, regardless of how illogical it seems.

You can follow Patrick Carnegy on Twitter here: @patrickcarnegy