poledriver
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2005
- Messages
- 11,543
'There are more than 350 legal highs, but many see them as a poor substitute'
My great love is drum'n'bass. I feel really at home in clubs; my first job in a nightclub was when I was 15 and they've always held a fascination for me – when the strip lights go off and the music comes up, it's wonderland. I go to nightclubs every weekend and in summer I go to festivals, to find out what people are taking and why. I talk to hundreds of people and I run a charity called The Loop that aims to reduce drug-related harm.
A decade ago, we wouldn't have said there was such a thing as "legal highs" or NPS. I would say it began in 2008, because that's when mephedrone appeared. It was the perfect storm: the illegal drug market was treading water, ecstasy and cocaine purity were the lowest they had ever been and suddenly this new product comes along that is legal and delivered to your door for £10 a gram. People were saying, "What's not to like?"
Most legal highs are actually illegal – 70-80% of them are already controlled in the UK because we have this broad-ranging, generic legislation that bans all chemicals of the same family. We've banned things that don't even exist yet.
At the clubs where I've done research, more than half the people are taking drugs, but hardly anyone is taking NPS. There are now more than 350 NPSs identified by the European Monitoring Centre (EMCDDA), but just because we have these products doesn't mean everyone's buying them. I took a student to a festival this summer to do research on NPS, and he couldn't find anyone who was taking any. He had to change his dissertation to "Why aren't people taking NPS?" Classic, illegal drugs were much more appealing. For a lot of people NPSs are an unpleasant substitute.
My research shows that people sometimes call NPSs "chav drugs", and there's definitely a market among lower-income groups who want a cheap, cheerful stimulant. In the north-west, mixtures of unidentified white powders have been sold as "bubble", which is basically a hotchpotch of whatever stimulants and ex-legal highs are hanging around in the dealer's house. It's almost taken the place of what speed was in the 1990s – the "poor man's cocaine".
In the Netherlands, they don't have much of a problem with synthetic cannabinoids, whereas in New Zealand they have trouble getting hold of illegal drugs, and that's where NPS really took off. It would be interesting to see what happened to NPS in the UK if we introduced a legal, regulated market in cannabis and ecstasy.
I went to a two-day festival this summer and there were nine cardiac arrests from MDMA. High purity can be as much of a problem as low purity. At the moment ecstasy is very pure, but people are taking too much because they don't realise. The police had to put out a tweet saying, "Be careful, the MDMA is really strong"; people were tweeting back, saying ,"Excellent, where do I buy it?"
My colleagues say, "Fiona, you don't need to be out every Saturday night. You can get a research assistant to do it." But I wouldn't want to miss the conversations I have, they give me such a good feel for what's happening. I interviewed a guy in a gay club this summer whose father had died from drugs and whose mother was a daily crack user dying of emphysema. He'd lost contact with his family and his neighbours were climbing his drainpipe and shouting, "We're going to kill you, faggot" – when he called the police they told him to grow up. He'd come to that club to be surrounded by gay people in a warm, accepting environment, and to get off his head on mephedrone; that was his family. Drugs had been the cause of real tragedy in his life, but they were also a part of what made him feel safe.
My teenage daughter finds it quite amusing that her mum's a lifelong clubber. In my teens, the place to be was the pub and the club, but she and her friends aren't really interested. They go to cafés and they go to Waterstones in the evening and listen to authors. The next generation has a lot of pressures – university fees, debt, graduate unemployment. Alcohol and drug use is falling among under-25s. She told me, "Our generation has to stay sober to sort out the mess that your generation's made of the world."
Cont with some user comments -
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/oct/05/legal-highs-criminology-drugs-clubbing
My great love is drum'n'bass. I feel really at home in clubs; my first job in a nightclub was when I was 15 and they've always held a fascination for me – when the strip lights go off and the music comes up, it's wonderland. I go to nightclubs every weekend and in summer I go to festivals, to find out what people are taking and why. I talk to hundreds of people and I run a charity called The Loop that aims to reduce drug-related harm.
A decade ago, we wouldn't have said there was such a thing as "legal highs" or NPS. I would say it began in 2008, because that's when mephedrone appeared. It was the perfect storm: the illegal drug market was treading water, ecstasy and cocaine purity were the lowest they had ever been and suddenly this new product comes along that is legal and delivered to your door for £10 a gram. People were saying, "What's not to like?"
Most legal highs are actually illegal – 70-80% of them are already controlled in the UK because we have this broad-ranging, generic legislation that bans all chemicals of the same family. We've banned things that don't even exist yet.
At the clubs where I've done research, more than half the people are taking drugs, but hardly anyone is taking NPS. There are now more than 350 NPSs identified by the European Monitoring Centre (EMCDDA), but just because we have these products doesn't mean everyone's buying them. I took a student to a festival this summer to do research on NPS, and he couldn't find anyone who was taking any. He had to change his dissertation to "Why aren't people taking NPS?" Classic, illegal drugs were much more appealing. For a lot of people NPSs are an unpleasant substitute.
My research shows that people sometimes call NPSs "chav drugs", and there's definitely a market among lower-income groups who want a cheap, cheerful stimulant. In the north-west, mixtures of unidentified white powders have been sold as "bubble", which is basically a hotchpotch of whatever stimulants and ex-legal highs are hanging around in the dealer's house. It's almost taken the place of what speed was in the 1990s – the "poor man's cocaine".
In the Netherlands, they don't have much of a problem with synthetic cannabinoids, whereas in New Zealand they have trouble getting hold of illegal drugs, and that's where NPS really took off. It would be interesting to see what happened to NPS in the UK if we introduced a legal, regulated market in cannabis and ecstasy.
I went to a two-day festival this summer and there were nine cardiac arrests from MDMA. High purity can be as much of a problem as low purity. At the moment ecstasy is very pure, but people are taking too much because they don't realise. The police had to put out a tweet saying, "Be careful, the MDMA is really strong"; people were tweeting back, saying ,"Excellent, where do I buy it?"
My colleagues say, "Fiona, you don't need to be out every Saturday night. You can get a research assistant to do it." But I wouldn't want to miss the conversations I have, they give me such a good feel for what's happening. I interviewed a guy in a gay club this summer whose father had died from drugs and whose mother was a daily crack user dying of emphysema. He'd lost contact with his family and his neighbours were climbing his drainpipe and shouting, "We're going to kill you, faggot" – when he called the police they told him to grow up. He'd come to that club to be surrounded by gay people in a warm, accepting environment, and to get off his head on mephedrone; that was his family. Drugs had been the cause of real tragedy in his life, but they were also a part of what made him feel safe.
My teenage daughter finds it quite amusing that her mum's a lifelong clubber. In my teens, the place to be was the pub and the club, but she and her friends aren't really interested. They go to cafés and they go to Waterstones in the evening and listen to authors. The next generation has a lot of pressures – university fees, debt, graduate unemployment. Alcohol and drug use is falling among under-25s. She told me, "Our generation has to stay sober to sort out the mess that your generation's made of the world."
Cont with some user comments -
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/oct/05/legal-highs-criminology-drugs-clubbing
