Stand-ins for drugs such as MDMA and cannabis are on the rise, while lack of quality control of all street drugs puts users at risk.
Most people who grew up in the 70s, 80s and the 90s – and even those who took drugs during that time – have no idea what is going on in today's drugs market. Forget the acid flare and dope fug of the 70s, the twitchy glamour of coke, the grim arrival of crack and the cheap smack era of the 80s – even the benign ecstatic burst of acid house: today's ever-changing drug culture is different: digital and massively distributed.
The news from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) that there are 280 new legal drugs on sale in Europe will alarm some, intrigue many, and surprise no one that has been watching the development of the online trade in new drugs for the last few years. The numbers themselves tell a simple story: there are now more drugs on sale than the 234 banned by the 1961 and 1971 UN conventions. Moves to ban new drugs simply inspire chemical innovation that sidesteps the law.
Ask a police officer which of these is legal: AMT, 6-APB, 25I-NBOME, 5F-AKB-48 or ETOH. All of them, and most towns now have a shop selling them, in some form or other. (The last one is booze, the world's deadliest legal high that kills 320,000 young people aged 15-29 worldwide every year, or 9% of deaths in that age group).
