As soon as one pharmaceutical compound is identified and placed on a schedule of banned drugs, the makeshift labs create another, barely altered but strictly legal.
Professor David Nutt is rocking the boat once again. The former chief drugs adviser to the Government, who was sacked in 2009 after saying that tobacco and alcohol are more harmful than some illicit substances, has now added his name to a letter to The Lancet raising questions about the perceived dangers of so-called legal highs. In fact, many of the recorded fatalities were caused by substances that were already illegal, Professor Nutt and Dr Leslie King claim.
All of this only re-emphasises the confusion at the heart of the “war on drugs”, and the extent to which it is failing. In this case it might be more accurately called the “war on legal drugs”, as these synthetic substances, mimicking the effects of proscribed drugs, lie outside the law. There is a cat-and-mouse game being played here. As soon as one pharmaceutical compound is identified, catalogued and placed on a schedule of banned drugs, the makeshift labs create another, barely altered but strictly legal. Such activities only make a further mockery of a system already long since discredited.
