Tabloid hysteria, misinformation and a potential legislative minefield
characterise the new generation of synthetic drugs.
DDN
reports
News focus |
Analysis
WHAT SHOULD THE GOVERNMENT BE
DOING ABOUT NEW SYNTHETIC DRUGS?
6 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| July 2012
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
‘Stores now selling “Zombie Bullets”
as police warn against new Cloud Nine drug following
TWO more horrifying cannibal attacks,’ screamed a
headline in the
Daily Mail
– never a publication to be
accused of sensationalist reporting. This upped the
ante from the ‘Teenager steals goat and kills it while
high on bath salts and dressed in women's
underwear’ story it had reported the previous month.
‘The drug blamed for cannibal plague’ chipped in the
Mirror
. ‘Panic spreads over mind-bending bath salts
linked to zombie-style attacks.’
‘Bath salts’ – a term, alongside ‘plant food’,
originally designed to avoid medicines legislation –
now seems to be the preferred catch-all name for new
synthetic drugs in parts of the press, which is perhaps
understandable in the case of the
Mail
, given its huge
online readership in the US. ‘Things aren’t really sold
as bath salts here anymore and they haven’t been for
a year or two,’ says toxicologist John Ramsey of St
George’s University’s TICTAC Communications, the
UK drug identification service used by healthcare and
criminal justice professionals. ‘This is America
suddenly discovering the problem, and for some
reason they seem to be calling everything bath salts.’
Does he feel this kind of tabloid hysteria is
obscuring the real issues? ‘It’ll certainly scare some
people and other people will laugh at it,’ he says. ‘It’s
just the way the
Daily Mail
does stuff. But I suspect
the case they reported – the guy who supposedly ate
the face off somebody else – has probably got a
measure of truth in it. Stimulants can cause
delusional paranoia. It’s very rare, but when it
happens it can be very severe.’
Meanwhile, the exponential rise in the numbers
of new synthetic substances shows no sign of
slowing down. Forty-nine were reported for the first
time last year through the European early warning
system (
DDN
, May, page 4) and 41 the year before.
‘It looks like it’s going to be even higher this year,’
says Ramsey, with the authorities – despite their
efforts to look tough – seemingly at a loss in terms
of coming up with an effective response.
Methoxetamine, or ‘mexxy’ – which was being
marketed online as a ‘bladder-friendly’ alternative to
ketamine – became the first substance to be banned
under a temporary class drug order (TCDO) (
DDN
,
April, page 4). TCDOs, however, will have to be used
sparingly, Ramsey points out, as there simply aren’t
the resources to carry out the necessary risk
assessments once the temporary bans are in place.
‘With methoxetamine, the one that’s currently being
risk-assessed, I suspect it will get
banned because it looks as though it’s
going to have a toxicity profile very much
like ketamine, and if it causes bladder
problems like ketamine does then clearly
it should be a controlled substance.’
The Advisory Council on the Misuse
of Drugs (ACMD) has proposed a US-
style ‘analogue act’ whereby any
analogue of an existing controlled
substance is automatically banned in an
attempt to keep on top of the ever-
changing chemistry of new drugs,
something home secretary Theresa May
says the Home Office intends to
consider, alongside making full use of
trading standards, medicine and
consumer protection legislation. From a
legislative point of view, however, an
analogue act would be ‘fraught with
difficulties’, Ramsey says. ‘It’s a matter
of deciding what’s an analogue, and
that’s an
opinion
– different chemists
and different people will have different
opinions. So it’s going to be a lawyer’s
charter, I think, if that happens.
‘I don’t actually think control is the
answer,’ he continues. ‘The only way to
deal with this is to look at the demand
side, rather than try to control the supply
side, because no matter what you do
there are always going to be ways around
it. Even if you introduce an analogue act
there are going to be compounds that
aren’t analogous to things being misused
that can suddenly crop up. All you’re
doing is changing the nature of control,
you’re not solving the problem.’
Attempts at education, however, clearly aren’t
having much effect on demand. ‘We don’t seem to
be able to get it across that it’s risky,’ he says. ‘The
problem, in a way, is that they’re not toxic
enough
–
there aren’t enough deaths to convince people that
there’s a significant risk. There have been a couple
of deaths – there was one at Rockness and another
one recently. Those are the same levels of deaths we
were seeing when ecstasy was at its peak. It didn’t
persuade people not to take MDMA.’
He warns that it ‘most certainly is possible’ that
something like MPPP – a compound produced in
the US containing an impurity that caused
permanent Parkinsons-like symptoms after a single
dose – could crop up again. ‘But unless there is
something as dramatic as that, the level of
morbidity and mortality seems to be tolerable.’
Does he get any sense that the number of new
substances will eventually start to tail off? ‘I don’t
think it’s going to change, unless something
dramatic happens – unless we do get something
like a really serious compound that causes real
havoc. But even then there’ll still be people who’ll
chance it. Everybody knows that smoking causes
lung cancer, but that doesn’t stop young people
from smoking. So why would the health threat from
these compounds put them off?’ DDN
‘Panic spreads over mind-
bending bath salts linked to
zombie-style attacks.’
Cloud Nine drug blamed for
‘cannibal plague’.