SERIES: DRUGS UNCOVERED: THE RIGHT STUFF?

From herbal joints to pills for ex-ravers, 'legal highs' are big
business. Classed as medicines, they are regulated in theory, but how
law-abiding are they, asks Oliver Marre

About six months ago, at a Brighton seafront nightclub, a 28-year-old
man was found by the bouncers to have three small white pills, each
stamped with the image of a dove, in his pocket. Naturally, they
turned him away, refusing to listen to his arguments, and warning him
that he was lucky they had not called the police.

You may think you've heard this story a hundred times before, but this
time something was different: the clubber had nothing to fear from the
police. Indeed, had it not been for the nightclub bouncers' right to
refuse entry to anyone they wish, he would have enjoyed an entirely
legal night out - and one which would have involved drinking very
little alcohol. Welcome to the world of Doves, Part-E Pills and Salvia
spliffs; of head shops and websites rejoicing in titles such as
highlylegal.com and everyonedoesit.com. This is a place where the
dealers claim you can get as high as you like without breaking the
law, on products bought by anyone aged 18 (and younger, if they're
prepared to fib about it on a website) to 70. This is the world of
legal drugs.

Easily purchased 'legal highs', as they're known to regular users, can
be split into two groups: herbal and laboratory-produced. The first
have been around for as long as man has been chewing leaves and
smoking pipes. These days, from most suppliers, they come either
sealed in shiny packets with swirly writing on them designed to appeal
to the more hippy minded, or ready-rolled as joints, for those of us
too uncoordinated or time-poor to roll our own. I bought mine, branded
Spice, from a shop in central London, and ordered some more from a
website whose warehouse is to be found staffed by a father-and-son
team in Scotland. The second group have, according to the proprietor
of one online shop who prefers not to be named, largely grown out of
rave culture, and are produced by scientists in laboratories,
predominantly in New Zealand, from where they are shipped all over the
world.

'Ravers have grown up and had kids and don't want to break the law any
more, which accounts for quite a lot of our market - or at least our
initial market,' he says. 'But when you're faced with the option of
taking something that has all the effects of an illegal drug but
doesn't put you on the wrong side of the line, who wouldn't choose to
go for that instead?' The answer to this question is not entirely
straightforward, of course.

At least a little of the attraction of illegal drugs lies in their
illegality, the risk-taking, the ritual. Brandon, a 30-year-old
regular ecstasy user, who has also used the legal alternatives, puts
it this way: 'The fun isn't breaking the law, it's getting high. But
there's something a bit lame about registering online, paying postage
and packing, and deciding three working days in advance what you're
going to take. That's how I get my bananas but it's not how I want my
drugs.'

Nevertheless, Britons are doing it in ever increasing numbers.
Statistics are impossible to discover because there are no criminal
records involved and no regulatory body for the market. Anecdotal
evidence from suppliers, however, suggests more users by the month.
Robert Gorton, who runs highlylegal.co.uk, tells me business is
'booming'. Five years ago, the legal drug market was very different
from today. 'When I first started, they [legal drugs] had a bad
reputation,' he says. 'People thought that they didn't do much,
compared to illegal stuff, and they were right a lot of the time; a
lot of the herbal mixes didn't used to work. But recently, there have
been some very good companies set up, who supply things with good
packaging and fully sealed, which makes people feel safe. People like
to know they haven't been touched since they were manufactured, which
is never the case with illegal stuff.'

Gorton's website will only sell to the over-18s, but there's no way to
be sure that younger customers don't simply click on all the right
buttons. All you need is a credit card and a letterbox big enough to
take a small jiffy bag. I ordered a pack of Salvia joints (a
hallucinogenic herb, whose full name is salvia divinorum - the sage of
the seers - which originates in Mexico and whose main working
ingredient is the chemical salvinorin A); a pack of Soma spliffs (you
get three in a pack and they're rolled from a combination of Salvia
and other herbs, providing a mellow high); and a pack of two Doves (a
weak ecstasy alternative). The grand total was UKP 25.47, plus UKP
1.50 postage and packing. They arrived at the office 24 hours after
ordering. Gorton says his younger customers simply 'don't see much
difference between having a drink and taking a tablet': both are
legal, both are easy to come by.

'All chemicals affect different people in different ways,' says
Gorton. 'It's down to the individual's make-up. Personally, I go for
the mild side; I don't touch certain products because I don't like the
effects they have on me. When I was younger and used to smoke
cannabis, I found myself having panic attacks from that, so I stopped.
On the other hand, I love getting home and having the choice between
opening a bottle of wine and lighting a Soma spliff. The Soma is
cheaper and you need a lot less of it to bring on the same relaxing
effect as a bottle of wine. And there's no hangover.'

Other users make the comparison with cannabis, rather than alcohol.
'They're weaker than anything like skunk but they have the advantage
over weed in that at least you know that a Soma spliff will have the
same content every time. If you buy illegal cannabis, nobody's
promising you that one day's supply will be the same as the day
before,' says Jonathan, who is in his forties and has smoked marijuana
since university, and Soma products from time to time. 'But I need to
smoke three spliffs in an evening to feel much effect from the Soma.'

Jonathan says he and his friends tend to smoke after dinner parties,
but that he wouldn't be any happier with his children buying legal
drugs than buying alcohol until they turn 18: 'After that, I guess
it's up to them.'

Gorton and the owners of rival websites all agree that while the style
of their online shops leans towards the recreational side of legal
drug use, they also have customers who buy their products for medical
reasons. On the day I spoke to Gorton, a woman had bought a supply of
diamond-strength (the ratings are unscientific, but this is the
strongest on the market) Spice for her sister, who suffers from
multiple sclerosis. 'It was good for her because it meant she wasn't
forced on to the street looking for her local illegal drug dealer to
sell her cannabis,' says Gorton.

Diamond Spice, on sale at SoHi Soho, in central London, at UKP 25 for
a 3g packet, is compared to regular cannabis by a first-time user: 'I
retained a good body high for far longer than on weed (around four
hours). The spacey-trippy part of the high is great, just like
marijuana, and munchies [feeling hungry under the influence] occurred
as well: perfect. The only downfall is the taste: at first disgusting,
but easily dispersed.' When I visited the shop, the saleswoman pointed
me towards the less strong 'silver' variety, because I was a
first-time user.

Exactly how Spice works is not clear, because what is contained in any
of these products is difficult to ascertain. The herbal highs, in
particular, are tricky to test. John Ramsay is a scientist who runs a
large visual drug information database called TICTAC, which stands for
The Identification CD for Tablets and Capsules, from St George's
Hospital in the University of London. It is used by the police and NHS
to identify what is contained in any pills people are found with and
may have taken. He explains that botanists work from looking at leaves
and habitats, 'so once it's all ground up, it's very hard to tell what
is inside any of the packets'. Some of them, however, do have
ingredients printed on them, with exotic sounding names such as 'blue
lotus' and 'dwarf skullcap'.

It is a different matter with the laboratory-produced pills. Ramsay
demonstrates that if you type the description of a Dove pill into his
TICTAC database - 9.1mm across, 4.8mm thick, 430mg weight, white in
colour and printed with the image of a flying bird - up pops a picture
of the pills matching exactly what I have in front of me, and
information on the active ingredient. In this case, it is butylone
(more properly known as BK-MBDB), which the database records as 'an
ecstasy-like compound'. According to a regular user, it has an
ecstasy-like effect, too, though more moderate than most of the
illegal pills sold on the street. It's more expensive, too: UKP 12.50
for two, as opposed to UKP 3 per pill.

The packet that I received in the post doesn't tell as detailed a
story. Rather than specifying butylone, it says the Doves contain
ketones, the wider family from which butylone comes. Although London
Underground, which makes Doves, is not willing to talk to me, a rival
producer of tablets explains that often detailed ingredients aren't
printed so that the secrets of the product's success can be preserved.

This doesn't cut much ice with officials. Danny Lee-Frost, head of
operations at the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Authority's
enforcement team, says if people are going to consume anything,
they've a right to know what is in it. And it raises the question of
just how legal these 'legal highs' really are.

Many of the packets on sale are stamped with almost comical product
descriptions, put there deliberately to be ignored: Doves call
themselves plant feeder, while a packet of Part-E Pills, decorated
with multi-coloured images of people dancing and sold to me across the
counter of a high-street shop as 'like ecstasy', says in large
letters: 'Not for human consumption'. Bottles of amyl nitrate,
commonly known as poppers and widely available on the high street to
be inhaled, are described on the label as 'air freshener', although
you're liable to find yourself with a bad headache and a swimming mind
if you leave the top off in an enclosed space for long.

The idea behind this misinformation is two-fold. First, it is indeed
to avoid disclosing to rival producers exactly what the pills contain.
But, more importantly, it is an attempt to avoid regulation by the
MHRA, because while these products are perfectly legal to own and to
consume wherever and whenever the mood takes you, they are legally
classified as medicines and therefore their sale and supply should be
regulated.

Lee-Frost insists that whatever it may say on the packet, it does not
help a product get around the law. 'If it's clearly to be eaten, it's
either a medicine or a food. And if it has an ingredient that will
have an active physiological effect, it is a medicine,' he says. And
this is the irony of legal drugs: the salesmen, the importers, the
manufacturers, all those people celebrating the existence of a legal
way to get high, are all in danger of prosecution. Lee-Frost says they
can face two years in prison for supplying medicines without the
correct licences, although he concedes that the MHRA's time and
resources limit the number of prosecutions it pursues. 'The objective
is compliance. We try to target the big guys, the importers and
wholesalers,' says Lee-Frost. 'But often, when it comes to retailers,
just explaining that they're breaking the law is enough and we can
take the products off the shelves. We could also confiscate the
proceeds of any illegal sales.' He says that at customs, shipments of
several tons of unlicensed pills - though the contents are not illegal
in themselves - are seized with regularity. 'There are two cases going
through the courts at the moment,' he adds.

Do the suppliers know this? Several of the wholesalers I spoke to put
the phone down when I posed this question, and it may explain the wi
despread reluctance to speak on the record about any aspect of legal
highs. Those who would discuss the issue say, on the contrary, they do
not want to be quoted because anything that draws attention to them is
more likely to catch the government's eye and precipitate a full-scale
ban.

One widely used product is about to face exactly this type of new
control. Under the direction of the European Union, a chemical used in
the manufacture of ecstasy replacement pills, benzylpiperazine (BZP),
is to be reclassified as a controlled substance, which will make it
illegal to possess. The EU has put this forward on account of the fact
that it has no known medical benefits and is suspected (although no
serious scientific study exists) to be fairly unhealthy. At the moment
it's widely used: in my Part-E Pills, for example, although not my
Doves.

This is not the first time that the law has changed to make a legal
high illegal: in recent years, the horse tranquilliser ketamine and
gamma hydroxybutyrate (GHB) have both been classified as controlled
substances as a direct result of their widespread use as recreational
drugs. But Goreton isn't worried. He says he has never stocked
products containing BZP anyway: 'The manufacturers are clever. They'll
just add another molecule and make a new ingredient.' Interviewed from
New Zealand, Matt Bowden, who runs Stargate , which is one of the
world's leading producers of legal drugs, agrees: 'It's not about the
product, it's about the culture. Once the shift has occurred towards
regulation of safer drugs [such as BZP] we will probably see a gradual
repositioning of pharmaceutical technology into new consumer markets.
The drugs won't lose.'

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LEGAL HIGHS

1. Part-E Pills

According to the TICTAC drugs database, the active ingredient is
benzylpiperazine, which the EU wants to get member states to ban. For
the time being, it's a legal alternative to ecstasy.

2. Doves

The active ingredient is butylone, another legal ecstasy alternative,
though weaker than BZP and nobody's looking to ban it.

3. Enhanced Saliva Joint

Pre-rolled for the lazy or short of time, this contains the famous
salvia divinorum herb, which has psychoactive properties. Here it's
enhanced by other ingredients, though they don't specify which ones.

4. Spice

Ingredients in this herbal cannabis alternative include blue lotus,
dwarf skullcap, indian warrior and Siberian motherwort, though whether
the manufacturers have in fact gone all the way to Siberia for their
motherwort is an untested assertion.

5. Soma Spliffs

The packet records fly agaric caps and extract, which is
hallucinogenic but also poisonous if consumed in large doses and is
therefore used as a garden insecticide.