THE RISE AND RISE OF LEGAL HIGHS

Good Trip? A Personal Investigation into the UKP10m-A-Year Market in
Legal Drugs

How can you get high without breaking the law? A survey of friends
and colleagues. "Smoke nutmeg," said an actor. "Find a dodgy
Starbucks barista who'll sell you the nitrous oxide cans they use to
whip cream," said a banker. "Ask around for something called
Methedrome, or Mephedrone, or Mephedrome," advised an account
manager. "Lick a newt," texted a doctor, "and don't ask me things
like this again." One PR directed me towards news stories about
Spice, an over-the-counter smoking mixture that was reported to have
effects similar to cannabis; a web developer directed me to a recent
issue of Mixmag, announcing the new popularity of "analogue drugs"
such as Mephedrone (aha!) in British clubs.

Something known as "that purple drank" was a favourite of American
rappers in the 1990s, an A&R man told me: "I think it was a mixture
of cough syrup and Sprite and it made everything move very slowly." A
teacher remembered that a fistful of ProPlus worked when he was younger.

A civil servant had tried snorting Dreft detergent, to no effect.

I was sifting through this jumble of urban myth and murky fact when a
report was forwarded to me by a medical student.

Published last month by drugs information charity DrugScope, the
report stated that "legal highs" had, for the first time, made a
significant impression in its annual survey of drug use. Legal highs?

That sounded right.

I wanted to try some. "Go to a head shop," said the student. "You'd
be surprised."

Head shops - purveyors of drug paraphernalia and herbal remedy,
invariably dwelling on the edge of an urban centre, with lava lamp
and glass bongs on display in the window - have never enjoyed a
cast-iron reputation. I'd always assumed they were a bit of a racket:
silly but harmless, selling ineffectual energy capsules to
festival-goers, or things like privet branches and tumbleweed to
credulous new agers.

When I crept cautiously into a head shop in Edinburgh and saw that
there really was a ball of tumbleweed for sale, I prepared myself for
the worst - to be offered a handful of magic beans in exchange for my
watch, perhaps, or sold the instructions to a dangerous curse.

It may be an industry worth UKP10m a year, according to a 2006 study,
but I couldn't bring myself to believe they sold anything that actually worked.

"We don't sell much that doesn't work," an unsmiling salesman behind
the counter told me, "but some things work better than others.

You're not from the papers are you?" Um. "Then I don't want to say
too much about the good stuff.

Any publicity is bad publicity as far as legal highs go." He didn't
want to give me his name either, after a recent, unsought outing in
the local press.

This was because his head shop sold Spice, a controversial smokable
product that had been on the market since 2006 but had come under the
spotlight in 2009. Spice, to almost universal surprise, had been
getting people high.

Last December, after initial murmurs in Germany about the legality of
its ingredients, the UK's Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs
began investigating Spice. In August, the Council recommended that
the government ban Spice (and derivative products like it), and by
2010 it will be illegal - an "unparalleled" move, according to Martin
Barnes, DrugScope's chief executive, who cannot recall another
occasion in which a synthetic replica of an illegal drug has become
illegal itself.

Head shops had found their breakthrough product, and quickly lost it.
Could I still buy some? "The company that made Spice tried changing
the brand and logo a few times, and eventually sold off the recipe,"
said the salesman. "They still make it in the Dominican Republic, I
think, but it's not easy to get here any more." He scribbled down the
phone number of a possible supplier ("a shaman in Holland") and sold
me a small bag of something called Kratom instead. "It behaves like
an opiate without any of the addictive qualities," he said, charging
UKP15 for a gram of the dried leaves. "Stir the packet into a yogurt
and eat it."

Later, following his instructions, and making a gritty mess of my
peach Danone, I ate the kratom.

It made me a bit fretful and urgent for an hour or two, a
restlessness like that after one too many coffees, when you start to
feel you ought to be writing a hit screenplay or enlisting to join
wars. Some hours passed and I took an extraordinarily colourful visit
to the loo.

Was there more to legal highs, I wondered, than this?

The industry presented a friendlier, more modern face in the home of
John Clarke and Jo Hall, recent graduates from Birmingham University,
who run an online retailer of legal highs called Coffeesh0p.com. The
couple had propped a giant teddy bear next to a waist-high stack of
Tupperware boxes containing colourful lotus leaves, powdered
toadstool and Hawaiian woodrose seeds; above a chest of drawers
stuffed with cardboard envelopes of guarano pills and pre-rolled
kratom joints was a poster of Sean Bean in Sharpe.

"It pays the bills," said Clarke, 22, who started the business three
years ago when he was studying for a degree in pharmacology. Today,
his customers range from students attracted by the ease of shopping
online, to professionals looking for substances that wouldn't show up
on drug tests at work. There was a professor from the local
university who made regular purchases; also a photographer, a shop
assistant, and a yacht salesman. "We sold to a couple in their 30s last month.

It was their anniversary, a weekend without the kids, and they wanted
an interesting time. I think you'd be surprised that our customers
are not just 18-year-olds wanting to get high. There's an entire
culture of sensible people out there."

I was surprised at the appearance of some of my fellow shoppers on my
visit to the head shop in Edinburgh. Yes, there was the shuffling
student-type, and a group of twentysomething regulars who were
pointedly told to come back later for something that couldn't be sold
in front of me. But there was also a middle-aged woman, who looked
for all the world like the respectable mother in an advert for
margarine or a multi-surface cleaner. "Usual?" the salesman asked
her, to which she affirmed, chatted for a minute or two about the
weather, and left with three baggies of expensive Kratom.

"Legitimate transaction" is the draw, said Clarke - replacing the
exchange of sweaty tenners on a street corner with a secure
transaction by credit card. I spoke to one online shopper (who did
not want to be named), and he agreed. "The price of the legal smoke
is about the same as high-quality marijuana gram for gram, and even
more in some cases.

If these drugs were illegal they wouldn't be sold in anywhere near
the numbers they are at the moment.

But the ease of access is a huge advantage."

"We're trying to sell honest people honest stuff," said Clarke, who
is galled that the law makes it impossible for him to give advice as
to how to properly consume his products.

Almost everything in Clarke and Hall's stockpile - from natural
products such as Salvia divinorum, a psychoactive herb, to a
synthetic snuff called Snow Blow - bore a label that warned it was
"not for human consumption". And as we spoke, the couple were always
careful to qualify any descriptions of use. "That's only really
effective in a pipe or bong, should you smoke it... Traditionally
this would be brewed into a... You might pipette a drop of that under
your tongue, which we don't recommend..."

This is common practice (herbal entheogens are sold as "botanical
souvenirs", smoking mixtures as "incense") and it causes problems.
When gram-packs of woodrose seeds or a box of cactus bark arrive in
the post, the customers will find a warning on the packet urging them
to call a doctor if the product is ingested.

People panic, and think they've been ripped off. "We'd rather not
[have a label]," Clarke said, "but if you sell it without that label
it then becomes a medicine, something that has to pass tests." That
was where Spice went wrong, explained Hall. "They tried to change
their classification from 'incense' to 'smokable product', and people
started taking a closer look at the ingredients." The closer look was
fatal, scientists in Germany discovering that, far from being a
completely herbal mixture, as the packet had claimed, the buds in
Spice had been sprayed with a chemical called JWH-018, which
replicates the psychoactive effects of THC (tetrahydrocannabinol, the
active chemical in cannabis) on the brain.

Cue lockdown.

"The not-for-human-consumption thing is probably the worst thing,
morally, that we do as an industry," said Hall. They likened their
jobs to running a "naughty Holland & Barrett", but like my salesman
in Edinburgh, the couple have to play a game of avoid-the-tide with
legislators: legal highs need to be effective enough to attract a
market, but not effective enough to attract the eye of the Advisory
Council, which becomes aware of substances when they show up in
amnesty bins at clubs, or when users report to treatment centres with
problems, or when the tabloids start making a stink.

In the days leading up to my visit, news had broken that two more
legal substances - BZP, a stimulant similar to ecstasy, and GBL, a
derivative of GHB that had caused the death of a student in April -
were to be brought under the Misuse of Drugs Act alongside Spice. "It
was a blow when magic mushrooms were banned in 2005, but the industry
survived," said Hall. "We're keeping our fingers crossed."

Clarke and Hall face an unforgiving legal crunch. "I'm not aware of
any substance being taken out of the Misuse of Drugs Act,"
Drugscope's said Martin Barnes. "That is actually one of our
concerns, that it is politically acceptable to bring substances in to
the Act, or to increase their classification, but politically it
doesn't seem possible to downgrade classification." He expressed a
worry that thresholds might be starting to come down too low. "We
need to have a better understanding of potential harms before making
these substances illegal, with the fact that anybody caught using
them will be committing a criminal offence."

"Sitting at home, smoking a joint of Spice and watching Sharpe.
Doesn't sound like much of a crime, does it?" said Clarke.

Dr John Huffman, a 77-year-old professor of organic chemistry, was in
his office at Clemson University in Southern California last December
when he received an email from Germany. It pointed him towards a news
report in Der Spiegel, which revealed that a compound he had invented
years earlier was being used in a legal smoking mixture of unusual
potency. Well, thought Dr Huffman, what took you so long?

Huffman created JWH-018 (one of a hundred or so compounds known as
"cannabinoids") in 1994, while conducting experiments for a US
research institute.

Research into cannabis-simulating substances began in the 1930s,
moving through "an idiot phase when the American government planned
to make 'happy moms' in the 1950s", to become of great interest to
pharmaceutical companies in the 80s and 90s, hopeful that a medicine
might be crafted that could recreate the pain-relief effects of
cannabis without the intoxication. JWH-018 was "nothing special", Dr
Huffman remembered, "but it was one of the more potent compounds we
made, and it was quite easy to make from commercially available materials.

Probably the reason it has now caught on."

After the article in Der Spiegel, a slew of people contacted him: the
military in Germany, worried about use among their troops; drug
enforcement agents and forensic scientists in the US; and
entrepreneurs from around the world, wanting to know how to make it
for themselves. To the latter, he always wrote back "Don't." But Dr
Huffman had inadvertently jump-started an industry. "My biggest
surprise was that this all hadn't happened sooner," he told me. "All
it needed was somebody with a reasonable understanding of science to
see the papers we had published and think, 'Aha!'"

After years of selling products that drew their effect from caffeine,
or herbal combination, or simple wishful thinking, head shops found
themselves with a product firmly grounded in science. "You could make
JWH-018 for about $30 a gram, and a gram of the stuff would send you
into oblivion forever," said Dr Huffman. "The enterprising chemists
in China who make this stuff and sell it as plant growth hormone -
yeah, right - have probably figured out an even cheaper way."

To find some Spice for myself I had to go on a tour of Midlothian
head shops (the "shaman in Holland" had not come good), eventually
finding some from the fugitive period when its producers were trying
to evade closure.

The packet bore a different name and logo but, I was assured,
contained the Spice of infamy within.

It smelled sickly sweet, heavily flavoured with the kind of synthetic
fruit essence that is found in shisha tobacco, and it made my body
weighty and sluggish when smoked.

I didn't feel particularly euphoric; more disengaged so that I
wouldn't have minded much if somebody had, say, punched me quite hard
in the stomach.

Its potency was undeniable. I could suddenly picture them all - that
initial curious customer, the army officers in Germany, US drug
officials and our own Advisory Council - encountering Spice for the
first time and having to stifle a great guffaw.

This is legal!

"I've lived around the world a long time," said Dr Huffman. "I've
come to the conclusion that if an enterprising person wants to find a
new way to get high, they're going to do it."

There can be no better endorsement for a product that purports to
make you high than for a government to confirm it does exactly that.
John Clarke and Jo Hall knew whenever Spice was in the news because
they would receive a week's worth of orders in a single day. New
customers flocked to long-ignored head shops, enticed by the Spice frenzy.

One user I spoke to said that he was so impressed by the effects of
Spice he immediately went online to investigate what else was out
there. "I'd always thought the stuff you could get from your average
head shop was laughable," said Tim, a 38-year-old sales manager from
Surrey who preferred not to give his real name. He bought some
Mephedrone, about which there had been some recent buzz ("It seems to
be the most talked about with clubbers," Mixmag's features editor
Duncan Dick told me). An amphetamine-like chemical that arrived in
powdered form, it was supposed to have an effect similar to MDMA, and
Tim gave it a go. He started with a 250mg dose, in a capsule, and the
results were good - euphoria, stimulation - so he kept taking it,
eventually consuming a gram in 12 hours. "I had taken a lot of
amphetamines in the past and two or three grams over an evening was a
reasonable amount for me. I wasn't worried."

But the next day, Tim woke up shaking and soaked in sweat, his heart
beating frighteningly fast. The state persisted, along with
near-permanent anxiety, for days. "I've had comedowns in the past
where you feel a bit grotty for 24 hours and then after that you feel
a bit better.

This time, even a week later, I was genuinely struggling to
function." His doctor proscribed Diazepam to calm the anxiety, but a
month on, when we spoke, he was still feeling twitchy and on edge.
Tim's error had been to base his dosage on Mephedrone's illegal equivalents.

DrugScope's recent survey highlighted the falling quality of street
drugs as a reason why legal highs are growing in popularity. The
Mephedrone Tim took was far cleaner than anything he was likely to
have bought from a dealer.

It had not been cut with chalk, or mashed-up aspirin, or Dreft
detergent; it had been mass-produced in a factory, probably in China,
imported by a wholesaler, and sold to him by a head shop - pure. He
posted a description of his experience on an online drug forum, to
warn others about making the same misjudgment.

This is another advantage of legal highs, according to Clarke. When
people have better evidence as to what they've taken - because a
substance bears a brand name, or because it is produced in a factory
to roughly the same strength from dose to dose - effects can be
compared with some kind of accuracy.

Sites such as Drugs-Forum.com and Erowid.org throb with testimonials
and advice. "With generic ecstasy there are so many different pills
out there with different things in them that their effect is not
going to be consistent," says Clarke. "It makes similar discussion
almost impossible."

Most predict that Mephedrone will be the next substance to come under
government review ("I imagine most users will be stockpiling supplies
before the inevitable," said Mixmag's Duncan Dick). Martin Barnes
told me that, even in the week leading up to our conversation,
DrugScope had received an increase in calls from treatment centres,
asking for information about the drug. "I don't want to give the
impression that there are all these laboratories furiously trying to
come up with new chemicals," he said. "But the traditional perception
of what we meant by legal highs is changing.

Head shops are selling more than just Kratom or Salvia, stuff to take
to music festivals with a niche appeal.

Spice and Mephedrone are something quite different, a couple of
molecular tweaks away from controlled substances. That's a big
challenge for legislators."

Mephedrone was the final legal high I tried.

Already nervous after listening to Tim's tale, I was ratcheted up to
a state of sheer terror by a warning from the salesman in Edinburgh
that he knew it to be horribly addictive ("Should you decide to take
it, which we don't recommend..."). But my experience was actually
very pleasant.

Even a relatively small dose had a significant effect: the urge to
participate in every conversation in the room, the sudden conviction
that I should have always known that it felt good to move my eyeballs
around in their sockets.

I took it with friends, many of those who had once suggested I smoke
nutmeg, or tap up a dodgy barista for his whipped-cream can. All
reported similar effects, and all asked the same question: "Is this
really legal?"?