Legal high ban will move drugs underground

The blanket ban on legal highs that is set to become effective later this week will only cause more deaths and provide benefits to drug dealers, drug experts are claiming.

Legal highs are chemical substances that mimic the effects of illegal drugs. On Thursday, new legislation will mean that they too will be illegal following concerns that they are causing health issues and encouraging antisocial behaviour.

However, those against the ban claim that it will simply force the sale of legal highs to move underground as users will go to street drug dealers and criminals to source the substances. This will, in turn, lead to more deaths related to legal highs.

A former government drugs advisor, Professor David Nutt, said, “It is a completely nonsense piece of legislation. It is purely politics. The only people who will benefit will be the drug dealers. They’ll have a monopoly.”

Professor Nutt stated that some of the shops selling legal highs have demonstrated a responsibility to the users of legal highs and exercised some form of quality control, but that street dealers would not do the same. Dealers, he claimed, would source their goods from the Internet without any regard for the quality of the substances and with the intention of moving legal high users onto harder drugs, such as heroin. He said there would be an initial slowdown in the use of legal highs, similar to that which occurred in Ireland when a blanket ban was introduced, but that use would rise again.