No limits on the high life but will smiles end in tears?

EXOTIC plants, brightly coloured pills, bongs and growing kits — the shelves on the Head Shop in Dublin’s Temple Bar are packed with everything the discerning drug user could possibly want.

They have bright green capsules, pills with smiley faces, something resembling blue and yellow potpourri. They have ones that make you high, ones that chill you out, ones that increase your testosterone level and ones that help you lose weight. And they are all entirely legal.

At 4pm on a Thursday afternoon the shop is packed, with a queue from the counter going out the door of the pokey store. It includes a group of well-dressed young women, an ageing hippy and a young man in a suit. They are all there for one thing: pills. Little red and yellow tablets that will give them the same effect as an ecstasy or speed pill they could buy from a dealer on the street. But in this shop they are not breaking the law.

“They’re pretty strong,” the assistant behind the counter advises, “so maybe just take half a pill and stick off the booze.”

Just around the corner, in the FunGuy shop, festival-goers are being offered special prices on “blissed out dance capsules” and others that get you “whizzin’ through the night”. Or, if you prefer, there is one for “energy euphoria and stimulation”.

FunGuy and the Head Shop are just two of about 13 stores around the country that sell a selection of legal, mind-altering drugs, similar to cocaine, ecstasy and speed, and accessories to go with them. Along with several websites, mostly operating out of Britain, they form a lucrative “legal highs” industry, which markets to a growing audience of drug users looking for an alternative to illegal substances.

Demand for legal drugs has never been higher. “They have been around for quite a long time but over the past year they have become a lot more popular,” said Laura Hodgins of FunGuy. “We get all sorts in here, everyone from high-ranking business men in suits, to your average labourer, to your average student of course. Everyone is coming in here — doctors, lawyers, nurses, you wouldn’t believe it.”

The reasons for their rising popularity are not hard to fathom. Not only are they legal, but they are easy and cheap to buy.

With drug testing increasingly routine in work places, 30 and 40-somethings are switching to highs that don’t put them on the wrong side of the law. Similarly, most young people prefer to walk into a shop to get their highs than take part in shady dealings from a criminal down the street.

Retailers argue that legal highs have a history of human use dating back thousands of years and are safer than illicit drugs, which are often either adulterated or dangerously powerful.

“The idea behind them is a healthy alternative to people who chose to take drugs, as a lot of people do, of all ages,” said Ms Hodgins. “Drugs you buy on the streets are often mixed with all kinds of rubbish. But you know what’s in these, there’s no depressional bad comedown from them afterwards; they don’t make you sick, they don’t make you unaware of what’s around you.

“There’s ones that are like speed that will keep you alert and awake and give you that buzz without being completely out of it. There’s ones like ecstasy, and the problem with buying ecstasy on the street is that they are mixed with all kinds of rubbish that you don’t know what you are taking. The herbal ecstasy will give you all kinds of buzz without any of the dangers.”

Dr Des Corrigan, senior lecturer in pharmacy in Trinity College Dublin, said people are being fooled if they think they are getting anything safer. He said because they do not come under the same regulations as prescribed medicines, there is no guarantee of what they contain, or the safety of the conditions under which they are made. It also means that their strength is not regulated and users could be taking dangerously high dosages.

While the drugs sold in the FunGuy store are mostly made from herbal products, pills available in the Head Shop and other stores contain a much stronger ingredient, benzylpiperazine (BZP), which acts as a substitute for MDMA, the banned substance in ecstasy and speed pills.

BZP was originally developed in the 1940s to treat cows for parasites, but its use was abandoned because of bad side effects. In the 1990s, the United States Drug Enforcement Administration discovered that it was being used recreationally in California. An explosion in its use and the death of a young woman after taking a pill containing BZP (although it was never established if there was a direct link) meant that it was banned and classified as a Class A substance in the US in 2002.

BZP can be found on shop counters in Ireland in the form Jax Extra Strength Pills — so called because of the Union Jack print on the front. Jax pills, which cost €15 for a pack of two, are five times as potent as ecstasy.

BZP can also be found in smiley pills which claim to have a “smooth balance of e-sensory and speed-like qualities”.

These are becoming more and more the choice drug for young Irish people, looking for a dance pill but fearful of the dangers of E.

Manufacturers of Jax claim users will have “no more Tuesday blues, no flat-feeling come down and best of all, no addiction or long-term damage”.

Dr Corrigan said he would have concerns about the safety of BZP. “People are probably taking chances because they think that these materials are safe. They are synthetic, they are not a natural chemical. There is no guarantee that the chemicals are being synthesised under pure conditions.

“These pills contain the combination of TMFPP and BZP, the two are usually found together as something similar to ecstasy. The main concern would be dehydration and the risk of heat stroke. The other concerns would be headaches and a flu-like hangover that lasts a few days. There is also the risk of panic reactions and high blood pressure. It would surprise me if anyone would think they are getting anything safer,” Dr Corrigan said

The non-addictiveness and limited abuse potential of BZP have also been called into question. The New Scientist journal reported last month that a study showed that rhesus monkeys will intravenously self administer the drug at rates higher than they would for cocaine. Work due to be published next month shows adolescent rats given BZP grow up into anxious adults.

Suppliers say that the legal party pills were originally made to get people off legal drugs. But research in New Zealand, where they are also legal, found that 97.2% of legal party pill users said they used other substances in the past year — 60% had used cannabis, 21% had used ecstasy and 16% had used amphetamines.

The Department of Health said that BZP is not a scheduled substance under the Misuse of Drugs Act. However, it said such substances are kept under constant review.

In a statement, the department said: “In particular, the department reviews any evidence that substances are being abused and are causing significant harm to public health. For example, earlier this year the law surrounding pyschotropic mushrooms in their raw state was clarified in the light of evidence of increased availability and significant harm being done.”

But vendors have found ways to fill the void. Twenty new effective and legal drugs have emerged since then.

Among these is Salvia, a hallucinogenic plant far more potent than mushrooms, but perfectly legal. The Crosscare Drugs Awareness Programme said it got more than 1,000 queries about the drug in a six-week period after the banning of magic mushrooms. Director of the programme, Chris Murphy, said: “We would be more concerned about Salvia than magic mushrooms. Magic mushrooms are mild enough. Salvia is quite potent stuff and people who use it can get quite out of touch with the reality around them for a short period of time. Even the people who sell these drugs would offer advice to people not to take it on their own because of what they could do.”

Hawaiian Baby Woodrose is a plant that has been around for thousands of years, but like Salvia its hallucinogenic effects have only recently been discovered. It contains LSA, a substance close in chemical composition to LSD and the effects of both drugs are more or less the same. The only difference, one is illegal, the other is not.

“Governments tend to respond to very visible problems or public health scares. If there is an explosion of use or supply of a particular substance, such as magic mushrooms, then they might take steps,” Mr Murphy said.

The Garda National Drugs Unit (GNDU) said they keep an eye on Head stores, but once the substances they are selling are legal then it is none of their business. “If they are legal and they are selling them then we don’t have anything to do with that really,” said Chief Superintendent Cormac Gordon of the drug squad. “If any information is brought to our attention they might be subject to visits by local drugs units.”

A number of suppliers of legal highs in Britain have recently been shut down — not because of what they are selling but because of alleged money laundering. The main distributor in Ireland said this might affect the supply of the drugs here, but only in the short-term, as they can be easily sourced from Holland and New Zealand.

The National Advisory Committee on Drugs, which recommends Government policy on drugs, said the emerging trend of legal highs was discussed at its meetings in the past two weeks. It said it will consult with its European counterparts before advising the Government on whether or not BZP and other substances should be made illegal.

But when they are making that decision, there is a sobering thought: For every substance that is banned, there are dozens more to replace it.

Most of these drugs have been around for thousands of years, some are just old plants with new purposes. And just as Salvia replaced magic mushroom, BZP replaced MDMA and LSA replaced LSD, the universal and timeless demand for drugs will ensure that the authorities will always be forced to play catch-up.