We need our head shops examined

IT'S TIME to be frank.

When it comes to Ireland's notoriously and dangerously overcrowded hospital Emergency Departments (EDs), the normal

culprits (ie shortages of beds, staff and space) no longer really wash with those of us who labour long and hard therein and who despair of the daily vista of trolleys as far as the eye can see. Why?

Well because most of the people who end up in the ED are there because of the choices they have made either in the short term or over a lifetime.

Obviously these include smoking, drinking, and sitting on the sofa in perpetuity.

But more recently, such choices have extended - vividly – to going out into the weather utterly unprepared, driving at speed on icy and foggy roads and skating on thin and thick ice.

And now, just as the message about the weather's hazards begins to penetrate nationally, we are faced with yet another - this time, entirely man-made – lifestyle development that is piling intense pressure on the healthcare frontline.

The latest choice to cause medical misery is that of "head shop highs" - hits produced by "organic" leaves and seeds like Salvia divinorum, and synthetic cocaine powders, like Snow Blow, XXX and Charge.

Just last weekend, for instance, at the Mercy University Hospital, based in Cork's city centre, five patients were brought to the ED due to adverse reactions to the kind of drugs mentioned - four arriving by ambulance.

But take the torrent of injuries caused by the ice - 18 serious fractures were treated last Monday at MUH, and the orthopaedic workload at Cork University Hospital (CUH) for the past 10 days or so has reached roughly seven times the average - add in a surge of elderly winter illnesses and subtract the considerable number of hospital beds lost to cutbacks, and the last thing we need is a new "epidemic" of drug-illness, layered upon that already created by tobacco, alcohol, heroin and cocaine.

Unhappily, in the past few months, we have seen a relentless rise in the number of seriously distressed young adults and teenagers being hospitalised due to "head shop highs" with panic, paranoia, delirium, psychosis and chest pain.

These cases are utterly avoidable and are nearly always associated with the consumption of other intoxicants like alcohol, despite the trumpeting of head shop highs as "alternatives" to alcohol and illegal drugs.

And because nobody has any idea what is contained in the leaves, seeds, powders and pills that Ireland's 100-plus head shops are purveying, there is enormous added difficulty in treating and diagnosing these young people.

I reckon that local head shops customers in Cork have cost the MUH alone thousands of euro this year in emergency healthcare.

Moreover, last month, I had to deal with a particularly sinister episode when three young women (average age 21) were admitted simultaneously to the hospital after what I believe was the spiking of their drinks with head shop hallucinogenic powders.

The results were devastating in terms of the patients' mental health and

I feared the implications for their future psychological well-being. One of the patients took three days to stop "tripping", so you can imagine the burden on the staff and family.

Meanwhile, head shop owners - despicably and disingenuously in my view - maintain that their shops offer "alternative highs" that are "legal" and which somehow detract from the activities of gangsters and the resulting criminality.

However, in my opinion, as with the sale of all drugs, head shops exist to make money - pure and simple (unlike their products). In fact, their promotion of "highs" (ie euphoric intoxication) merely adds to the population's general appetite for drugs of all sorts, so illegal dealers will be delighted as so-called "soft drugs" soften up another cohort of impressionable youngsters for the hard drugs market.

Head shop products remaintechnically legal because they cannot be generically prohibited. For example: the molecular formula for cocaine is C17H21NO4, and the law stipulates, pedantically, that this particular drug formula is illegal, then it is possible to render the product technically legal, just by "tweaking" the compound so that there is an extra carbon (C) or hydrogen (H) atom. (This is a simplistic idea, for the sake of argument).

So, to continue this basic line, "artificial cocaine" sold by head shops, with euphoric effects and stimulation similar to that bestowed by natural cocaine, but with a different trade name and a slightly different formula (for argument's sake, C18H22NO4) may be legal because it can be argued that it is technically a different, legally distinct and therefore not a specified drug.

Speculation that head shops somehow promote social cohesion, provide legal highs and detract from the criminal business of illegal drug dealing is just that.

There is no evidence that adding head shop highs to the already boiling broth of drug and alcohol consumption will do anything other than create a new layer of illness, public health and social problems and a major new source of worry and work for health service staff.

The evidence of that is certainly clear, starting with the dozen or so cases we have seen in the Mercy in just the past six months or so.

So what would be my solution to the head shop problem?

Well, I accept that it would be alegal and policing nightmare to pursue each new compound as it emerges, from laboratories in China and Eastern Europe, and is then imported for sale by the network of head shops.

Consequently, given the increasingly self-evident hazards to health associated with the products that head shops sell and, given that many of their products come in packets which specifically state "not for human consumption" (by way of a car-park style disclaimer), I suspect the way to curtail the activities of head shops is by means of an Al Capone strategy.

So, just as the infamous gangster long evaded criminal prosecution and was eventually brought low by prosecution for tax evasion, I think head shops should be subjected to the rigours of existing health and safety, trade description, insurance and commercial regulation.

If they are as legal and community-spirited as they profess, they will surely pass such scrutiny with flying colours. But I would have high hopes that they don't.