Grim repercussions

摘要

A blanket ban on legal highs is now on the cards in the UK. Cue cheers from campaigners who say that newly devised psychoactive substances can be lethal, and that the "head shops" selling them are reviled by communities in the way sex shops used to be. At the core of the campaign for a ban is the repeated claim that legal highs killed over 90 people in the UK in 2012, the most recent year for which data is available. DrugScience, an independent committee I set up, showed this to be false, revealing many drugs involved in this claim were illegal.