Is the Head Shop Hysteria Justified?

“Legal but lethal: The drug snorted by school kids”, “Sinister new drug on our streets: Mephedrone turns users violent” and “Drugs made my son take his life”.
Those are some of the headlines that have appeared in Irish and British papers over the past fortnight as the media officially declared war on legal highs and the head shops that sell them.

The Joe Duffy and Matt Cooper radio shows have both covered the subject with considerable gusto; the January 26 edition of Prime Time was devoted to “The booming trade in legal highs”; and the same day found the Mullingar Park Hotel hosting an “Exploring the Legal Highs of Head Shops” conference, which brought together National Drugs Strategy Minister John Curran T.D., and the ten Regional Drugs Task Forces that work regionally to co-ordinate a response to substance misuse.
Hot Press wanted to interview two of the keynote speakers, but neither the Head of the Alcohol and Drug Research Unit, Jean Long nor the Chairperson of the National Advisory Committee on Drugs, Dr. Des Corrigan were available to talk to us. Which may or may not have something to do with the fact that, in the past, Hot Press has published articles which were broadly supportive of the rights of legal high users, and the harm reduction role the substances involved could play if properly tested and regulated.
It’s a point we put in February 2008 to Minister Curran’s predecessor Pat Carey. His view was that, “The likely harm to public health of synthetic substances needs to be clearly established. And on the basis of that, the health authorities must then take a decision about what controls, if any, you need to have around them. People require guidance rather than a knee-jerk reaction saying, ‘It’s a hallucinogenic-type drug, it has likely side-effects, so therefore we’ll ban it.’ Whether it’s alcohol, BZP or whatever, if people are inclined to get involved they need to know the consequences. There’s such a thing as personal responsibility. We can’t have a complete nanny state. At the end of the day people must have enough information to take their own decisions.”
Coupled with his earlier meeting with Matt Bowden, the New Zealander who’d turned BZP into a €15.5 million a year industry in his native country and the Chairman of the Irish Head Shops Association, Shane O’Connor, it seemed like Carey was keeping a refreshingly open mind on legal highs. And then, just as he’d outlined his ambitious plans for reformulating Ireland’s National Drugs Society, he was shunted off to the Department of An Taoiseach. He’s now the Government’s Chief Whip.
“Yes, myself and Matt went and met Pat Carey, who genuinely thought the points we were making were interesting, asked some very pertinent questions and seemed willing to keep the lines of communication open,” says Shane O’Connor, who is still the Chairman of the IHSA and runs six head shops around the country in addition to other business interests both at home and abroad. “There was a lot of talk about harm reduction back then, but for a variety of reasons that message has got lost. There hasn’t been any further dialogue that I’m aware of between the head shop industry and the government, who’ve allowed drug policy in this country to be dictated by not medical people or other experts in the field, but Joe Duffy. What we see time and time again is a knee-jerk reaction to the media coverage of legal highs, which for the most part is woefully ill-informed and indulging in the sort of scare-mongering that Pat Carey seemed to want to avoid. I think we’ve actually gone backwards over the past two years in terms of the quality of the legal highs debate.”
O’Connor is speaking to Hot Press today as “the owner of my own shops – I’m not making statements on behalf of the industry.” He believes that the banning last year of BZP, a ‘party pill’ which mimicked the effects of ecstasy, was a huge mistake.
“All that did was to drive BZP underground,” he claims. “95% of what’s being sold as ecstasy in Ireland now is actually BZP, though not necessarily the pure unadulterated substance you were able to get in the head shops prior to the ban – which we only heard about on the day itself from the press. It was literally a case of, ‘Right, come four o’clock this stuff’s going to be illegal!’ The effort I had to go to get the legislation from the health board!
“Nowadays, BZP is like any other illegal drug in that it’s cut with God knows what to give the various people in the supply chain a bigger profit. The government has turned a relatively safe substance – 26 million BZP pills sold in New Zealand and no fatalities – into something that’s now completely unpredictable with regards to what’s in it. They’ve also given criminal drug gangs a new best-seller. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see that being advantageous to anyone but those criminals.”
O’Connor also argues that there’s a harm reduction aspect to allowing a substance like BZP to be sold legally.
“I’m not aware of any Irish data on it, but the New Zealand medical profession and government acknowledged that there had been a reduction in both cocaine and metamphetamine use and addiction as a result of BZP being legally available. Now that it’s been banned, cocaine and metamphetamine use/addiction has crept up again – not to its previous levels, but quite significantly.
“Another interesting fact – the BBC carried a report the other day saying that proper MDMA ecstasy has all but disappeared in the UK because, even though they’re more expensive, people prefer to buy the legal alternatives. That’s hundreds of thousands of people who’ve been taken out of the criminal loop. You can get rid of demand for illegal substances by giving people a legal version.”
The legal-highs – DMAA and methrodrone – which have replaced BZP as head shop best-sellers are of concern to Fine Gael’s Spokesperson on the National Drugs Strategy, Catherine Byrne T.D., who come next year has an excellent chance of being sat in John Curran’s ministerial seat.
“At least one of the callers to RTÉ’s Liveline programme today has lost a family member apparently to the side-effects of one of the so-called ‘legal highs’,” Deputy Byrne said in a statement earlier this month, bolstering Shane O’Connor’s point about the Joe Duffy programme dictating drug policy. “Others told of the lasting and distressing impact such products had on the behaviour and mental well-being of their children. It’s blindingly obvious we have a serious problem here and no community has been immune to the proliferation of head shops.
“The items on sale in these shops are disguised as innocuous lifestyle products, but in reality they are mind-altering substances designed to replicate the effects of illegal drugs, like coke and speed. It’s not good enough that these dangerous drugs are allowed to slip under the radar. Regulation must be the answer and the Government must make new moves in this direction. Planning laws can also play a part by applying stringent tests before permission for such shops is granted.
“It’s also clear that new ingredients and products have emerged to replace BZP,” she went on. “The Health Minister must examine these new substances in the same way as BZP, so that they too can be considered for a ban, as has already happened in the case of mephedrone in Sweden, Denmark and Israel.”
That list now includes Germany, which added mephedrone to its proscribed substances list on Friday January 22.
Regulation, Shane O’Connor says, is something that “the vast majority of head shop owners who run their business responsibly would welcome. Irish Head Shops Association members already subscribe to a voluntary code of conduct whereby nobody who’s intoxicated or less than 18 years of age gets served. We don’t set up near schools or other locations where you have large concentrations of children. We have specified opening hours and are very careful with our signage. The irony is that by consumer law we should actually be selling to everybody, but we consider that to be morally wrong. We make judgment calls all the time – there was a bit of a demand a couple of years ago for something called GBL, which is a rohypnol variant, but nobody in Ireland sold it because it’s bloody dangerous. Head shop owners are setting out to make a living, but not to hurt people.
“The regulatory measures Deputy Byrne wants are more or less what I suggested to Pat Carey two years ago. If the dialogue’s to be a sensible one, I’ll sit down and talk to anyone.”
However, O’Connor admits that some head shop owners have been scoring own goals recently.
“I don’t think it does our industry any good to have head shops selling their products late at night through hatches,” he proffers.
O’Connor stresses that, “all of my shops and the people we do wholesale business with operate 100% within the law.” Another Dublin head shop owner who declined to be named told Hot Press this week feels that there is cause for concern in the industry. “A small but worrying overlap between the legal and illegal drug trades has crept in over the past 12 months,” he said. “I’m not saying that there are head shops selling cannabis or coke or anything else under the counter – you wouldn’t last five minutes doing that – but I know of a couple of people with a foot in both camps, so to speak, which is the last thing the industry needs.”
There’s certainly good money to be made from legal highs, with a kilogram of methrodrone costing as little as €2,000 if it’s sourced direct from one of the factories in China, Cameroon, India, Canada, the Ukraine or the other countries in which it’s known to be manufactured. Sell it for €20 a gram, which is the average price here, and you’ve a nice little earner on your hands.
Marketed (wink wink nod nod) as “plant food not for human consumption”, mephedrone, a.k.a. meph, miaow, MCAT, 4-mmc, bubble and half-a-dozen other slang names its acquired, is described by the UK’s highly-respected DrugScope charity as “a stimulant which is chemically related to amphetamines. Mephedrone is probably the most well known of a group of drugs derived from cathinone – the same chemical found in the plant called khat – although two other compounds are also increasingly recognised on the market. These are methadrone and methylone. The effects of methadrone are said to be broadly similar to mephedrone, although methylone is said to give the user an experience more closely related to taking ecstasy.
“There’s no significant clinical literature on the effects of mephedrone and the other cathinone derivatives currently gaining popularity on the drug scene,” the DrugScope report continues, ”so we have to rely on anecdotal reports from users. Many people who’ve used mephedrone and similar drugs report that their experiences are similar to taking amphetamines, ecstasy or cocaine, producing a sense of euphoria and wellbeing, with users becoming more alert, confident and talkative. People who have used methylone, which is closely chemically related to ecstasy, particularly report a feeling of empathy with those around them.
“People who snort these substances can experience extremely sore nasal passages, throats and mouths, with burns or cuts caused by the chemicals sometimes leading to nose bleeds. Some people choose to swallow the drugs instead to avoid these particular problems. Like other stimulant drugs, the cathinone derivatives can have an impact on the heart. Some users report heart palpitations, or an irregular or racing heartbeat, which may last for some time after taking the drugs. Users can experience blurred vision, hot flushes and muscle tension, particularly in the jaw and face, and some people report that their fingers and other extremities have taken on a blueish pallor after using mephedrone. As with other stimulants, the substances tend to act as appetite suppressants. Nausea and vomiting has been reported, particularly if mixed with other drugs such as alcohol or cannabis.
“A particularly concerning feature of many reports about mephedrone use,” the DrugScope overview concludes, “is that once users have started using the drugs in a particular session, it’s very hard to stop, with compulsive use leading to a number of unpleasant side-effects including insomnia, involuntary muscle clenching and hallucinations. In some cases, it seems, regular or heavy use may develop into psychological dependency.”
All of which tallies with the experiences of a 25-year-old mephedrone user, Dermot, we spoke to.
“It kicks in pretty much straight away like cocaine, but feels more like E in that it’s very euphoric,” he says. “I drank what I’d normally drink on a Friday night out, which is five or six pints, and didn’t feel nauseous or anything. Snorting it really stung, so I dabbed about a quarter of a gram of it on my gums at nine-ish, and went to bed at half-eight the next morning. I was a bit woozy the following day, but that could have been the booze.
“A friend of mine has been taking about a gram a weekend for the past couple of months, and has had some rough comedowns – he’s had palpitations and felt depressed for a couple of days afterwards. He’s also stopped snorting it, because of the burning sensation. He didn’t have any nosebleeds though.”
Shane O’Connor estimates that mephedrone is currently stocked by around 60% of Ireland’s headshops.
“We, as a company, choose not to sell mephedrone because, unlike BZP which had a huge track record, we don’t know enough about it. The guy who was sacked recently for speaking sense in the UK, Professor Nutt, suggested to the government there that we follow New Zealand’s example and introduce an extra Class D category, which is for drugs needing to be monitored. You see what the social and health effects really are, and then make a decision based on empirical evidence rather than hearsay and media conjecture. Professor Nutt also said that MDMA is not as dangerous as alcohol, but the British government didn’t like either point of view and got rid of him (the Professor, who is President of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology and was Chairman of the UK’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, has just announced the setting up of the Independent Scientific Council on Drugs, and can be followed at twitter.com/ProfDavidNutt. S.C.)
“Our argument with BZP was, ‘This is clearly safe. Let it remain on sale while we try and develop alternatives that are safer still’,” O’Connor continues. “If you ban mephedrone it’s going to be replaced by you don’t know what. The new one we are selling, which is the subject of Class D monitoring in New Zealand, is DMAA, which seems to have marvellous tolerance levels. If you take too much you feel nauseous, therefore there’s no desire to keep upping the dose. There’s a safety ratio, which is where those sort of substances come into their own.
“Going back to mephedrone briefly – one of our products, Blow-Out has been mentioned in articles as containing mephedrone but it doesn’t. There’s so much misinformation and scaremongering out there.”
Although not available for interview, Dr. Des Corrigan did issue Hot Press with the following statement in relation to head shop products.
“Because the drugs they appear to contain have never been tested for safety in humans, we have to rely, at present, on user reports,” he says. “These may not be reliable because people often don’t know what exactly they’ve taken and there’s no way of knowing how much has been used. Nor do we know what other drugs might have been taken by users which could change the effects and risks.”
In other words, the people who Minister Curran will consult before deciding whether or not to ban mephedrone have no specialist knowledge of it.
The authorities showed themselves to be very badly informed in 2008 when, under the auspices of Operation Fluorine, the Garda National Drugs Unit raided 22 head shops and removed their stocks of hallucinogenic Morning Glory seeds and peyote plants.
“Morning Glory seeds being available from the gardening department of a well-known national supermarket chain, and the peyote plants in question being babies that are 20 years away from being able to be used for anything,” Shane O’Connor claims. “How much money did all those simultaneous raids cost? How the hell was that justified? Weren’t there any heroin dealers around that day? If that wasn’t politically motivated, I don’t know what is.
“You’re never going to eliminate the demand for recreational substances, or be able to stop chemists tweaking formulas in order to produce the next DMAA or the next mephedrone,” he concludes. “What we can do is bring in regulation for head shops; introduce Class D monitoring and make the products we sell as safe as possible.”