The Real Deal

Having convinced everybody that they re about to be hacked to death by pill-popping psychos, the Herald went and spoilt it all with the admission that no one, the Gardai and Customs included, has actually come across it yet.
It appears that the good denizens of Middle Abbey St were adding their own slant to a story which appeared in the Independent On Sunday last weekend, and Hot Press two months ago.
Developed by Nazi scientists as a means of keeping frontline troops awake, the methamphetamine reappeared in South East Asia during the 70s and is now the stimulant of choice for millions of Thais and Laotians. According to UN figures, the number of yaba-addicted students entering rehab has risen nearly 1000% in the past two years. Small quantities have been discovered in the UK and France, but only in the luggage of returning holiday makers. That s likely to change, though, as demand increases and organised crime realises there s money to be made from the drug.
Since the Herald story appeared, I ve had a load of people asking me for it, claims one city-centre dealer. I imagine if it was available in Ireland now, it d sell really well.
Of more immediate concern to the authorities is the rogue batch of heroin which has been linked to the deaths of eight intravenous Dublin drug users. The symptoms abcesses around the site of the injection, followed by shock and collapse are identical to the ones that have already claimed 17 lives in Scotland.
We believe we are looking at two outbreaks with a common cause, says Dr Laurence Gruer of the Glasgow Health Board. Most of the evidence points towards the heroin being at the root of it but so far our efforts to find the actual cause have been unsuccessful.
Having ruled out malicious contamination the British Army s chemical warfare research team was called in to test for anthrax Dr Gruer says that the evidence now points to a previously unknown organism.
We have to consider the possibility that there is a completely new bacterium, he resumes. Just think back to Legionnaire s disease. When that first came along nobody knew what it was.
The worry is that having surfaced in Dublin, the mystery illness could spread to other parts of the country which are dependent on the capital for their heroin supplies.
99% of the smack that s sold in Limerick comes from Dublin, proffers a local source. The level of risk is different, though, because very few people here are injecting.
Finally, two new reports suggest that even small amounts of ecstasy and cocaine can cause serious health problems.
Presented with a series of mental tasks, researchers at Aachen University in Germany found that regular E users performed far worse than those who d never taken the drug. They concluded that the effects may be culminative and irreversible.
According to a report in the latest Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, They tested the alertness, attention span, memory and general intelligence of 84 people a third of whom were regular users of ecstasy and cannabis, a third regular users of cannabis and a third who don t take any drugs.
The researchers found that ecstasy users got significantly worse scores in complex memory tests, although their alertness was not affected.
The cognitive decline was most pronounced among those who combine E with cannabis the two drugs have a toxic effect on brain cells which may be irreversible.
In the second report, scientists at Pittsburgh University found that as little as O.1 grams of cocaine increases the body s production of blood-clotting agents. Not a problem for healthy adults, but potentially fatal if you ve got a heart condition.

The hotpress findings
update

The latest drug to hit London clubland and a few rock n roll tour buses is DMT.

Euphemistically known in the States as the businessman s lunch , the powerful hallucinogen takes a matter of seconds to kick in and then lasts for an average 15 to 30 minutes.

New research shows that Prozac causes violent outbursts in 10% of users.

2,000 patients are being recruited for trials which could result in a range of cannabis-based prescription medicines being legalised in the UK.

The British Police Federation has renewed its call for ecstasy to be classified as a soft drug. Although deaths from ecstasy are highly publicised, it probably kills fewer than 10 people each year, which, though deeply distressing for the surviving relatives and friends, is a small percentage of the many thousands of people who use it each week, reads an official statement.