Frontlines: The Drugs Don’t Work

There’s a short poem about safer drug use – actually almost a nursery rhyme – that Dr. Adam Winstock, chief coordinator of the Global Drug Survey, likes to quote. “If you take a drug you do not know/ Our advice is start low, go-slow/ And ask your mates to keep an eye on you/ Because you never know with something new.”

Tragically, that sage advice comes too late for 18-year-old student Alex Reid, who died in Cork University Hospital a fortnight ago after reportedly ingesting a synthetic designer drug called 2C-B – a variant of 2C-P – at a house party in the city. Five others were also hospitalised.

Although the toxicology reports aren’t in yet, it’s obvious that all six partygoers had an extremely bad reaction to whatever drug they took. Witnesses reported a nightmare scene, with blood all over the walls in the house where the party was taking place.

“It’s difficult to properly comment without seeing the toxicology report,” Winstock reflects, “because so many times, when there’s suspicion that there’s particular drugs involved, when toxicology is done, either the level found is (just) traces or there’s a huge dose of something else. So laying the blame flatly at a single drug is difficult.

“However, if it was 2C-B – or 2C-P – it’s strong stuff,” he continues. “It’s got that fairly unique combination, between a hallucinogenic drug and a stimulant. You know, hence its attraction. The reason it could be such a dodgy drug is that it’s really potent, and 5 or 10 milligrams is the difference between the dose that makes you floaty and happily tripping, and a dose that’s too much.

“So it’s a narrow margin between the dose you want and the dose that’s too much. It’s got a really slow onset to action too – three, four or five hours – and it lasts a long time. So it’s really difficult to gauge.

“It has got all the hallmarks that make a drug dangerous,” he adds. “It’s got the slow onset of action; it’s really potent; the difference between the dose you want and the dose you don’t want is tiny; and it lasts for a very long time.”

Inevitably, it’s because of this extremely slow onset that many users accidentally overdose.

“The problem is that, with a pill, say, you expect to come up after 45 minutes, but you don’t and other people don’t, so you say, ‘Sod it! It’s a duff pill and I’ll take more’. And that’s what we saw with PMMA.”

According to the results of the last Global Drug Survey, 2C-B wasn’t commonly used in Ireland.

“I look at the top 40 drugs all the time, and 2C-B or 2C-P would not be drugs that people would go out to use. It has been made, and someone is trying to make money off it. How it found its way into an MDMA tablet – that’s an interesting question. MDMA is so cheap to produce anyway that you wonder why anybody would bother adding something else.

“The important thing is that whoever is flogging them, the nicest interpretation is that it’s somebody that’s unknowingly sold something really dangerous. What you would hope is that, on the back of this tragedy in Cork, that person would go, ‘Oh my Lord, I’m destroying them all... I just didn’t know’.

“But what’s happened in the past is – there are lots of people that obviously aren’t terribly nice and who just want to make money. And you can re-press a batch of powders or of pills easily enough. So the fear is that you’ve got someone that’s going, ‘Oh no, these pills have got some really bad press... I’d better change them’. And so they crush and rebrand them. That can happen as well.”

Designer pills and MWP [Mystery White Powders] won’t be the only dangerous drugs to watch out for in future. Although the results of this year’s Global Drugs Survey aren’t yet in, Dr Winstock also reckons that synthetic cannabis use will be a big problem in Ireland.

“The thing that characterises Ireland more than anywhere else is your level of alcohol consumption and your very expensive cannabis use,” he says. “That would make the synthetic cannabis market potentially appealing within Ireland to people who are cannabis users. What does a country do that really likes cannabis, but where cannabis is really expensive? Synthetic cannabis products may actually be attractive. And that can have huge implications, because synthetic cannabis products are very dangerous. Your risk of going to A&E is 30 times greater from synthetic cannabis rather than real cannabis. So that’s the bit I would be worried about for Ireland.”

Given that many users only turn to cheaper synthetic drugs for financial reasons, the economic recovery will also have implications on patterns of national drug use.

“As the Celtic Tiger picks up, I’m sure the coke in Ireland is better, and the MDMA in Ireland is getting better, and I’m sure people have got more disposable income for drugs,” Dr Winstock says. “What we saw last year, and I would expect to see this year again, is people adapting to the return of good quality, traditional drugs.

“The other bit that will be interesting are the two little sections in the Global Drugs Survey this year. One is called ‘Desert Island Drugs’, and it literally says: Imagine you’re stuck on a desert island where cannabis and magic mushrooms grow freely and you’ve got a plentiful supply of top quality coke and MDMA. A passing dealer comes by and asks, ‘Would you give up any of those drugs for any new drug?’ I think the answer to that will be quite important to governments. These synthetic drugs aren’t used because they are preferred, they are used because they are for price benefit and that’s the biggest issue.

“The other thing is we’re going to look at how different sorts of alcohol affect people. So it’ll be quite interesting to see if the Irish have the same responses to the rest of the world, because clearly they’re a bit special when it comes to drinking.”