Legal highs and 'love' in Lincoln

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/27/legal-highs-and-love-in-lincoln

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“I know it’s worse here than any other place I’ve been,” said an anonymous 19-year-old who, even before I heard his story, I thought was older than his face. “I work in retail. Every morning when I open up the shop, I’ll go into the back and there’ll be empty packets of legal highs. Everywhere.”

On Tuesday night, Lincoln became the first place to introduce any UK legislation relating to legal highs. “What’s illegal now is to use them in public,” Lucy Rigby, the prospective Labour candidate explained. “I think we should be going much further. The police say they have people coming to Lincoln just to acquire legal highs. It’s been a problem for a while, but it’s a lot more obvious over the past two years.”

The nameless young man continued: “I think they should ban them completely. They’re only legal in the sense that nobody’s bothered to make them illegal. I’ve tried one, once. My friend brought it around in a little packet – it said it was a synthetic cannabinoid, which many of them are. I smoked it twice and it did nothing, then on the third day, I had the same amount and I literally felt like I was in a different universe. It was like I had got rid of my senses and replaced them with completely different senses.”

“Not in a good way?”

“Not in a good way, no. It was a fit. And then when it was over, my spine and the base of my neck felt like porcelain or coral, that had been crushed to dust. It only lasted 20 minutes, it felt like about three weeks. And I felt weird for months afterwards. I couldn’t leave the house for months.”

I last wrote about legal highs in 1995, when I went from one porn shop to another, buying whatever I could find - poppers, GHB. Then I took them all in the office (of the freebie magazine Rasp) and wrote a piece about it. There are a host of reasons why I wouldn’t do that now (dignity, ethics) but the main one is personal safety. Legal highs are dangerous now. Spice, in particular (a very strong cannabinoid) is reputedly used in prisons as an ad hoc torture method; some small but unpayable debt exacted by forcing the debtor to smoke more than the recommended match-head. It is, people say, like walking into the mouth of hell; more horrible than anything nature alone could devise.

Jack, 19, studying marketing at the University of Lincoln, used to regularly walk past a shop which sold legal highs and has now been closed. “Every time I walked down there, people would be queuing round the block.” It wasn’t what you’d call a party queue. “They looked like they were taking other things as well. I also heard they were selling other things there, that were illegal.”

Liam Wyatt, a 21-year-old law student, said: “It’s a really bad place for heroin as well. You see people just zoned out on benches. It’s not really about what’s legal, is it? It’s about what they do to you, and why you would want to do that to yourself. You can do incredibly dangerous things with bath salts.”

“Like what?”

“Google it,” he said, darkly. Then relented. “Someone in Florida smoked them, then ate someone’s face.”

The shop Jack talked about was closed down some weeks ago, and Headcandy, in the centre of town, folded at around the same time. But on the site now is a shop with no name and two broken windows, displaying little packets under glass cabinets, with a young guy in a grey sweatshirt guarding-cum-selling them.

“What are these?”

“Herbal incense, love.”

‘What does that even mean?”

“Have you ever had a joss stick, love?” I’ve never heard the word “love” said with such animus.

“Do you mean to say you set fire to them and they make your room smell nice?”

“Yes.”

I looked again. Synthetic versions of existing drugs are quite vague: nothing is explicitly called “fake cannabis”. Instead, there’s something called “High Grade”, with a picture of a marijuana leaf. There was one called methiopropamine, described on the Legal Highs Forum website as an “incredibly seductive, powerful dissociative-entheogen: ketamine fans, your prayers are answered”.

“So,” I asked the man, “what do I get if I want my room to smell like methiopropamine?”

He turned away, indicating our conversation was over.

For a legal activity, it has a very criminal atmosphere. Robin, 19, another student, said: “I think it has more stigma than taking illegal drugs, if anything, because they’re so untested.”

“They’re incredibly cheap,” Rigby said. “These things are cheap, readily available and they’re really addictive. It cuts across class boundaries. Nobody wants them here.”