There has been considerable confusion and concern around new government plans to ban legal highs . Scientifically, the only solution is to ban the human brain

New government plans to crack down on and ban “legal highs” have a lot of people confused and worried. For a start, the government is essentially planning to make legal highs illegal, and thus creating a logical paradox. Anything covered by the new laws would become illegal, so would not a “legal” high, so wouldn’t be covered by the laws after all, so would be legal. So they would be covered the laws, but then become illegal…

Ironically, this sort of thinking will probably only make sense when you’re stoned out of your mind.

Thankfully (for a given value of “thankful”) the proposed legislation is a bit more detailed than this, in that it promises to ban trade in any substances for human consumption that is capable of producing a psychoactive effect. It has also been made clear that things such as coffee, food, alcohol etc. wouldn’t be included. Similar policies in Ireland and Poland also clarify that the psychoactive effect has to be “significant”, to prevent more common “everyday” substances being affected.

While more detailed, there are still several issues with this approach. Firstly, “psychoactive” basically means any substance that affects brain function and can alter perception, consciousness, mood, things like that. Anything that affects the mind, to be succinct. Trouble is, this isn’t exactly a hard thing to do. The human brain is so active and flexible that practically anything can “alter brain function”. Reading a particularly provocative or illuminating newspaper article can be said to alter your mood and/or perception. Propaganda is based on processes like this.

We could be generous and say the law applies specifically to consumable substances which alter brain function “artificially” (another tricky term when you consider the workings of the brain). This is still problematic, because if you’re not specifying the specific substance (as the proposed law doesn’t) then countless things can have a “psychoactive” effect like this. Some well prepared food can do it, which that scene in Ratatouille demonstrates nicely.

The issue of “significant” psychoactive effects is another problem. How do you measure whether something is significant? What’s the cut-off point between significant and non-significant in a scenario like this? We’re talking legal ramifications here, where the distinction could mean the difference between breaking the law and not, so this should really be specified. How to do that though is a big problem, because response to psychoactive substances can vary massively between individuals.

Most people will have seen examples of this; there’s always someone you know with an incredible tolerance for alcohol, who can drink constantly and heavily throughout the night, but the only consequences they demonstrate are a slight reddening of the face and more regular toilet visits. In contrast, there are those people who struggle to walk or put sentences together if they’re so much as in the room when someone opens a bottle of wine. And this is just alcohol, an incredibly-common substance. How much harder is it going to be to work out how much is “too much” when we’re dealing with an essentially new compound?

Alcohol consumption can be analysed directly by breathalysers, but how do you measure the psychoactive effects of a novel substance? The mind is incredibly difficult to measure, so much so that some sciences have to ignore it altogether to get anything done. So how is law enforcement meant to manage it? It’s difficult to imagine a policemen pulling someone over and saying “Sir, please step out of the vehicle and think into this tube”, or “It appears your mental state is significantly different to the norm, you’ll have to come with us”.

But these things would have to happen if we were to get a logical, consistent and effective system for controlling legal highs. But then, logic and effectiveness have never really been a big part of drug enforcement policy, and with crackdowns already happening it seems this will remain the case for some time.

Obviously there are health concerns to consider, and in fairness most legal highs that have been targeted thus far seem designed to mimic the effects of known illegal narcotics, but the advances in science and the complexity of the brain will only serve to make this area incredibly problematic as we go on.

One easy solution does present itself: ban dopamine! Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, so is a chemical substance like most drugs, and it certainly has a psychoactive effect in that it enables the sensations of pleasure and reward in the brain, which are behind most drug sensations and addictions. Banning dopamine would be a sure-fire way of stopping legal highs, effectively rendering them all pointless. Granted, dopamine has many other crucial functions, but sacrifices have to be made in the war against drugs.

However, other neurotransmitters and hormones like oxytocin and serotonin can also chemically induce pleasure, and there is mounting evidence that others are involved in drug effects too. Using the same “everything is banned unless we say otherwise” approach of the new regulations on legal highs, it would be best to ban all neurotransmitters just in case they’re used to induce psychoactive effects. And they would be, because that’s technically what they’re for. So we’d end up with a population unable to use their brains.

Seems like an ideal arrangement for the government, if we’re honest.

Dean Burnett provides illicit thrills via his Twitter account, @garwboy

His debut book The Idiot Brain is out early 2016