A new ban on psychoactive substances in the UK is a catch-all backward step that ranks as one of the most unhelpful laws ever passed, says Clare Wilson

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It’s official – the UK ban on legal highs that will begin in April is going to be one of the stupidest, most dangerous and unscientific pieces of drugs legislation ever conceived.

Watching MPs debate the Psychoactive Substances Bill yesterday, it was clear most of them hadn’t a clue. They misunderstood medical evidence, mispronounced drug names, and generally floundered as they debated the choices and lifestyles of people who are in most cases decades younger than themselves.

It would have been funny except the decisions made will harm people’s lives and liberty.


The bill is an attempt to clamp down on substances that mimic the effects of drugs like cannabis and ecstasy. It stems from the media hysteria a few years ago over one of the best known ones, mephedrone, or meow meow, which was linked with some deaths. Mephedrone was banned, but new compounds can be made rapidly and other legal highs soon took its place. These can be openly sold on the internet and in “head shops”, seedy-looking stores found in most towns and cities.

Prohibition didn’t work in America

So “ban everything that gets you high” was the government’s reaction – and this bill is the result. The idea of a blanket prohibition is superficially appealing – yet fundamentally flawed. Banning something people enjoy does not mean they will stop doing it. It just means that instead of buying what they want from shops and legal websites, they now need to trade with criminals. Criminals have much less incentive to make sure their products are genuine and unadulterated or to refuse sales to minors.

Prohibition didn’t work with alcohol in 1920s America, it hasn’t worked with heroin today and it won’t work with anything else people get high on either.

A ban on all things psychoactive will also unintentionally snare other generally harmless substances that were never the intended targets. For if this bill has highlighted anything, it is the ubiquity of the human desire to tweak brain chemistry in satisfying ways. Special exemptions have already had to be made for caffeine, nicotine, and of course, the world’s number one recreational drug of choice: alcohol.

A few bottles of claret

To MPs, sinking a few bottles of good claret with chums at the end of a hard day is perfectly normal and acceptable, and is a world away from the chemical adventures of 20-year-olds. Yet both involve deliberately altering brain chemistry. Both have risks if overdone. You could argue the law’s stance all comes down to the history and popularity of your chosen method of drug use.

Various other exemptions were debated. Respectable MPs from the Home Counties found themselves discussing the merits of “poppers” – a group of drugs that give a brief high as well as relaxing sphincter muscles, so are popular among gay men. One MP confessed she had thought poppers meant those small tubs of streamers fired into the air at parties.

Gay health charities want poppers exempted on the grounds they are relatively safe and so commonly used that many people will turn to underground labs. That didn’t fly with the MPs. Poppers look set to be banned with everything else.

Memory enhancers

Another MP, Cheryl Gillan, spoke up for “smart drugs“. They are claimed to make you mentally sharper, so there’s a small community of users, often students, who buy them online. The evidence they work may be rubbish but again prohibition will only drive them underground.

That said, I spoke to her last week and she clearly hadn’t grasped that to describe them as memory enhancers, as she did in the Commons, is highly scientifically contentious. It turned out her intervention had followed a request from one of her constituents who sells them online. “From what he tells me,” she said to me. “It’s a perfectly legitimate business.”

Well that’s alright, then.

It doesn’t matter, anyway, as the MPs threw out that amendment too. Save for a couple of voices of reason, they followed the cross-party line: drugs are evil and dangerous and won’t somebody please think of the children?

Look at Ireland

No matter that the more dangerous something is, the less we want its trade to be taken over by criminal gangs, as Labour MP Paul Flynn pointed out. In desperation Flynn urged colleagues to consider the experience of Ireland, which enacted a similar ban in 2010. Sure enough, all its head shops closed. Yet a recent survey found that the number of teenagers who have used the compounds has risen from 16 to 22 per cent.

Before the debate, Flynn said to me that the MPs in charge of this bill were not chosen for their scientific literacy but for their likely compliance with government whips. He was certainly right about one thing – that the bill would pass. “This is politicians behaving at their worst,” he said. “The future will condemn them.”

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